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and the enforced contact with all that was most painful to his refined tastes and habits proved a shock from which he never recovered. He had not long regained his liberty before he was attacked by a second paralytic seizure of a much more serious character than the former, and from which he only partially rallied; his reason gradually became impaired, and it was soon found necessary for him to be constantly attended. I will not dwell on the distressing details of this period; suffice it to say that, after a while, his state became so precarious as to necessitate his removal to the asylum of St. Saviour. He was here treated with every kindness and consideration, but did not long survive his admission. During the winter of 1839 he became much weaker, and in the March following it was evident that his end was near. The account of his last moments, as given by the nun who attended him, is very touching. "On the evening of his death," she said, "about an hour before he expired, the debility having become extreme, I observed him assume an appearance of intense anxiety and fear, and he fixed his eyes

upon me with an expression of entreaty, raising his hands towards me as he lay in bed as though asking for assistance, but saying nothing. Upon this I requested him to repeat after me the acte de contrition of the Roman ritual as in our prayerbooks. He immediately consented, and repeated after me in an earnest manner that form of prayer. He then became more composed, and laid his head down on one side; but this tranquillity was interrupted about an hour after by his turning himself over and uttering a cry at the same time, appearing to be in pain. He soon, however, turned himself back, with his face laid on the pillow, towards the wall, so as to be hidden from us who were on the other side. After this he never moved, dying imperceptibly." It was the 30th of March, 1840. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Caen.

So died the once famous, admired, and courted George Brummel, a pauper and an imbecile. If his follies and extravagance transcended ordinary bounds, it must be allowed that his sufferings did so also.

St. Paul's. CHILD-LIFE AS SEEN BY THE POETS.

WERE we in search of a sort of golden thread on which to string together some of the choicest gems of poetic thought and diction, what better could we find for our purpose than such a title as "Child-Life as seen by the Poets ?" Instead of a mere collection of elegant extracts, or of mere nursery rhymes, or of poems written for children, we should have before us a collection of the grandest poetry that men of genius have left behind to "brighten the sunshine;" but we should have in addition something more-a sparkling little history, so to speak, of the progress of the poetic intellect. For it will be found, on careful examination, that there is no better clue to the quality of any minstrel than his manner of writing about children, his greater or less reference to childish experience, and his fondness for child-like moods. If, as most good critics now admit, the crucial proof of any poet's mission be the power of his human sympathy, if poetry be something more than a set of fanciful pictures, if it be the perfect speech of the supremest and simplest natures in their most beNEW SERIES.-VOL. XVI., No. 1.

neficent moments, and if it be conceded on the other hand that any worthy representation of child-life and child-thought, their influence and their mystery, demands some of the very tenderest, subtlest qualities of human nature, it will speedily be seen how our poets and singers may glorify or betray themselves in this infantine direction. Open Shakspeare at any passage where the beginning of life is referred to. Read the passage:

I' the dead of darkness

The ministers for the purpose hurried thence
Me, and thy crying self!

Prospero to Miranda, The Tempest. There we have a flash of humanity in one epithet: or turn to the piteously beautiful lines on the Innocents in the Tower,

Girdling one another Within their alabaster innocent arms: Their lips were four red roses on a stalk Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other!

Or glance elsewhere, even into the strange pages of "Pericles," and hear the King addressing the little one new born amid the storm:

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Now, mild may be thy life! For a more blust'rous birth had never babe: Quiet and gentle thy conditions !-for Thou art the rudeliest welcomed to this world, That e'er was prince's child!

The whole of the situation here alluded to is infinitely tender, and should be noted by every student. How the whole great heart of Shakspeare sobs with Pericles in the memorable passage which follows, when the superstitious sailors of the ship insist that the Queen must be thrown "overboard straight!" "Here she lies, sir," cries Lychorida, pointing to the "corpse ;" and Pericles exclaims

A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time
To give thee hallow'd to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely confin'd, in the ooze;
O Lychorida!

Bid Nestor bring me spices, ink and paper,
My casket and my jewels; and bid Nicander
Bring me the satin coffer: lay the babe
Upon the pillow; hie thee, whiles I say
A priestly farewell to her!

Such mere glimpses of the great Bard would be insufficient to show the supremacy of his insight; yet from either of the above passages we may at least gather, at a glance, that the mightiest of intellectual creators was a man whose heart was in tune with all innocent loveliness. We are taught the very same truth of Homerthat mystic human figure far back in time -by the glimpse of Andromache's child in the Iliad. Here it is, as admirably rendered by the late Mr. Worsley:

He spake, and to the babe reached forth his arms,
Who to the bosom of his fair-eyed nurse
Clung with a cry; scared at his father's look
And by the brass helm, and the horsehair plume
Waving aloft so grimly. And they laughed,
Father and mother; and the nodding helm
He in a moment from his head removed,
And laid it shining on the earth, then kissed
Fondly, and dandled in his arms, the child,
And called on Zeus and all the gods in prayer:

"Zeus and all gods, let this my child become
Famed in the hosts of Troia; even as I,
In strength so good, and full of power to reign.
And, when he cometh from the fight, let men
Say, 'A far better than his sire is here.'
And thus with glory-spoils let him return
From the slain foe, and cheer his mother's heart!"

He spake, and in the arms of his dear wife Laid the fair babe, and to her fragrant breast She clasped him, smiling thro' a mist of tears.

Animal light and sparkle of childhood is there, brightening with one sweet touch the beautiful episode of the parting. Leaving the great bard of Greece, turn to the

great bard of Italy. In all the awful series of human faces which succeed each other in the "Inferno," is there any awfuller than that of Ugolino, gnawing the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, who starved the miserable Count and his four children to death? Tender beyond tenderness is every detail of the story, down to the heart-rending close.

Gaddo mi si gittò disteso a piedi,

Dicendo: Padre mio, chè? non m' aiuti?
Quivi morl.

Dante spares us none of the horrible particulars; but his soul is full of stern pity. When our own Chaucer takes up the tale, however, he breaks down-he is too tender-hearted-he can not finish; but refers us to the "grete poete of Itaille." Chaucer adds one exquisite touch, concerning the behavior of one of the children, to which attention has been drawn by Mr. Leigh Hunt:

There day by day this child began to cry,

Till in his father's barme* adowne he lay And said, Farewell, father, I must die, And kiss'd his father, and died the same day.

Chaucer's eyes overflow at all times with divine tears. He, the "morning star" of English song,t was also the most pitiful and the most human. Here, once more, the method of regarding a child-like circumstance is the clue to the whole poetic identity of the writer.

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Having ascertained so much, we may soon ascertain more, and discover, in following our golden thread of subject, that themes connected with child-life have been treated most frequently at the noblest periods of our literature; and so surely as poetry has been wretched and degenerate, such themes have been employed most degradingly or neglected altogether. Chaucer, children are fresh little creatures, touched with no metaphysical light; tender human blossoms, sometimes plucked cruelly, but ever meant for beauty and for brightness. We are breathing the morning air of literature, and life around us is simple, unsophisticated, and troubled by no "problems." With Shakspeare and the dramatists who shine around him and constitute with him what might be called "the Shakspearian system," a child is a child, an unconscious actor sometimes in great

* Lap.

+ Old Chaucer, like the morning star,

To us discovers day from afar.-DENHAM.

events; a prattling voice breaking in occasionally on the deeper tones of men and women; a little creature of flesh and blood:

At first the infant,

Mewling and puling in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

of child-life, and when they do speak, pile up conceits and oddities. These men, who would trim the very daisies on a grave into quaint forms and characters, were mostly childless and overshadowed with religious sorrows. When the Restoration came, things were worse still. Our poets played French tunes till the world sickened, and scarcely one natural note

How tenderly does Ben Jonson, bewailing reached the ears of the public. In that his boy, call him

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry! And with what quiet insight Michael Drayton, describing the little infant Moses, enters into the very life and soul of infancy :

Her pretty infant lying in her lap,

portentous collection of nervous English and vicious rubbish, known to the reader as "Dryden's Works," in that dusty legacy of a man who might have become a great English poet, and who doubtless was our very best English critic, there is nothing natural save the fearless self

With his sweet eyes her threatening rage be- revelation of the writer who changed his guiles,

For yet he plays and dallies with his pap,
To mock her sorrows with his amorous smiles,

And laugh'd, and chuck'd, and spread the pretty

hands,

While her full heart was at the point to break.

Moses' Birth and Miracles, Book I. As these men and their contemporaries wrote of children, they wrote of all else— with insight, tenderness, and truth. They were as noteworthy for kindly humanity as for poetic force and range. So too, though in a much less degree, were their immediate successors. The Stuarts began early to create court poets; and the false and artificial verses of Carew and his comrades were already poisoning our Helicon. As we follow our poetic thread further, there are long blanks, and few indeed are the pearls between Drayton and Milton. Milton was a stately singer, not used to unbend to infancy, save as typical of Him who came in infant guise to redeem the world. His lines "On a fair infant dying of a cough" are full of puerile affectations, and the "Ode on the Nativity," though grand and golden beyond parallel, having the effect of a glorious illuminated missal unrolled to sudden music, shows little or no tenderness. In good truth, something of the freshness of English literature had already departed. Great as Milton was, he was academical, and his poetry wanted the natural life of Chaucer's breezy verse, and Shakspeare's ever-varied numbers.

But if we are disappointed in the poets who preceded Milton, and even in Milton himself, what shall we say of his contemporaries and immediate successors? Even the Puritan poets, who were in all respects the finest singers of those days, speak little

creed every lustrum and would gladly have changed his skin had that been posMuses were silent, save at routs and teasible. Between Dryden and Pope the parties; there was no mention of children or any thing else innocent; and there was no true poetry. Pope rose, flourished, lied, and confirmed the artificial tendencies of his age; and Gay, who might have done better than any of his contemporaries, for he had real humor and a large heart, fiddled away his great gifts, leaving posterity his debtor for little more than the Beggar's Opera. About this period, Jonathan Swift sarcastically recommended the poor and fruitful Irish to eat their babies, and showed in divers other ways his contempt for ordinary human ties. Let us do Swift the justice, however, to observe that, in the same spirit of savage and relentless humor, he was demolishing the artificial structure of English poetry, showing its insincerity and worthlessness. English poetry was in a very bad way when Ambrose Phillips wrote his hideous infantine pieces,-on the little "Lady Charlotte Pulteney dressed to go to a ball," etc.;-carrying the patch-box and the powder-brush into the very nursery, bedaubing infancy, and hailing it in anacreontics; all his feeling, on seeing a beautiful female child, being that it was not old enough to be made love to. Things were not much better in Johnson's day, though the fresh and wholesome genius of Goldsmith was beginning to woo man back to nature and simple truth, and Bishop Percy published that book which, more than almost any other, renovated our poetic literature-the "Reliques" of

antique ballads. A great heap of shameless trash was yet to be written and published ere that great poet rose, who stands in the foreground of modern poetry and dispenses light to all contemporaries and successors. Wordsworth was born, and English poetry was saved. He himself dwelt in long obscurity; but he filled the lamps of all the world honored. Byron read Wordsworth secretly and was transformed from a feeble verse-writer into a living force, though he never had the grace to confess his obligation. Coleridge gave and received light to and from the same source. Without Wordsworth's poetry to recruit his imperfect strength, Shelley could scarcely have become a subtle power at all. Even Keats drank something, though not much; he had scarcely begun to feel the world. Without Wordsworth, indeed, modern poetry might have remained at what might be called the "Addisonian" stage to this day.

And what did Wordsworth begin by doing? By writing what have been called savagely, but quite truly, "poems about babies,"-about the dim beginnings of life, about birds'-nests and flower-gathering,-about little village maidens, gypsy boys and idiot lads,-about Barbara Lewthwaite and her pet lamb, and Agnes Fell and her new cloak of " duffel gray." No wonder that critics sneered and the public neglected. "Childishness, conceit, and affectation !" cried Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review; and afterward proceeded to compare Wordsworth with Ambrose Phillips, and actually quoted the noblest passage in the noble "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" as a sample of utter raving and unintelligibility,-these lines for example, among others!

Hence, in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us thither,

Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. Wordsworth's poems about children form a volume in themselves. To this great master, a child was a mysterious and beautiful agent; childhood, an unutterably significant epoch in the history of man. It would occupy too much space to show in how many ways he conveyed, through the medium of childhood, his

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Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child,

And he, laughing, said to me,

"Pipe a song about a lamb;"

So I piped with merry cheer; "Piper, pipe that song again ;"

So I piped; he wept to hear.
"Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,

Sing thy songs of happy cheer;"
So I sung the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.
"Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read."
So he vanish'd from my sight;
And I pluck'd a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,

And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

In these lamb-like moods Blake has no rival. There is a poem of his, narrating how a number of little sweeps got washed in a shining river in Heaven, which, for simple audacious beauty and quaintness of effect, is without a peer in our language. Old and gray in years, he was a cherub in soul. He was utterly devoid of guile. So tremendous was his simplicity of character, that he is said to have persuaded his wife to walk with him in the garden in a state of nature, in the manner of Adam and Eve. The ordinary modern explanation for such conduct as Blake's is summed up in one word "insanity;" but the word is bandied about too readily. Many of his pranks were absurd from our point of view; but is it not perfectly obvious

that we should feel in the same way towards any more spiritual being than ourselves, provided we did not quite fathom the living motive of such a being? Blake believed himself a spiritual person, and laid little stress on the body. Admitting for a moment (what the world won't admit) that the conception was a true one, there was nothing irrational in his conduct after all. But be that as it may, he was a truly divine poet, and may be said to have sown in Wordsworth's mind the

seeds of an imperishable literature. Compared with Blake's child-poems, Wordsworth's wonderful series may be described as less etherial and more obtrusively pathetic. Wordsworth takes the philosophic attitude, and allows us, even in such exquisite poems as "Alice Fell," to catch a faint tone of the schoolmaster. A wilder and more elfin light, a light more alien to Blake's etherial mood, yet far removed from Blake's divine simplicity, burns in the child-like poems of Shelley. They are very few, and little known; the finest, indeed, is not printed in the body of his works at all. Another is the merest fragment, and, on that account, infinitely touching. It bewails the death of his child, buried among the ruins of Rome; and is full of an impulsive gleam, which gains brightness from the sudden finishas if the poet could bear his grief no

more:

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.
(With what truth may I say-
Roma! Roma! Roma!
None è piu come era prima !)
My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume,
Which its lustre faintly hid,
Here its ashes find a tomb,

But beneath this pyramid
Thou art not. If a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine.

Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds
With its life intense and mild
The love of living leaves and weeds,
Among these tombs and ruins wild;

Let me think that through low seeds
Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass,
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion

But far finer-tremendous indeed in its blending of strong emotion and semiscenic effect, is the extraordinary "Invocation," written under circumstances with which all the world is familiar:

INVOCATION TO HIS CHILD.

The billows on the beach are leaping around it, The bark is weak and frail;

The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it
Darkly strew the gale.
Come with me, thou delightful child,-
Come with me, though the wave is wild,
And the winds are loose; we must not stay,
Or the slaves of law may send thee away.
They have taken thy brother and sister dear,

They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile, and dried the tear,
Which should have been sacred to me.
They have bound them slaves in youthly time;
To a blighting faith, and a cause of crime,
And they will curse my name and thee,
Because we fearless are and free.
Come thou, beloved as thou art;

Another sleepeth still

Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart,
Which thou with joy wilt fill
With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,
And which in distant lands will be
The dearest playmate unto thee.
Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,

Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river,

It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see
Like wrecks on the surge of eternity.
Rest, rest. Shriek not, thou gentle child!

The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray, and the clamor wild!

There, sit between us two, thou dearest,
Me and thy mother; well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves

Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves.

This hour will in thy memory

Be a dream of things forgotten;
We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,

Or Greece, the mother of the free;
And I will teach thy infant tongue
To call upon their heroes old
In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame
Of Grecian love, that by such name
A patriot's birthright thou mayst claim.

It will be seen that the poet is too passionately moved to be exquisite; the piece is as loose in writing as Byron's worst and most careless flights; but it veritably trembles with power, rocking us on the billows of a stormy and broken style, until it ceases in a false and dangerous calm-the calm of agony and pride suppressed. Turn from it; turn from the boat dancing on stormy waters, with its two hysteric figures; and listen for a moment to the somewhat oilier tones of a great good

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