sold as waste paper to the pastry-cook or the chandler. What wonder that the disenchanted poet should be transmuted into a cold and caustic critic, or that the disappointed man should with draw into the narrowest limits of a friendly society, a hermit in the center of London!

To add to these griefs, Mr. Darley was afflicted by a natural infirmity not uncommon with men of high talent and nervous and susceptible temperament. He stammered so much as to render conversation painful and difficult to himself, and distressing to his companions. The consciousness of this impediment (which he called "his mask") increased its intensity, causing him to shrink from all unnecessary communications, except with the few to whom he was familiarly accustomed, and of whose appreciation he was sure. They seem to have esteerned him much.

I myself never saw him. But I suppose I owed to the too partial report of some of his own most valued friends the honor of being admitted among his correspondents. Much as I admired him, and sincerely grateful as I felt for his notice, I confess that these elaborate epistles frightened me not a little. Startling to receive these epistles, resembling the choicest part of the choicest orations, were terrible to answer; and as my theory as to letterwriting is, that it should be like the easiest, most careless, most off-hand talk, and my practice full of blots and blunders, and of every sort of impertinence that a pen can by any chance commit, is apt to carry out my theory even to excess, I have no doubt but I often returned the compliment by startling my correspondent.

Besides these letters, Mr. Darley sent me a little volume, called "Sylvia, or the May Queen," a dramatic pastoral full of lyrical beauty; a tragedy on the story of Thomas-à-Becket, of which the most original scene is one in which Richard is represented as a boy, a boy foreshowing the man, the playful, grand and noble cub, in which we see the future lion; and an unpublished poem called "Nepenthe," as different in appearance from the common run of books" printed for private distribution," which are usually models of typography, of paper, and of binding, as it is in subject and in composition. Never was so thorough an abnegation of all literary coxcombry as was exhibited in the outward form of this "Nepenthe," unless there may be some suspicion of affectation in the remarkable homeliness, not to say squalidness, of the

strange little pamphlet, as compared with the grace and refinement of the poetry. Printed with the most imperfect and broken types, upon a coarse, discolored paper, like that in which a country shopkeeper puts up his tea, with two dusky leaves of a still dingier hue, at least a size too small for cover, and garnished at top and bottom with a running margin in his own writing, such (resembling nothing but a street ballad or an old “broadside") is the singular disguise (ah, Mr. Darley might well have called that a mask!) of the striking poem of which I am about to offer an extract. There is no reading the whole, for there is an intoxication about it that turns one's brain. Such a poet could never have been popular. But he was a poet.

The first page is headed as follows, in Mr. Darley's hand-writing, "seeking the panacea called 'Nepenthe,' the wanderer finds himself on the hill of Solitude."

NEPENTHE.

Over a bloomy land, untrod

By heavier foot than bird or bee
Lays on the grassy-bosomed sod,
I passed one day in reverie:
High on his unpavilioned throne
The heaven's hot tyrant sat alone,
And like the fabled king of old
Was turning all he touched to gold;
The glittering fountains seemed to pour
Steep downward rills of molten ore,
Glassily trickling smooth between
Brown shaded banks of golden green,
And o'er the yellow pasture straying,
Dallying still yet undelaying,
In hasty trips from side to side
Footing adown their steepy slide,
Headlong impetuously playing
With the flowery border pied,
That edged the rocky mountain stair,
They pattered down incessant there,
To lowlands sweet and calm and wide.
With golden lip and glistening bell
Bowed every bee-cup on the fell,
Whate'er its native unsunned hue,
Snow-white, or crimson, or cold blue;
Even the black loches of the sloe
Glanced as they sided to the glow,
Y

And furz in russet frock arrayed
With saffron knot, like shepherd maid,
Broadly pricked out her rough brocade.
The singèd mosses curling here,
A golden fleece too short to shear!
Crumbled to sparkling dust beneath
My light step on that sunny heath.

Light! for the ardor of the clime
Made race my spirit that sublime,
Bore me as buoyant as young Time
Over the green earth's grassy prime,
Ere his slouched wing caught up her slime;
And sprang I not from clay and crime,
Had from those humming beds of thyme
Lifted me near the starry chime

To lean on empyrean rhyme.

No melody beneath the moon

Sweeter than this deep wasel tune!
Here on the greensward grown hot gray,
Crisp as the unshorn desert hay,
Where his moist pipe the dulcet rill
For humorous grasshopper doth fill,
That spits himself from blade to blade
By long o'er-rest uneasy made;
Here ere the stream by fountain pushes
Lose himself brightly in the rushes
With butterfly path among the bushes,
I'll lay me on these mosses brown,
Murmuring beside his murmurs down,
And from the liquid tale he tells
Glean out some broken syllables;
Or close mine eyes in dreamy swoon,
As by hoarse winding deep Gihoon
Soothes with the hum his idle pain
The melancholy Tartar swain,

Sole mark on that huge-meadowed plain!

Hie on to great Ocean! hie on! hie on!
Fleet as water can gallop, hie on !
Hear ye not through the ground
How the sea-trumpets sound

Round the sea-monarch's shallop, hie on!

Hie on to brave Ocean! hie on! hie on !
From the sleek mountain levels, hie on!
Hear ye not in the boom

Of the water-bell's womb

Pleasant whoop to sea-revels, hie on!

Hie on to bright Ocean! hie on hie on
'Tis the store of rich waters, hie on!
Hear ye not the rough sands

Rolling gold on the strands,

For poor Earth's sons and daughters, hie on

Hie on to calm Ocean! hie on hie on !
Summer rest from earth-riot, hie on !

Hear ye not the smooth tide

With deep murmur and wide

Call ye down to his quiet, hie on !

Thus to the bubbling streamlet elves

To haste them down the slopes and shelves,
Methought some naiad of their fall
In her bright dropping sparry hall,
Sang to her glassy virginal.

Perchance to me monition sweet;
I started upright to my feet
Attent: 'twas but a fancy dream!
I only heard in measure meet
The pulses of the fountain beat,
As onward prest the throbbing stream,
Fair fell no less my fancy dream!

I have been still led like a child
My heedless wayward path and wild
Through this rough world by feebler clews
(So they were bright) than rainbow's dews
Spun by the insect gossamer

To climb with through the ropy air.
Fair fall ye then my fairy dream!
I'll with this labyrinthian stream,
Where'er it flow, where'er it cease,
There be my pathway and my peace!

Swift as a star falls through the night,
Swift as a sunshot dart of light

Down from the hills heaven-touching height

The streamlet vanished from my sight.

The poet is carried away by the phoenix, and laid at the bottom of her tree, in Arabia Felix, where he beholds her dissolution.

O blest unfabled ineese-tree
That burns in glorious Araby,
With red scent chalicing the air
Till earth-life grow Elysian there!

Half buried to her flaming breast

In this bright tree she makes her nest,
Hundred-sunned Phoenix! where she must
Crumble at length to hoary dust!

Her gorgeous death-bed! her rich pyre
Burnt up with aromatic fire!

Her urn right high from spoiler men!
Her birth-place when self-born again!

The mountainless green wilds among
Here ends she her unechoing song!
With amber tears and odorous sighs
Mourned by the desert where she dies'
Laid like the young fawn mossily
In sungreen vales of Araby

I woke, hard by the Phoenix tree

That with shadeless boughs flamed over me;
And upward called by a dunbery
With moon broad orbs of wonder, I
Beheld the immortal bird on high
Glassing the great sun in her eye;
Steadfast she gazed upon his fire,
Still her destroyer and her sire.
As if to his her soul of flame
Had flown already whence it came;
Like those who sit and glare so still
Intense with their death-struggle till
We touch and curdle at their chill!
But breathing yet while she doth burn
The deathless Daughter of the Sun!
Slowly to crimson embers burn
The beauties of the brightsome one.
O'er the broad nest her silver wings
Shook down their wasteful glitterings;
Her brindled neck high arched in air
Like a small rainbow faded there.
But brighter glowed her plumy crown
Moldering to golden ashes down;
With fume of sweetwood to the skies,
Pure as a Saint's adoring sighs,
Warm as a prayer in Paradise,
Her life-breath rose in sacrifice!

The while with shrill triumphant tone

Sounding aloud, aloft, alone,

Ceaseless her joyful death-wail she

Sang to departing Araby!

Deep melancholy wonder drew

Tears from my heart-spring at that view;