Hopes that were angels in their birth,
But perished young like things on earth.

Night is the time to watch,

On Ocean's dark expanse

To hail the Pleiades, or catch

The full moon's earliest glance,
That brings unto the home-sick mind
All we have loved and left behind.

Night is the time for death;
When all around is peace,
Calmly to yield the weary breath,
From sin and suffering cease:

Think of heaven's bliss, and give the sign
To parting friends such death be mine!

Professor Wilson.

John Wilson (1785-1854) was born at Paisley, in Scotland, and studied at Glasgow and Magdalene College, Oxford. He afterwards purchased some property on the beautiful banks of Lake Windermere, in Lancashire, where he resided for four years, but having experienced a reverse of fortune, he became a candidate for, and obtained the chair of moral philosophy in Edinburgh University. Wilson's principal poetical works are the Isle of Palms, and a dramatic poem, the City of the Plague. His poetry is characterized in general by softness and sweetness, and the Isle of Palms has been adduced as one of the best specimens of the "beautiful sublime", but he occasionally shows great force and vigour, as in his fine picture of the shipwreck in the same poem. Perhaps nothing he wrote has been so much read as his lines, A sleeping Child, suggested, it is said, by one of the sculptor Chantrey's two sleeping children in Lichfield Cathedral. It suited the poet's purpose better, however, to transform the child of marble into one of flesh and blood, so as to enable him to paint successively the tranquil slumber and the joyous waking of infancy.

A SLEEPING CHILD.

Art thou a thing of mortal birth,
Whose happy home is on our earth?
Does human blood with life imbue
Those wandering veins of heavenly blue
That stray along thy forehead fair,
Lost 'mid a gleam of golden hair?
Oh, can that light and airy breath
Steal from a being doomed to death;
Those features to the grave be sent
In sleep thus mutely eloquent ?
Or art thou, what thy form would seem,
The phantom of a blessed dream?

Oh! that my spirit's eye could see
Whence burst those gleams of ecstasy!
That light of dreaming soul appears
To play from thoughts above thy years.
Thou smil'st as if thy soul were soaring
To heaven, and heaven's God adoring!
And who can tell what visions high
May bless an infant's sleeping eye!
What brighter throne can brightness find
To reign on than an infant's mind,
Ere sin destroy or error dim
The glory of the seraphim?

Oh! vision fair! that I could be
Again as young, as pure as thee!
Vain wish! the rainbow's radiant form
May view, but cannot brave the storm:
Years can bedim the gorgeous dyes
That paint the bird of Paradise.
And years, so fate hath ordered, roll
Clouds o'er the summer of the soul.
Fair was that face as break of dawn,
When o'er its beauty sleep was drawn
Like a thin veil that half concealed
The light of soul, and half revealed.

While thy hushed heart with visions wrought, Each trembling eyelash moved with thought, And things we dream, but ne'er can speak Like clouds came floating o'er thy cheek, Such summer-clouds as travel light,

When the soul's heaven lies calm and bright; Till thou awok'st then to thine eye

Thy whole heart leapt in ecstasy!

And lovely is that heart of thine,
Or sure these eyes could never shine
With such a wild, yet bashful glee,
Gay, half-o'ercome timidity!

Mrs. Southey.

Mrs. Southey (1787-1854), when still Miss Caroline Bowles, made herself favourably known to the public by the publication of the Widow's Tale and other poems. In 1839 she became the second wife of the then poet laureate, Robert Southey, though quite aware that his reason had already begun to totter, and devoted herself to her husband, in his terrible and incurable malady, with exemplary fortitude and patience, up to the time of his death in 1843. Miss Bowles and Southey, many years before their marriage, had projected a poem on the subject of Robin Hood, but the idea was only partially carried out, and after Southey's death, the work was given to the world as a fragment by the widow. Of Mrs. Southey's numerous minor poems we present to our readers, as one of the most characteristic, the lines entitled, Once upon a Time.

I mind me of a pleasant time,

A season long ago;

The pleasantest I've ever known,
Or ever now shall know.

Bees, birds, and little tinkling rills,
So merrily did chime;

The year was in its sweet spring-tide,
And I was in my prime.

I've never heard such music since,
From every bending spray;
I've never plucked such primroses,
Set thick on bank and brae.
I've never smelt such violets

As all that pleasant time

I found by every hawthorn-root
When I was in my prime.

Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854).

The distinguished dramatist, Mr. Talfourd, sergeantat-law, was a native of Reading, in Berkshire. Of his numerous poetical effusions, nothing pleases us so much as his verses on the death of one of his children, named after his friend, the poet and essayist Charles Lamb, who died at Brighton a year after his gifted and genial godfather.

THE POET AND THE CHILD.
Our gentle Charles 1) has pass'd away,
From earth's short bondage free,

And left to us its leaden day
And mist-enshrouded sea.

Here by the ocean's terraced side,

Sweet hours of hope were known,
When first the triumph of its tide
Seem'd presage of our own.

That eager joy the sea-breeze gave,
When first it raised his hair,
Sunk with each day's retiring wave,
Beyond the reach of prayer.

The sun-blink that through drizzling mist,
To flickering hope akin,

Lone waves with feeble fondness kiss'd,
No smile as faint can win ;

1) The first seven stanzas refer exclusively to the child.

Yet not in vain with radiance weak
The heavenly stranger gleams
Not of the world it lights to speak,
But that from whence it streams.

That world our patient sufferer sought,
Serene with pitying eyes,

As if his mounting spirit caught
The wisdom of the skies.

With boundless love it look'd abroad
For one bright moment given,
Shone with a loveliness that awed,
And quiver'd into Heaven.

A year made slow by care and toil
Has paced its weary round,
Since death enrich'd with kindred spoil
The snow-clad, frost-ribb'd ground.

Then Lamb, with whose enduring name
Our boy we proudly graced,

Shrank from the warmth of sweeter fame
Than ever bard embraced.

Still 'twas a mournful joy to think
Our darling might supply

For years to us a living link

With name that cannot die.

And though such fancy gleam no more
On earthly sorrow's night,
Truth's nobler torch unveils the shore
Which lends to both its light.

The nurseling there that hand may take
None ever grasp'd in vain,

And smiles of well-known sweetness wake
Without their tinge of pain.

Though, 'twixt the child and childlike bard
Late seem'd distinction wide,
They now may trace, in Heaven's regard,
How near they were allied.

Within the infant's ample brow

Blythe fancies lay unfurl'd,

Which all uncrush'd may open now

To charm a sinless world.