And through the veins and delicate skin
The light shone rosy? that the darkened lids
Gave yet a softer lustre to her eye?

That with such pride she tricked
Her glossy tresses, and on holy-day
Wreathed the red flower-crown round
Their waves of glossy jet?
How happily the days

Of Thalaba went by!

Years of his youth, how rapidly ye fled !"

A drear winter was to close over this happy spring,-a tragic ending to this bright promise. The trial of his faith which most heavily crushes the heart of Thalaba is when the angel of death invades the bridal chamber; and then follows that woeful description,-his ghastly wretchedness at Oneiza's grave:

"By the tomb lay Thalaba,

In the light of the setting eve.
The sun, and the wind, and the rain,
Had rusted his raven locks;

His cheeks were fallen in,

His face-bones prominent.

Reclined against the tomb he lay,

And his lean fingers played,

Unwitting, with the grass that grew beside."

When Thalaba's unwearied faith approaches its consummation, the good fight nearly finished, the race nearly won, the ministering spirits come closer to his path, and he hears a spiritual welcoming from the angel voice of his lost Oneiza :

:

"Was there a spirit in the gale
That fluttered o'er his cheek?

For it came on him like the new risen sun,
Which plays and dallies o'er the night-closed flower

"And woos it to unfold anew to joy ;

For it came on him as the dews of eve
Descend with healing and with life
Upon the summer mead;

Or liker the first sound of seraph-song
And angel-greeting to the soul

Whose latest sense had shuddered at the groan
Of anguish, kneeling by a death-bed side."

It gives a vivid impression of the versatility of Southey's genius to turn from a spiritual and wildly-supernatural poem like "Thalaba" to his poetical odes. The finest of these were written during the long strife between his country and Napoleon. I cannot stop to characterize that contest, or to say how far I consider the poet's strain against the adversary to be justified. It is with the poetry, and not the politics, I have to deal. This only let me say: that the war with the French Empire is a grand chapter in British history, and that I know not where an American or a republican can find just ground for any sympathy with a military despotism. The trumpet-sounds of Southey's poetry came forth from his mountain dwelling to cheer and fortify the hearts of his countrymen. His heart never lost its faith that there is a moral strength mightier and more enduring than the perishable power of armies. He spake to the nation in the spirit of that noble line which he had spoken to himself in early manhood:

"Onward in faith, and leave the rest to Heaven!"

:

And it is a grand thing to behold the poet, like his

own Thalaba, ever faithful, hopeful alike in seasons of victory and of doubt, and to hear him at last raising the exultant strain of triumph, as over the disastrous retreat from Moscow :

"Witness, that dread retreat,

When God and nature smote
The tyrant in his pride!

Victorious armies followed on his flight;
On every side he met

The Cossack's dreadful spear;

On every side he saw

The injured nation rise

Invincible in arms.

What myriads, victims of one wicked will,

Spent their last breath in curses on his head!

There where the soldiers' blood

Froze in the festering wound,

And nightly the cold moon

Saw sinking thousands in the snow lie down
Whom there the morning found
Stiff as their icy bed!"

The highest and most impetuous of these strains is the ode written during the negotiations with Napoleon in 1814. Since Milton's tremendous imprecation against the Papal tyranny on occasion of the Piedmontese massacre, I know of no piece of political invective equal to it. It is hurled with the force and the fire of a thunderbolt, one burst of indignation following another, and closing with an accumulation of all the deeds of blood identified with the name of him who had been at once the terror and the wonder of Europe. Let me give the opening and ending stanzas of the ode:

"Who counsels peace at this momentous hour, When God hath given deliverance to the oppressed, And to the injured power?

Who counsels peace when vengeance, like a flood, Rolls on, no longer now to be repressed;

When innocent blood,

From the four quarters of the world, cries out
For justice upon one accursed head;

When Freedom hath her holy banners spread
Over all nations, now in one just cause
United; when, with one sublime accord,
Europe throws off the yoke abhorred,
And loyalty and faith and ancient laws
Follow the avenging sword?

"Woe, woe to England! woe and endless shame,
If this heroic land,

False to her feelings and unspotted fame,
Hold out the olive to the tyrant's hand!
Woe to the world if Buonaparte's throne
Be suffered still to stand!

France! if thou lovest thine ancient fame,
Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame.
By the bones which bleach on Jaffa's beach;
By the blood which on Domingo's shore
Hath clogged the carrion-birds with gore;
By the flesh which gorged the wolves of Spain,
Or stiffened on the snowy plain

of frozen Moscovy;

By the bodies which lie all open to the sky,
Tracking from Elbe to Rhine the tyrant's flight;
By the widows' and the orphans' cry;
By the childless parents' misery;
By the lives which he hath shed;

By the ruin he hath spread;

By the prayers which rise for curses on his head,

Redeem, O France! thine ancient fame!

Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame!

Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!
Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind!

By those horrors which the night
Witnessed when the torch's light
To the assembled murderers showed
Where the blood of Condé flowed;
By thy murdered Pichegru's fame;
By murdered Wright,-an English name;
By murdered Palm's atrocious doom;
By murdered Hofer's martyrdom;

Oh! by the virtuous blood thus vilely spilt,

The Villain's own peculiar, private guilt,-
Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!
Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind."

From these notes, tuned in tumultuous times, and fit to cope with the tempest's swell, let me further illustrate the varied power of Southey's genius by turning to a passage in his pleasing poem, "The Tale of Paraguay." It is an exquisite specimen of purely pathetic poetry,full of the truth of feeling and of fancy,-the description of the death-bed of a young and innocent female. What can be more beautiful or more touching than the line which actually pictures to your imagination the sweet smile of the dying one?—

"Who could dwell

Unmoved upon the fate of one so young,

So blithesome late? What marvel if tears fell

From that good man, as over her he hung,

And that the prayers he said came faltering from his tongue?

"She saw him weep, and she could understand

The cause thus tremulously that made him speak.

By his emotion moved, she took his hand;
A gleam of pleasure o'er her pallid cheek