THE LAST MAN. EY THOMAS CAMPEELL. ALL worldly shapes shall melt in gloom, Before this mortal shall assume I saw a vision in my sleep, That gave my spirit strength to sweep I saw the last of human mould, The Sun's eye had a sickly glare, In plague and famine some! Yet, prophet like, that lone one stood, Saying, We are twins in death, proud Sun, For these ten thousand thousand years That shall no longer flow. What though beneath thee man put forth And arts that made fire, floods, and earth, For all those trophied arts And triumphs that beneath thee sprang, Go, let oblivion's curtain fall Its piteous pageants bring not back, Of pain anew to writhe; Ev'n I am weary in yon skies My lips that speak thy dirge of death- 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; And took the sting from death! Go, Sun, while Mercy holds me up To drink this last and bitter cup Or shake his trust in God! 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. 1 |