ALL worldly shapes shall melt in gloom, The Sun himself must die,

Before this mortal shall assume

Its Immortality!

I saw a vision in my sleep,

That gave my spirit strength to sweep
Adown the gulf of Time!

I saw the last of human mould,
That shall Creation's death behold,
As Adam saw her prime !

The Sun's eye had a sickly glare,
The Earth with age was wan,
The skeletons of nations were
Around that lonely man!
Some had expired in fight,-the brands
Still rusted in their bony hands;

In plague and famine some!
Earth's cities had no sound nor tread,
And ships were drifting with the dead
To shores where all was dumb!

Yet, prophet like, that lone one stood,
With dauntless words and high,
That shook the sere leaves from the wood
As if a storm passed by,

Saying, We are twins in death, proud Sun,
Thy face is cold, thy race is run,
'Tis Mercy bids thee go.

For these ten thousand thousand years
Hast seen the tide of human tears,

That shall no longer flow.

What though beneath thee man put forth
His pomp, his pride, his skill;

And arts that made fire, floods, and earth,
The vassals of his will;
Yet mourn not I thy parted sway,
Thou dim discrowned king of day;

For all those trophied arts

And triumphs that beneath thee sprang,
Healed not a passion or a pang
Entailed on human hearts.

Go, let oblivion's curtain fall
Upon the stage of men,
Nor with thy rising beams recall
Life's tragedy again.

Its piteous pageants bring not back,
Nor waken flesh upon the rack

Of pain anew to writhe;
Stretched in disease's shapes abhorred,
Or mown in battle by the sword,
Like grass beneath the scythe.

Ev'n I am weary in yon skies
To watch thy fading fire;
Test of all sumless agonies,
Behold not me expire..

My lips that speak thy dirge of death-
Their rounded gasp and girgling breath

To see thou shalt not boast. The eclipse of Nature spreads my pall,— The majesty of Darkness shall

Receive my parting ghost!

This spirit shall return to Him

That gave its heavenly spark;
Yet think not, Sun, it shall be dim
When thou thyself art dark!
No! it shall live again, and shine
In bliss unknown to beams of thine,
By him recalled to breath.
Who captive led captivity,
Who robbed the grave of Victory,-

And took the sting from death!

Go, Sun, while Mercy holds me up
On Nature's awful waste

To drink this last and bitter cup

Of grief that man shall taste-
Go, tell that night that hides thy face,
Thou saw'st the last of Adam's race,
On Earth's sepulchral clod,
The dark'ning universe defy
To quench his Immortality,
Or shake his trust in God!

For the Eclectic Museum.

THE PRESS AND THE AGE.

FUGITIVE THOUGHTS.

From the Vierteljahrs Schrift.

TRANSLATED BY F. A STRALE.
CONCLUDED, FROM PAGE 401 OF VOL. II.

Ir the estimate assigned in the preceding remarks, of the relation between the essentially different powers in man and the present transforming movement, is correct, then the present condition of art contrasted with that of science appears to be a necessary one. The march of the more open, susceptible, palpable, and arbitrary elements of soul, is so impetuous, that no concentration is allowed or attainable for its deeper, in their essence, more instinctive powers; no rest or breathing-time in which to consolidate themselves into a definite form, and constitute the spiritual index of the age. We behold the developments of art carried out of sight by the rush of scientific developments, the hot pursuit after knowledge, after discovery, after invention, the rational and useful appliance.

In the pressure of our restless desires to penetrate the entire labyrinth of the past, to measure and adjudge every production of the human mind, and place them as dressing-glasses before us, we have long since been shorn of that enviable ease and contentment with the present, in being and in thought, that self-satisfaction and consequent self-esteem, which rendered antiquity and the middle ages a poetical reality, and VOL. III. No. I.

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enabled them to seize with a vigorous grasp the salient points of their existence, in their manners, in their costume; and to embody the noblest ideas and most exalted feelings in monuments of art.

Even the usual conventional faith in our own actual refinement is no more to be found; that self-reliance from which might spring forth a fresh blooming season of the Arts in after-time; for we miss,-and truly thankful we feel that it is so, we miss even a satisfied and settled self-complacency among the higher Aristocracy, whose taste in Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and Poetry, has with surprising universality, twisted itself into what we style the Rococo, which they affect to despise and yet imitate. The past affords us almost the only matter of reproach against Art, at least all higher art, and it becomes most strikingly apparent, how very much life to us has lost of its poetry, from the bitter criticism which we bestow on our own external appearance, a sort of aesthetical pity at our personal habiliments. Thus the nerve of modern historical painting and sculpture is severed and destroyed at the outset. Our conceptions in forming historical or ideal figures, in portraying the condition of our cotemporaries, never amount to any thing more than barren prosaic reality, or may be something humorous and caustic, or in the worst cases, something sentimental. We are unable to produce any thing more. Intimately connected with this is the fact, that we are just as unable to erect a house dedicated to