MANY, MANY YEARS AGO. H, my golden days of child- How we thronged the frozen streamlets hood, Many, many years ago! Ah! how well do I remem ber What a pride it was to know, When my little playmates mustered On this old familiar spot To select their infant pastimes, That my name was ne'er forgot; They so eagerly would come, Oh, my balmy days of boyhood, Many, many years ago, For the berry or the sloe, Traced by its own perfume sweet, To the nutting groves repaired, And in warmth of purest boy-love The rich clusters with them shared! Or when hoary-headed Winter Brought his welcome frost and snow, She as fair as I was proud-- Would so gladly dance along! Ah, ye golden days! Departed, Yet full oft on Memory's wing Ye return like some bright vision, And both joy and sorrow bring. Where are now my boy-companions, Those dear friends of love and truth? Death hath sealed the lips of many Fair and beautiful in youth. Robin's lute has long been silent, And the trees are old and bare; Silent too the rippling brooklets; The old playground is not there; Time hath stolen my fair one's beauty, And he will soon strike the blow That will break those ties that bound us Many, many years ago. T. LOKER. Let us rise up and part: she will not know; Let us go seaward as the great winds go, Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here? There is no help, for all these things are so, And all the world is bitter as a tear; That hides from our vision the gates of And how these things are, though ye strove Let us go hence and rest: she will not love. Nor see love's ways, how sore they are and steep. Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough. Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep; And, though she saw all heaven in flower above, She would not love. You wish the court to hear and listen too? Cite well your cases: let them be in point, Free from false taste and verbiage and pa- Stuff not your speech with every sort of law: Let us give up, go down she will not care. Though all the stars made gold of all the air, And the sea moving saw before it move One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair, Though all those waves went over us and The same's the surfeit, take the worst or best. drove Books should be read; but if you can't digest, Deep down the stifling lips and drowning Clear heads, sound hearts, full minds, with hair, point may speak ; All else how poor in fact! in law how weak! Who's a great lawyer? He who aims to say Greatness ne'er grew from soils of spongy All on the surface dry, beneath all cold; And gather vigor as it seeks the skies. Whoe'er in law desires to win his cause Must speak with point, not measure out "wise saws," Must make his learning apt, his reasoning Pregnant in matter, but in style severe, JOSEPH STORY. EDWARD YOUNG. OUNG'S satires have at least the merit of containing a number of epigrams, and, as they appeared rather earlier than those of Pope, they may boast of having afforded that writer some degree of example. The opinion of Swift concerning them, however, seems to us not to be an unjust one-that they should have either been more merry or more angry. One of his tragedies is still popular on the stage, and his Night Thoughts have many admirers both at home and abroad. Of his lyrical poetry he had himself the good sense to think but indifferently. In none of his works is he more spirited and amusing than in his "Essay on Original Composition," written at the age of eighty. The Night Thoughts have been translated into more than one foreign language, and it is usual for foreigners to regard them as eminently characteristic of the peculiar temperament of English genius. Madame de Staël has, indeed, gravely deduced the genealogy of our national melancholy from Ossian and the Northern Scalds down to Dr. Young. Few Englishmen, however, will, probably, be disposed to recognize the author of the Night Thoughts as their national poet by way of eminence. His devotional gloom is more in the spirit of St. Francis of Asisium than of an English divine, and his austerity is blended with a vein of whimsical conceit that is still more unlike the plainness of English charac ter. The Night Thoughts certainly contain many splendid and happy conceptions, but their beauty is thickly marred by false wit and overlabored antithesis. Indeed, his whole ideas seem to have been in a state of antithesis while he composed the poem. One portion of his fancy appears devoted to aggravate the picture of his desolate feelings, and the other half to contradict that picture by eccentric images and epigrammatic ingenuities. As a poet he was fond of exaggeration but it was that of the fancy more than of the heart. This appears no less in the noisy hyperboles of his tragedies than in the studied melancholy of the Night Thoughts, in which he pronounces the simple act of laughter to be half immoral. That he was a pious man, and had felt something from the afflictions described in the Complaint, need not be called in question; but he seems covenanting with himself to be as desolate as possible, as if he had continued the custom, ascribed to him at college, of studying with a candle stuck in a human skull, while, at the same time, the feelings and habits of a man of the world, which still adhere to him, throw a singular contrast over his renunciations of human vanity. He abjures the world in witty metaphors, commences his poem with a sarcasm on sleep, deplores his being neglected at court, compliments a lady of quality by asking the moon if she would choose to be called "the fair Portland of the skies," and dedicates to the patrons of "a much-indebted Muse," one of whom (Lord Wilmington) on some occasion he puts in the balance of |