That

"Ah, yer honour-poor sowl!-it was the death of her! night she watched, and watched, and the morning dawned and found her still alone. Unable to bear the agony of suspense, she rushed to the coast, and ere long her straining eyes beheld a boat fast approaching the shore from the island. It drew near, but her lover was not therein. She questioned the crew, wildly, concerning him they knew her, and endeavoured, at first, to conceal the truth-each shrinking from disclosing the fatal reality. But 't was of no use; she read it in the looks of all. The dreadful certainty came before her in all its horrors. She died, sir, bereft of reason; and should ye ever visit the village of Killimly, you will see in the churchyard a small tombstone, inscribed to the memory of Barney Dempsey, and his bethrothed Mary."

"A fatal pilgrimage, indeed," I exclaimed, as the guide concluded the foregoing tale, which we have given to our readers nearly as we heard it. "And you say it was from this spot he was precipitated? "Yes, yer honour, just here; and he fell beyant that big black rock."

I cast my eyes below, but quickly withdrew them from the fearful depth. The huge waves, as they broke angrily against the gloomy cliffs, seemed yawning for their prey.

"Let us leave this," I said; a proposition which my friend gladly echoed.

"Ov coorse yer honors will kiss the crass first?" exclaimed our guide.

An involuntary shudder came over me, and I felt, if my very existence had been depending upon it, I could not have advanced another step on the crag.

"Not I, Tim!"-" Nor I!" said my friend.

"And you wouldn't be afther going away without touching it even?"

I fear our resolutely declining to make any further acquaintance with the holy relic, tended to alter Mr. Healey's opinion of our courage considerably; at least so I deduced from two or three hints he threw out.

"If it was only to say you had touched it, yer honor!"

It was, however, out of the question; and we put an end to our guide's entreaties by at once commencing the descent. This occupied even more time than the ascent, but was accomplished in safety. The fact was, Tim's story had a strange effect on our nerves, and I often wished he had indulged us with it when we were in a less perilous position. We found our crew waiting in the boat, and were soon gazing upwards at the cross, which was fast dwindling to a mere speck. The evening was just closing as we pulled into the harbour of Valentia.

That night the cross on the Great Skellig was often before me, and more than once I felt as if some irresistible impulse urged me towards it; and, advancing to embrace it, my foot made a false step, and I woke in perfect agony. Never did poor mortal welcome the first rosy streaks of morning more than I did. I jumped up, hurried on my clothes, and rushing to the beach, was soon breasting the waves as they came rolling in from the Atlantic.

MISERIES OF A POETICAL GENIUS.

Ir is positively true, that in the nineteenth century there exist, in this enlightened land of ours, men who do not believe in predestination. I only wish I were among the number; but, alas, my own history and my daily experience forbid me to indulge in the happy infidelity. I am a living instance of the truth of the Calvinistic doctrine in one of its phases -I was doomed to be a "genius"—worse, "a poetical genius !" At ten I wrote verses in the amatory style-at fourteen I translated odes of Horace (poor Horace !) into English rhyme-at sixteen I began an epic -and the consequence is that, at six-and-twenty, I am the most miserable creature in existence.

My father-peace to his manes !-was a sugar-baker, who had amassed a tolerable fortune, as sugar-bakers and that sort of people always do; and then he had retired to the seclusion of Molasses Villa, situate in the wilds of Brixton. My mother (she is still alive) was the daughter of a country surgeon, who dispensed his own medicine on the usual profitable terms, vaccinated all the neighbouring babies gratis every Wednesday, and brought almost as many people in the shape of those interesting little beings-into the world every year, as the combined efforts of himself and a rival Esculapius could send out of it in the same space of time.

Of course, my mother was told that she had made a very bad match " -she, the daughter of a professional gentleman, to marry a sugar-baker; and exchange the cold mutton, and Saturday "scrap "-pie, of her paternal roof, for the salmon and venison of Molasses Villa. Poor creature! she bore her "awful sacrifice" with as much philosophy and smiling resignation as an Oxford-street tradesman could have displayed under a similar calamity—perhaps from the same reason because in either case the "indignity" was accompanied by a very considerable pecuniary compensation.

My father's years had fallen rather into "the sere and yellow leaf," by the time I entered this troublesome world. So much the more was I valued, petted, and spoilt. Instead of being kept in the nursery to plague the nurse, I was always a denizen of the drawing-room, to the great disgust of my mother's visitors in general, and of one old bachelor in particular, who was strongly addicted to white waistcoats, and occasionally to white "continuations" also. Into either of these devoted garments I never failed to plunge my infantile fingers, which, being usually coated with a composite mixture of hard-bake, cobbler's-wax, barley-sugar, and garden mould, left the most lively "fresco " colouring behind them.

"Look at that boy's head!" was the constant proud exclamation of my father to his guests. The only thing remarkable about the head, I reluctantly confess, was its enormous size, and the quantity of very red hair that adorned- -or disfigured-it. "That boy'll be a great statesman," concluded my father.

"He'll be a poet," rejoined my mother, "I know he will: and I'm sure that's better than any of your nasty prosy statesmen."

My own private determination was that I would be a confectioner, and live on toffy and sugar-candy: and even at this moment I am disposed

to think that I made a far more sensible selection of a "calling" than either of my worthy parents had predicted for me.

Instead of being duly breeched, birched, and sent to school, as little boys generally are, and always should be, my fond parents determined to "educate me at home." Now, if there be one greater error than another in this world of blunders, it is the notion that a boy can be educated under the parental roof. He can possibly be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, Latin, Greek, geography, and the use of the globes-but is this education? What sort of character does the home-trained youth acquire? Invariably that of a "sap "-or, a "reprobate," according to the temperament Dame Nature hath given him. To me she had assigned the mildest of dispositions; the only thing "fiery" about me being my head of hair; the only ebullition I ever displayed being those of my "poetical genius."

This same genius was developed under the fostering care of my mother who was a most enthusiastic reader of amatory and sentimental verses, and strove with untiring pertinacity to instil a similar taste into her hopeful son. My own impression is, that I was naturally as prosaic a little dog as ever existed; but the constant jingle of rhyme dinned into my ears at length begat a morbid taste for such sugar-candy literature in my own heart. My tutor was selected, not for his classical, mathematical, literary, or scientific attainments; but because he had written a volume of poetry, of the most diluted-sentimental cast, which nobody but the author and my mother had ever read.

Mr. Waller Montgomery Shenstone Jones (such were the manifold names of my instructor) was a very innocent young man with pale cheeks, pale hair, pale green eyes, and-I was about to write, a pale voice, but I ought to say, a voice so subdued and softened, that it seemed to have been, like his person, "washed out." In a word, Mr. W. M. S. Jones was an unmitigated "spoon ;" or, as my mother called him, “a highly intellectual, serene-minded, young man,"-pretty much the same thing in my humble opinion.

Under the supervision of this interesting youth, I began my education; and long before I knew how to conjugate a Latin verb, I was immersed in Ovid. I shall not bore the reader with a list of my studies, though Heaven knows how they bored me till I became accustomed to them, and almost loved them; looking with contempt on everything prosy, or in prose, and considering poets the only great men, the only real geniuses the world had produced.

Probably my respect for poets was increased by the intense difficulty I found in composing verses myself. In Latin and Greek there were those confounded "quantities" always turning out "long" where I wanted them to be "short," and vice versa. In English there was the abominable rhyme which never would come properly; or, if I picked out a few words that jingled euphoniously, and tried to fill up the lines afterwards, I never could make sense of them. So firmly convinced was I however, of the glorious nature of poetry, and the profound respect due to its writers, that I kept all these difficulties hidden in my own bosom, and often got applauded for the "impromptu" manner in which I composed an ode of eight lines, which, entre nous, had robbed me of three nights' sleep.

Time, patience, and perpetual practice at length made versification comparatively easy to me, and I wrote verses eternally, under the

popular delusion that, when the lines were of proper length, and the rhymes correct, it was poetry. My mother fully shared in such delusion, and saw me already realizing her prophecies. So attached did she become to my verses, that Mr. Waller Montgomery Shenstone Jones evidently fell into the background in her estimation. There was "less of tenderness and pathos in his muse than in mine," according to the worthy lady. I am quite sure of one thing,-that, in point of sense (or the lack of it), my many-named tutor and myself might have drawn lots for precedence. My father, good man, was rather disgusted at my eternal spinning of rhymes; "but what should a sugar-baker know of such things? as my mother very considerately remarked. He thought I ought at all events to study something solid,-history, for example. But I had a great contempt for history, as everybody has for everything he knows nothing about.

When I was about fifteen years old my father died. Of course I wrote an elegy on him, which my mother insisted on having engraved on his tombstone; but, to her great horror, the unpoetical pastor of the parish refused to allow "such rubbish " to be placed in the churchyard. She never forgave him,-I owe him a debt of gratitude which I hereby acknowledge; and I shall send him a copy of this magazine, that he may see I have not forgotten it.

Thus I lived until the age of sixteen, by which time I was a kind of animated rhyming dictionary, and occasionally found considerable difficulty in answering a plain question in plain prose. Now, however, came the time to decide on my future calling. Was I to go into trade? Forbid it, ye Nine ! Was I to be a lawyer or a doctor? In the name of Apollo, no! Fancy the author of "Thoughts on a fading Primrose," copying brief-sheets, or pouncing a writ. Imagine him who wrote that touching song, "The Skylark's Farewell to her Mate," mixing a blackdraught, or spreading a blister!

The Church, then. Humph! Well, that seemed better, certainly. My mother was very religious,-went to church three times every Sunday, and subscribed to four societies for sending out mild missionaries to convert well-meaning heathens into tipsy chapel-goers, calling themselves Christians.

But after all the profession was too practical to be poetical; and I knew it to be so. It looks very pretty in an old illustration to a moral tale, to see a good clergyman in a three-cornered hat, patting clean village children on the head, while respectable old men in white smock frocks take off their "wide-awakes," and ask his blessing likewise. But then, clergymen don't wear three-cornered hats now; village children are not clean; and old village men don't wear white smock-frocks, and don't value any one's blessing, preferring greatly a pipe and a pot, and the last Sunday's edition of the Weekly Crusher.

The truth is, that a clergyman has to poke his nose into places no more poetical than they are pleasant: no more romantic than they are fragrant; and that is not saying a little. I had a strong sense of the responsibilities of the calling, and an equally clear appreciation of the disagreeables" accompanying them, so I declined to undertake them.

Had my mother been the only person to consult in the matter, she would have probably kept me at home to do nothing but cultivate the Muses. But there was another guardian left me by my father's will, in the shape of an old friend and former partner of his-a tough-skinned,

hard-grained, anti-sentimental old fellow as ever wore double soles, and carried an umbrella of primitive cotton, to defy the weather, the 'busses, and the cabbies conjointly.

This worthy man insisted on my making the choice of a profession at once, or entering his office as a clerk. The latter alternative was too awful, so I proclaimed my wish to enter the army. Old Dates growled a little at my selection, swearing that such a profession was only an excuse for idleness, and that the heroes of her majesty's land forces were a set of popinjay boobies. However he had no power to thwart my inclination provided I did make a selection; and so I obtained an ensigncy in the -th.

I don't exactly agree with old Dates about the gallant officers of the army. They are not all popinjays, or boobies, or dandies, or fools. But really they are very unpoetical. There was not a man in the regiment who had read Wordsworth through; few even knew much about that vulgar fellow Byron; while Moore's most Anacreontic and Catullian ditties were the extent of the poetical readings of most of them. I was thoroughly disgusted with my new associates, and flew to my own meditations and books for relief. How long I should have continued in the army I don't know; but one day I was startled by being suddenly placed "under arrest." I was terribly frightened, though I couldn't conceive what offence I had committed until I was confronted with the orderly book, in which I had unconsciously scribbled (I'm sure I don't know when) some very strong lines expressive of my contempt for the "vulgar herd" with which I was doomed to associate. The end of it was that I was offered the alternative of fighting every man in the regiment separately, or selling out. Need I tell the alacrity with which I embraced the latter alternative?

Old Dates sarcastically remarked that, perhaps I would like to try the other branch of the service now-to enter the navy. But no! setting aside all other objections, I humbly confess that I am a perfect martyr to sea-sickness; and anything more unpoetical than that malady I am at a loss to imagine. After much deliberation I decided reluctantly on the church. At all events I should enjoy myself in the classic shades of Oxford for a time, and cultivate the Muses, sacred and profane, to my heart's content.

Heavens! what torture was in store for me! I was entered at

66

Crazynose College, and took possession of my rooms. I had a private tutor who was a fast coach;" a neighbour over me who was eternally dancing the polka for practice; another next me who kept a terrier that was a "devil for rats," to which he was constantly being treated for his own and his master's amusement, and which, whenever they escaped, came to lodge in my rooms. The man underneath me was always playing a bugle, or singing "Rule Britannia," and "Bacchus, Bacchus, jolly wine," at the top of his voice, and violently out of tune.

I was invited to breakfasts, and got inebriated on Champagne and Chablis; reprimanded for neglecting morning chapel, when my servant forgot to bring my shoes in time; and "called out" by the man with the terrier for calling his dog an ill-bred little brute, while he, the owner, insisted he was thorough-bred to the back-bone-as I've no doubt he was in one sense, but not in mine. In three months, my own tutor having hinted that I should never "pass," I left Oxford for ever.

My mother still swore that I was a genius, and I believed it more