by the refusal of the match. Threatened to march a hundred thousand men into the land, and "bring her in a whirlwind." He refuses his son's petition to make the wooing a little more gentle, who offers to go with his two friends and clear the matter up.

But when the council broke I rose and past

Thro' the wild woods that hung about the town;
Found a still place and pluck'd her likeness out;
Laid it on flowers, and watch'd it lying bathed
In the green gleam of dewy-tassell'd tress;

What were those fancies? wherefore break her troth?
Proud look'd the lips : but while I meditated

A wind arose and rush'd upon the south,

And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks
Of the wild woods together; and a voice

Went with it" Follow, follow, thou shalt win."

The three friends steal away unperceived, and reach safely the frontier.

Down from the bastion'd walls we dropt by night,
And flying reach'd the frontier; then we crost
To a livelier land; and so by town, and thorpe,
And tilth, and blowing bosks of wilderness,
We gain'd the mother-city, thick with towers,
And in the imperial palace found the king.

His name was Gama; crack'd and small his voice;
A little dry old man, without a star,

Not like a king, &c.

He acknowledges the contract, but adds that his daughter had two friends, widows, Lady Psyche and Lady Blanche, who fed her with theories of woman's equality, till she was wild to found a university for maidens in a summer-palace he had given to her. He however offers to

give the Prince letters to her, to enable him to attempt with more success his enterprise, though he rates his chances almost at nothing. Stopping at a hostelry near the frontier they learnt from the host how fully in all things the gentler sex had usurped the land.

He always made a point to post with mares;

His daughter and his housemaid were the boys.
The land he understood for miles about

Was tilled by women; all the swine were sows,
And all the dogs-

The author is too delicate to tell us what the dogs were; but probably the word will be found in the commencement of a poem called Christabell, by a poet who was not so fastidious.

The Prince and his two friends disguised themselves in female attire, mounted their horses (we presume not side-saddles, but looking rather like Mr. Etty's Joan of Arc), and pushed for the convent-castle.

We rode till midnight, when the college lights
Began to glitter fire-fly like in copse
And linden alley; and then we past an arch
Inscribed, too dark for legible, and gained

* Mr. Coleridge, we presume, is the anonymous person alluded to in the Quarterly Review, Dec. 1847, p. 9, "as a celebrated poet, philosopher, and serious writer," to whom the witticism belongs which is given by Lord Campbell to a lawyer who applied it to Lord Eldon," as being a buttress and not a pillar of the church :" he was not seen inside of it, while at the same time he supported it.-REV.

A little street, half garden and half house,
But could not hear each other speak for noise
Of clocks and chimes, like silver hammers falling
On silver anvils, and the splash and stir

Of fountains spouted up, and showering down
In meshes of the jasmine and the rose;
And all about us pealed the nightingale
Rapt in her song, and careless of the snare.

The Prince sent in a note, saying

"Three ladies of the northern empire pray

Your highness would enroll them with your own
As Lady Psyche's pupils."

Appropriate dresses are brought them, and they are introduced to the Princess, who is a little astonished at the bulk and size of the strange ladies.

"What are the ladies of your land so tall?"

On their dismissal they repaired to Lady Psyche's, their governess,

As we entered in

There sat along the forms, like morning doves

That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch,
A patient range of pupils-

who was reading a lecture to the doves in disparagement of that part of the human race who have beards on their chins, and proving by sundry examples well chosen, that the petticoat-wearers are their equals, and therefore for the future there should be

And everywhere the broad and bounteous earth
Should bear a double growth of those rare souls,
Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world.

Lady Psyche, however, had through his disguise discovered her brother Florian, and she threatens to inform the Princess; but, between compliments, flattery, and arguments, showered on her by the three traitors, she is reconciled to silence, and no wonder; for what maid could resist "such silver sounds of sweetness" as these:

"Are you that Psyche," Florian ask'd, "to whom

In gentler days your arrow-wounded fawn

Came flying, while you sat beside the well?

The creature laid his muzzle on your lap,

And sobb'd, and you sobb'd with it, and the blood

Was sprinkled on your kirtle, and you wept.

That was fawn's blood-not brother's,-yet you wept!

Oh, by the bright head of my little niece,

You were that Psyche, and what are you now?"

"You are that Psyche," Cyril said again,

"The mother of the sweetest little maid

That ever crow'd for kisses," &c.

She at the same time makes them promise to slip away "to-day, or tomorrow, or soon," as silently as they came, to which, albeit loth, they engage. But in the mean time a young girl, Melissa, the daughter of Lady Blanche, listens and overhears what has passed; she however promises

secrecy, and would not "give those gallant gentlemen to death." So they put their hoods over their faces, and walked away in safety for the present. Meanwhile they all go to dinner.

Lady Blanche,

A double-rouged and treble-wrinkled dame,
With all her faded Autumns falsely brown,
Shot sidelong daggers at us-a tiger-cat
In act to spring. At last, a solemn grace
Concluded, and we sought the gardens: there
One walk'd reciting by herself, aud one
In this hand held a volume as to read,

And smooth'd a petted peacock down with that:
Some to a low song oar'd a shallop by,

Or, under arches of the marble bridge,

Hung shadow'd from the heat some hid and sought
In the orange thickets: others tost a ball

Above the fountain-jets and back again

With laughter: others lay about the lawns,

Of the older sort, and murmur'd that their May
Was passing, &c.

The next morning Melissa arrives with the sad intelligence that her mother, the Lady Blanche, has discovered the secret; and her suspicions being confirmed by her daughter's blushes and behaviour, she has gone to inform the Princess. Cyril, who is the jovial wag of the party, undertakes to soften the old beldame, and partly by cajolery, by flattery, and temptation, obtains a kind of short and conditional reprieve, The Princess gives notice of a geological expedition she means to undertake in the afternoon on horseback, as the Oxford Professor of the same science used to do to Hedington and other quarries.

The Princess rode to take

The dip of certain strata to the North.
Would we go with her?

The Prince rides by her side, and they have a long and ingenious proand-con argument touching love and marriage, and the superiority of the sexes, in which the princess has a decided advantage, for she is a woman of masculine understanding, firm will, and extended views; e. g. she says

Would, indeed, we had been,

In lieu of many mortal flies, a race

Of giants, living each a thousand years,

That we might see our own work out, and watch

The sandy footprint harden into stone.

The Prince puts rather a delicate question to the Princess,-how it happens that, amidst all her schools of science, there was not one of anatomy. She confesses that it was not much suited for her sex to practise, but adds that they all profess physic and the leech-craft; and then she passes off in a little flight of metaphysics.

Let there be light and there was light: 'tis so:

For was, and is, and will be, are but is;

And all creation is one act at once,

The birth of light but we that are not all,

:

As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that,

And live, perforce from thought to thought, and make

One act a phantom of succession: thus

Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time;
But in the shadow will we work, and mould
The woman to the fuller day.

The tents are ordered to be pitched upon the sward, and the viands laid

out.

At the word, they raised

A tent of satin, elaborately wrought

With fair Corinna's triumph; here she stood,
Engirt with many a florid maiden-cheek,
The woman-conqueror; woman-conquered there
The bearded Victor of ten-thousand hymns,
And all the men mourn'd at his side: but we
Set forth to climb; then, climbing, Cyril kept
With Psyche, Florian with the other, and I
With mine affianced. Many a little hand
Glanced like a touch of sunshine on the rocks,
Many a light foot shone like a jewel set

In the dark crag: and then we turn'd, we wound
About the cliffs, the copses, out and in,
Hammering and clinking, chattering stony names
Of shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff,
Amygdaloid and trachyte, till the sun

Grew broader toward his death, and fell, and all
The rosy heights came out above the lawns.

While fruit and flowers, and viands and wine in golden flagons were piled on tables in the tent, and while the guests were reposing on broidered couches, a maiden was commanded to sing, and thus she sweetly sang:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears, from the depth of some divine despair,
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge ;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

This song is too tender and passionate for the approbation of the heroic Princess," Prælia virgo dura pati," and she hopes a nobler strain from the disguised Prince.

Then I remember'd one myself had made

What time I watch'd the swallow winging south

From mine own land, part made long since, and part
Now while I sang, and maidenlike, as far

As I could ape their treble, did I sing.
O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.

O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.
O were I thou that she might take me in,
And lay me on her bosom, and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.

Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,
Delaying as the tender ash delays

To clothe herself, when all the woods are green ?
O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown:
Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,
But in the North long since my nest is made.
O tell her, brief is life but love is long,
And brief the sun of summer in the North,
And brief the moon of beauty in the South.

O Swallow, flying from the golden woods,

Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine,
And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.

The sweet, simple, and beautiful little poem, worthy of Bion, or Moschus, or Meleager, was not acceptable to the virtuous and virgin Princess; the ladies stared on the singer with their great eyes, and the Princess read him another lecture. Cyril, in the mean time, had been too intimate with the wine-flask, and volunteered

To troll a careless, careless tavern-catch,

Of Moll and Meg, and strange experiences,
Unmeet for ladies.- Florian nodded at him;

I frowning-Psyche flush'd and wann'd and shook;

The lily-like Melissa droop'd her brows.

"Forbear," the Princess cried; "Forbear, SIR," I;
And, heated thro' and thro' with wrath and love,

I smote him on the breast; he started up;

There rose a shriek, as of a city sack'd;

Melissa clamoured, "Flee the death ;"-" To horse,"

Said Lady Ida; and fled at once, as flies

A troop of snowy doves, athwart the dusk,
When some one batters at the dovecote doors,
Disorderly the women.—

A general flight takes place-such as would take place at Miss Steed's seminary at Kensington at the unexpected reading of Don Juan, or the proposal of the Polka by one of the Evangelical young ladies in that select and sedulous establishment.

"Like parting hopes

I heard them passing from me; hoof by hoof,
And every hoof a knell to my desires,
Clang'd on the bridge: and then another shriek-
The Head, the Head, the Princess, O the Head!
For, blind with rage, she missed the plank, and rolled
In the river: out I sprang from glow to gloom :
There whirl'd her white robe like a blossom'd branch,
Rapt to the horrible fall. A glance I gave-
No more-but, woman-vested as I was,

Plung'd; and the flood drew; yet I caught her; then
Oaring one arm, and bearing in my left

The weight of all the hopes of half the world,

GENT. MAG. VOL. XXIX.

R