When we sit by the fire that so cheerily blazes

On our cozy hearthstone, with its innocent glee,
Oh! how my soul warms, while my eye fondly gazes,
To see my delight is partaken by thee!

And when, as how often, I eagerly listen

To stories thou read'st of the dear olden day,
How delightful to see our eyes mutually glisten,

And feel that affection has sweetened the lay.
Yes, love, and when wandering at even or morning,

Through forest or wild, or by waves foaming white,
I have fancied new beauties the landscape adorning
Because I have seen thou wast glad in the sight.

And how often in crowds, where a whisper offendeth,

And we fain would express what there might not be said; How dear is the glance that none else comprehendeth,

And how sweet is the thought that is secretly read! Then away with the pleasure that is not partaken! There is no enjoyment by one only ta'en:

I love in my mirth to see gladness awaken

On lips, and in eyes, that reflect it again.

Mrs. Howitt possessed more of the poetic faculty than her husband. The subjoined lines have appeared under her own name:

Alas! what secret tears are shed,
What wounded spirits bleed;

What loving hearts are sundered,
And yet man takes no heed!
He goeth in his daily course,
Made fat with oil and wine;
And pitieth not the weary souls,
That in his bondage pine.

To him they are but as the stones
Beneath his feet that lie,

It entereth not his thoughts that they
From him claim sympathy;

It entereth not his thoughts that God
Heareth the sufferer's groan,

That, in his righteous eye, their life
Is precious as his own.

Mr. Howitt is the author of an interesting work entitled Student Life in Germany. Mrs. Howitt has translated Frederika Bremer's principal tales from the Swedish

into English. Both husband and wife were brought up as members of the Society of Friends, or, as they are popularly called, "the Quakers."

Mr. A. A. Watts.

Alaric Alexander Watts (not to be confounded with Dr. Isaac Watts), born in London in 1799, was many years connected, as editor or contributor, with the newspaper press. He likewise originated or edited several of those collections of tales and poetry, known by the generic name of annuals, which were once so popular in England. His Poetical Sketches were published in 1822, and another volume of poetry, the Lyrics of the Heart, appeared in 1850; but most of his best pieces were written for the Literary Souvenir, and some other periodical works of the same class. Mr. Watts writes with taste and elegance. His beautiful verses, Ten Years Ago, were addressed, as will be readily surmised, to his wife, a daughter of William and Mary Howitt, who died 24th July, 1884. Mr. Watts quite recently resigned his secretaryship in the Inland Revenue Office, and retired into private life.

Ten years ago, ten years ago,

Life was to us a fairy scene,

And the keen blasts of worldly woe

Had seared not then its pathway green.
Youth and its thousand dreams were ours,
Feelings we ne'er can know again,
Unwithered hopes, unwasted powers,
And frames unworn by mortal pain:
Such was the bright and genial flow

Of life with us ten years ago!

Time has not blanched a single hair

That clusters round thy forehead now;
Nor hath the cankering touch of care
Left even one furrow on thy brow.
Thine eyes are blue as when we met,
In love's deep truth, in earlier years;
Thy cheek of rose is blooming yet,

Though sometimes stained by secret tears;
But where, oh! where's the spirit's glow
That shone through all ten years ago!

I, too, am changed

I scarce know why
Can feel each flagging pulse decay;
And youth and health, and visions high,
Melt like a wreath of snow away;
Time cannot sure have wrought the ill;
Though worn in this world's sickening strife,
In soul and form, I linger still

In the first summer month of life;
Yet journey on my path below,

Oh! how unlike ten years ago!

But look not thus: I would not give
The wreck of hopes that thou must share,
To bid those joyous hours revive

When all around me seemed so fair.
We've wandered on in sunny weather,

When winds were low, and flowers in bloom, And hand in hand have kept together,

And still will keep 'mid storm and gloom; Endeared by ties we could not know

When life was young

ten years ago!

Has fortune frowned? Her frowns were vain,
For hearts like ours she could not chill;
Have friends proved false? Their love might wane,
But ours grew fonder, firmer still.

Twin barks on this world's changing wave,
Steadfast in calms, in tempests tried;

In concert still our fate we'll brave,
Together cleave life's fitful tide;

Nor mourn, whatever winds may blow,
Youth's first wild dreams

ten years ago!

Have we not knelt beside his bed,

And watched our first-born blossom die?
Hoped till the shade of hope had fled,
Then wept till feeling's fount was dry?
Was it not sweet, in that dark hour,
To think, 'mid mutual tears and sighs,
Our bud had left its earthly bower,

And burst to bloom in Paradise?

What to the thought that soothed that woe
Were heartless joys ten years ago?

Yes, it is sweet, when heaven is bright,
To share its sunny beams with thee;
But sweeter far, 'mid clouds and blight
To have thee near to weep with me.

Then dry those tears

-

though something changed

From what we were in earlier youth,
Time, that hath hopes and friends estranged,
Hath left us love in all its truth,
Sweet feelings we would not forego
For life's best joys ten years ago.

P. J. Bailey.

Philip James Bailey, born in 1816 at Nottingham, is a philosophical poet, who between 1839 and 1858 produced four poems, entitled respectively Festus, the Angel World, the Mystic, and the Age, the first three in blank verse, the last, which is a satire in the style of Cowper's Table Talk, in verse. The most successful of these poems by far is Festus, in which the writer depicts the upward soaring of a purified soul towards the universal source of life. In the first edition, this poem consisted of only about one thousand lines, but it has been gradually expanded by the author, at the expense of its popularity as we believe, till in the tenth edition the number of lines can be hardly less than thirty to forty thousand. When it first appeared, the influence of Festus on the thinking world was electrical, and its readers maintained that it stilled a craving which neither philosophy nor theology had till then been able to satisfy. Though we cannot accept this excessive laudation, we readily admit, that the poem abounds in admirable passages. Let us take as an example the lines in which Festus dwells on the transitory nature of beauty, and the common lot of humanity?

Festus.

Who doth not

Believe that that he loveth cannot die?
There is no mote of death in thine eye's beams
To hint of dust, or darkness, or decay;

Eclipse upon eclipse, and death on death;

No! immortality sits mirrored there,

Like a fair face long looking on itself;

Yet shalt thou lie in death's angelic garb,

As in a dream of dress, my beautiful:

The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,
And feast him on the heart men pined to death for;
Yea, have a happier knowledge of thy beauties
Than best-loved lover's dream e'er duped him with.

In another fine passage he maintains the necessity

of faith for the poet.

The world is full of glorious likenesses.

The poet's power is to sort them out;

And to make music from the common strings

With which the world is strung; to make the dumb
Earth utter heavenly harmony, and draw

Life clear, and sweet, and harmless as spring water
Welling its way through flowers. Without faith,
Illimitable faith, strong as a state's

In its own might, in God, no bard can be.

Mr. Bailey's similes are always happily chosen:

Some peaceful spot where we might dwell unknown;
Where home-born joys might nestle round our hearts
As swallows round our roofs.

Just when the stars falter forth one by one,

Like the first words of love from a maiden's lips.

I said we were to part, but she said nothing;
There was no discord it was music ceased.

Eleven years after Festus, appeared the Angel World, but readers complained, that the execution was inferior to the boldness of the conception, and that they missed in it nearly all the qualities that had charmed then in the earlier poem. Disappointed and chagrined at this verdict, which Mr. Bailey refused to accept, he incorporated the whole of the Angel World into the next edition of Festus, a hazardous, and not a very successful experiment.

Hon. Mrs. Norton.

The Hon. Mrs. Norton, called by a writer in the Quarterly Review "the Byron of our modern poetesses," is the daughter of Thomas, the only son of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and was born in 1808. When hardly seventeen, Caroline Sheridan wrote a pathetic village tale in verse, called the Sorrows of Rosalie, which was followed in 1831 by the Undying One, founded on the old legend of the Wandering Jew, and in 1845 by the Child of the Islands, a poem designed to interest the