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THE LAST MAN.

EY THOMAS CAMPEELL.

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!

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TRANSLATED BY F. A STRALE.

CONCLUDED, FROM PAGE 401 OF VOL. II.

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 If the estimate assigned in the preceding found; that self-reliance from which might remarks, of the relation between the essen- spring forth a fresh blooming season of the tially different powers in man and the pres- Arts in after-time; for we miss,-and truly ent transforming movement, is correct, thankful we feel that it is so, we miss then the present condition of art contrasted even a satisfied and settled self-complacency with that of science appears to be a neces-among the higher Aristocracy, whose taste sary one. The march of the more open, in Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and Susceptible, palpable, and arbitrary elements Poetry, has with surprising universality, 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.

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 æsthetical pity at our personal habiliments. Thus the nerve of modern historical painting and sculpture is severed In the pressure of our restless desires to and destroyed at the outset. Our conceppenetrate the entire labyrinth of the past, tions in forming historical or ideal figures, to measure and adjudge every production in portraying the condition of our cotemof the human mind, and place them as poraries, never amount to any thing more dressing-glasses before us, we have long than barren prosaic reality, or may be somesince been shorn of that enviable ease and thing humorous and caustic, or in the worst contentment with the present, in being and cases, something sentimental. We are unain thought, that self-satisfaction and conse-ble to produce any thing more. Intimately quent self-esteem, which rendered antiquity connected with this is the fact, that we are and the middle ages a poetical reality, and just as unable to erect a house dedicated to VOL. III. No. I.

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