The scars his dark broad bosom wore,
Showed warrior true and brave;
A prince among his tribe before,
He could not be a slave.

Then to his conqueror he spake―

My brother is a king;

Undo this necklace from my neck,

And take this bracelet ring;

And send me where my brother reigns,

And I will fill thy hands

With store of ivory from the plains,

And gold-dust from the sands.'

'Not for thy ivory nor thy gold
Will I unbind thy chain:

That bloody hand shall never hold
The battle-spear again.

A price thy nation never gave,

Shall yet be paid for thee;

For thou shalt be the Christian's slave, In lands beyond the sea.'

Then wept the warrior chief, and bade
To shred his locks away;

And, one by one, each heavy braid
Before the victor lay.

Thick were the platted locks, and long,

And deftly hidden there

Shone many a wedge of gold among

The dark and crispèd hair.

'Look, feast thy greedy eye with gold Long kept for sorest need;

Take it-thou askest sums untold,

And say that I am freed.

Take it my wife the long, long day
Weeps by the cocoa-tree,

And my young children leave their play,
And ask in vain for me.'

'I take thy gold-but I have made
Thy fetters fast and strong,
And ween that by the cocoa shade
Thy wife will wait thee long.'
Strong was the agony that shook
The captive's frame to hear,
And the proud meaning of his look
Was changed to mortal fear.

His heart was broken-crazed his brain-
At once his eye grew wild-
He struggled fiercely with his chain,
Whispered, and wept, and smiled;
Yet wore not long those fatal bands,
And once, at shut of day,

They drew him forth upon the sands,
The foul hyena's prey."

That Mr Bryant's poetry may be seen in all its fine varieties, we quote two other compositions, inspired by love and delight in that benignant, bounteous, and beauteous Nature, who all over the earth repays with a heavenly happiness the grateful worship of her children. One of them, "To a Waterfowl," has been long and widely admired, and is indeed a gem of purest ray serene, of which time may never bedim the lustre. The other is new to us-and "beautiful exceed

ingly."

THE NEW MOON.

"When, as the garish day is done,
Heaven burns with the descended sun

'Tis passing sweet to mark,
Amid that flush of crimson light,
The new moon's modest bow grow bright,
As earth and sky grow dark.

Few are the hearts too cold to feel
A thrill of gladness o'er them steal,
When first the wandering eye
Sees faintly, in the evening blaze,
That glimmering curve of tender rays
Just planted in the sky.

The sight of that young crescent brings
Thoughts of all fair and youthful things-
The hopes of early years;
And childhood's purity and grace,
And joys that, like a rainbow, chase
The passing shower of tears.

The captive yields him to the dream
Of freedom, when that virgin beam
Comes out upon the air;
And painfully the sick man tries
To fix his dim and burning eyes
On the soft promise there.

Most welcome to the lover's sight
Glitters that pure, emerging light;
For prattling poets say,

That sweetest is the lovers' walk,
And tenderest is their murmured talk,
Beneath its gentle ray.

And there do graver men behold
A type of errors, loved of old,
Forsaken and forgiven;

And thoughts and wishes not of earth,
Just opening in their early birth,
Like that new light in heaven."

TO A WATERFOWL.

"Whither, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink

Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean-side?

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast-
The desert and illimitable air-

Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end,

Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not sqon depart.

He, who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright."

All who have read this article will agree with what Washington Irving has said of his friend-that his close observation of the phenomena of nature, and the graphic felicity of his details, prevent his descriptions from ever becoming general and commonplace; while he has the gift of shedding over them a genuine grace that blends them all into harmony, and of clothing them with moral associations that make them speak to the heart. Perhaps we were wrong in dissenting from Mr Irving's other opinion, that his poetry is characterised by "the same indigenous style of thinking, and local peculiarity of imagery, which gives such novelty to the pages of Cooper." His friend's descriptive writings, he says, are essentially American. They transport us, he adds, "into the depths of the solemn primeval forest, to the shores of the lonely lake, the banks of the wild nameless stream, or the brow of the rocky upland, rising like a promontory from amidst a wide ocean of foliage, while they shed around us the glories of a climate fierce in its extremes, but splendid in all its vicissitudes." We object now but to the last part of this elegant panegyric. There are no fierce extremes in Mr Bryant's poetry. That his writings "are imbued with the independent spirit and the buoyant aspirations incident to a youthful, a free, and a rising country," will not, says Mr Irving, be the "least of his merits" in the eyes of Mr Rogers, to whom the volume is inscribed; and in ours it is one of the greatest; for we, too, belong to a country who, though not young-God bless her, auld Scotland !-hath yet an independent spirit and buoyant aspirations, which she is not loth to breathe into the bosom of one of her aged children-CHRISTOPHER North.

POETRY OF EBENEZER ELLIOTT.

[MAY 1834.]

ALL poets are poets of the poor. For, is not the whole human race a poor race, subject to sin, sorrow, and death? Princes are paupers, autocrats, almsmen-and they know they are, in spite of their subjects or slaves. The world is a workhouse, and its rulers overseers. Their high mightinesses, the magistrates, are all accountable to the colic; and, even in this life, obedient to the diet of worms. Who but a fool dare lift up his voice and say, "I am rich," when palsy at the very moment may wring his mouth awry, or apoplexy smite him into a breathing clod? Strip the rich man of his purple and fine linen—and what an exposure of shrivelled skin-marrowless bones-flesh not like grass, but straw! Beauty, thought, intellect, genius, virtue —what, in this mysterious life of ours-what even are they? Shut your eyes and open them, and what a ghastly transfiguration! In their room, loathsomeness, imbecility, idiocy, insanity, vice, wretchedness, and woe; and is it not enough of itself to convince us in our worst pride, that we are all most miserably poor, to think that the round earth is not merely trenched all over with our graves, but composed of our very dust?

This is one light in which humanity may be truly viewed, if there be truth in the Two Testaments. And in no other light could it be truly viewed, if we do not believe in a Future State. Now, the ancient-the heathen world, did not believe in a Future State-though it did all it could-strove with all its mind, heart, and soul, so to believe-deified heroes-and changed them into stars. Imagination created its own mythologies, fluctuating between heaven and earth, and there was something of a saving spirit even in that superstition. How fair, and how foul were those creations of genius! Their worst sins, and their most pitiable weaknesses, did his worshippers attribute to Almighty Jove. The character of