MAY.

I FEEL a newer life in every gale;

The winds, that fan the flowers,

And with their welcome breathings fill the sail,
Tell of serener hours,-

Of hours that glide unfelt away
Beneath the sky of May.

The spirit of the gentle south-wind calls
From his blue throne of air,

And where his whispering voice in music falls,
Beauty is budding there;

The bright ones of the valley break
Their slumbers, and awake.

The waving verdure rolls along the plain, And the wide forest weaves,

To welcome back its playful mates again,
A canopy of leaves;

And from its darkening shadow floats
A gush of trembling notes.

Fairer and brighter spreads the reign of May;

The tresses of the woods

With the light dallying of the west-wind play;
And the full-brimming floods,

As gladly to their goal they run,
Hail the returning sun.

TO SENECA LAKE.

ON thy fair bosom, silver lake,
The wild swan spreads his snowy sail,
And round his breast the ripples break,
As down he bears before the gale.

On thy fair bosom, waveless stream, The dipping paddle echoes far, And flashes in the moonlight gleam, And bright reflects the polar star.

The waves along thy pebbly shore,

As blows the north-wind, heave their foam, And curl around the dashing oar,

As late the boatman hies him home.

How sweet, at set of sun, to view

Thy golden mirror spreading wide, And see the mist of mantling blue

Float round the distant mountain's side.

At midnight hour, as shines the moon,
A sheet of silver spreads below,
And swift she cuts, at highest noon,
Light clouds, like wreaths of purest snow.

On thy fair bosom, silver lake,

O! I could ever sweep the oar, When early birds at morning wake, And evening tells us toil is o'er.

Now the mist is on the mountains,

Reddening in the rising sun;

Now the flowers around the fountains
Perish one by one:-

Not a spire of grass is growing,
But the leaves that late were glowing,
Now its blighted green are strowing
With a mantle dun.

Now the torrent brook is stealing

Faintly down the furrow'd gladeNot as when in winter pealing,

Such a din is made,

That the sound of cataracts falling
Gave no echo so appalling,
As its hoarse and heavy brawling

In the pine's black shade.

Darkly blue the mist is hovering

Round the clifted rock's bare heightAll the bordering mountains covering With a dim, uncertain light :Now, a fresher wind prevailing, Wide its heavy burden sailing, Deepens as the day is failing, Fast the gloom of night. Slow the blood-stain'd moon is riding Through the still and hazy air, Like a sheeted spectre gliding

In a torch's glare:

Few the hours, her light is given-
Mingling clouds of tempest driven
O'er the mourning face of heaven,
All is blackness there.

THE FLIGHT OF TIME.

FAINTLY flow, thou falling river,
Like a dream that dies away;
Down to ocean gliding ever,
Keep thy calm unruffled way:
Time with such a silent motion,
Floats along, on wings of air,
To eternity's dark ocean,

Burying all its treasures there.
Roses bloom, and then they wither;
Cheeks are bright, then fade and die;
Shapes of light are wafted hither-

Then, like visions hurry by: Quick as clouds at evening driven O'er the many-colour'd west, Years are bearing us to heaven, Home of happiness and rest.

Not to the shades shall the youth descend, who for country hath perish'd:

HEBE awaits him in heaven, welcomes him there with her smile;

There, at the banquet divine, the patriot spirit is cherish'd;

Gods love the young, who ascend pure from the funeral pile.

Not to Elysian fields, by the still, oblivious river; Not to the isles of the bless'd, over the blue, rolling sea;

But on Olympian heights, shall dwell the devoted forever;

I feel it-though the flesh is weak, I feel
The spirit has its energies untamed
By all its fatal wanderings; time may heal
The wounds which it has suffer'd; folly claim'd
Too large a portion of its youth; ashamed
Of those low pleasures, it would leap and fly,

And soar on wings of lightning, like the famed Elijah, when the chariot, rushing by,

Bore him with steeds of fire triumphant to the sky. We are as barks afloat upon the sea,

Helmless and oarless, when the light has fled, The spirit, whose strong influence can free The drowsy soul, that slumbers in the dead Cold night of mortal darkness; from the bed Of sloth he rouses at her sacred call,

And, kindling in the blaze around him shed, Rends with strong effort sin's debasing thrall, And gives to GoD his strength, his heart, his mind, his all.

Our home is not on earth; although we sleep,

And sink in seeming death a while, yet, then, The awakening voice speaks loudly, and we leap To life, and energy, and light, again; We cannot slumber always in the den Of sense and selfishness; the day will break, Ere we forever leave the haunts of men; Even at the parting hour the soul will wake, Nor, like a senseless brute, its unknown journey take.

How awful is that hour, when conscience stings

The hoary wretch, who, on his death-bed hears, Deep in his soul, the thundering voice that rings, In one dark, damning moment, crimes of years, And, screaming like a vulture in his ears,

valiant, and free.

How wild the fury of his soul careers! His swart eye flashes with intensest flame, And like the torture's rack the wrestling of his frame.

HOME.

My place is in the quiet vale,

The chosen haunt of simple thought;

I seek not Fortune's flattering gale,

I better love the peaceful lot.

I leave the world of noise and show,
To wander by my native brook;

I ask, in life's unruffled flow,
No treasure but my friend and book.
These better suit the tranquil home,
Where the clear water murmurs by;
And if I wish a while to roam,

I have an ocean in the sky.

Fancy can charm and feeling bless

With sweeter hours than fashion knows;

There is no calmer quietness

Than home around the bosom throws.

THE author of "Fanny," "Burns," "Marco Bozzaris," etc., was born at Guilford in Connecticut, in August, 1795. In his eighteenth year he removed to the city of New York, where he has since resided. It is said that he evinced a taste for poetry, and wrote verses, at a very early period; but the oldest of his effusions that I have seen are those under the signatures of "Croaker," and "Croaker & Co.," published in the New York Evening Post, in 1819. In the production of these pleasant satires he was associated with Doctor DRAKE, the author of the "Culprit Fay," a man of brilliant wit and delicate fancy, with whom he was long intimate. DRAKE died in 1820, and his friend soon after wrote for the New York Review, then edited by BRYANT, the lines to his memory, beginning

"Green be the turf above thee,

Friend of my better days;
None knew thee but to love thee,

Nor named thee but to praise."

Near the close of the year 1819, HALLECK published "Fanny," his longest poem, which has since passed through numerous editions, though its authorship has never been publicly avowed. It is a humorous satire, containing from twelve to

fifteen hundred lines, and was written and printed

in three weeks from its commencement.

In 1827 he published a small volume, containing "Alnwick Castle," "Marco Bozzaris," and a few other pieces, which had previously appeared in various miscellanies; and in 1836, an edition of all his serious poems then written, including Burns," "Red Jacket," "The Field of the Grounded Arms," and those before alluded to. The last and most complete collection of his works appeared early in the present year.

Mr. HALLECK is the only one of our poets who possesses a decided local popularity. With the subjects of Fanny," the "Croakers," and some of his other pieces, every person in New York is in some degree acquainted, and his name is cherished in that city with fondness and enthusiasm. His humorous poems are marked with an uncommon ease of versification, a natural, unstudied flow of language, and a careless playfulness and felicity of jest. "Sometimes," remarks Mr. BRYANT, "in the midst of a strain of harmonious diction, and soft and tender imagery, he surprises by an irresistible stroke of ridicule, as if he took pleasure in showing the reader that the poetical vision he had raised was but a cheat. Sometimes,

*The curiosity of the town was greatly excited to know by whom these pieces had been written, and they were ascribed, at different times, to various literary gentlemen, while the real authors proved, for a long while, entirely unsuspected.-WILLIAM LEGGETT.-The Critic.

with that aerial facility which is his peculiar endowment, he accumulates graceful and agreeable images in a strain of irony so fine, that did not the subject compel the reader to receive it as irony, he would take it for a beautiful passage of serious poetry-so beautiful, that he is tempted to regret that he is not in earnest, and that phrases so exquisitely chosen, and poetic colouring so brilliant, should be employed to embellish subjects to which they do not properly belong. At other times, he produces the effect of wit by dexterous allusion to contemporaneous events, introduced as illustrations of the main subject, with all the unconscious gracefulness of the most animated and familiar conversation. He delights in ludicrous contrasts, produced by bringing the nobleness of the ideal world into comparison with the homeliness of the actual; the beauty and grace of nature with the awkwardness of art. He venerates the past and laughs at the present. He looks at them through a medium which lends to the former the charm of romance, and exaggerates the deformity of the latter. His poetry, whether serious or sprightly, is remarkable for the melody of the numbers. It is not the melody of monotonous and strictly regular measurement. His verse is constructed to please an ear naturally fine, and accustomed to a

range of metrical modulation. It is as different from that painfully-balanced versification, that uniform succession of iambics, closing the scene with the couplet, which some writers practise, and some critics praise, as the note of the thrush is unlike that of the cuckoo. He is familiar with those general rules and principles which are the basis of metrical harmony; and his own unerring taste has taught him the exceptions which a proper attention to variety demands. He understands that the rivulet is made musical by obstructions in its channel. In no poet can be found passages which flow with more sweet and liquid smoothness; but he knows very well that to make this smoothness perceived, and to prevent it from degenerating into monotony, occasional roughness must be interposed."

HALLECK's serious poems are as admirable as his satirical. There are few finer martial lyrics than Marco Bozzaris;" "Burns" and "Red Jacket" are distinguished for manly vigour of pieces have rarely been excelled in melodiousness thought and language; and several of his shorter of versification or quiet beauty of imagery.

HALLECK has generally been engaged in commercial pursuits. He was once in "the cotton trade, and sugar line;" but I believe he has for several years been the principal superintendent of the affairs of the great capitalist, Mr. ASTOR. He is a bachelor, and is as popular among his friends for his social qualities, as he is with the world as a poet.

BURNS.

TO A ROSE, BROUGHT FROM NEAR ALLOWAY KIRK, IN AYR. SHIRE, IN THE AUTUMN OF 1822.

WILD rose of Alloway! my thanks,

Thou mindst me of that autumn noon, When first we met upon "the banks And braes o' bonny Doon."

Like thine, beneath the thorn tree's bough, My sunny hour was glad and brief, We've cross'd the winter sea, and thou Art wither'd-flower and leaf.

And will not thy death-doom be mine-
The doom of all things wrought of clay-
And wither'd my life's leaf, like thine,
Wild rose of Alloway?

Not so his memory, for whose sake

My bosom bore thee far and long,
His, who an humbler flower could make
Immortal as his song.

The memory of BURNS-a name

That calls, when brimm'd her festal cup, A nation's glory, and her shame, In silent sadness up.

A nation's glory-be the rest
Forgot-she's canonized his mind;
And it is joy to speak the best
We may of human kind.

I've stood beside the cottage-bed

Where the bard-peasant first drew breath: A straw-thatch'd roof above his head, A straw-wrought couch beneath.

And I have stood beside the pile,

His monument-that tells to heaven
The homage of earth's proudest isle,
To that bard-peasant given.

Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that spot,
Boy-minstrel, in thy dreaming hour;
And know, however low his lot,
A poet's pride and power.

The pride that lifted BURNS from earth,
The power that gave a child of song
Ascendency o'er rank and birth,

The rich, the brave, the strong;
And if despondency weigh down

Thy spirit's fluttering pinions then, Despair-thy name is written on

The roll of common men.

There have been loftier themes than his,
And longer scrolls, and louder lyres,
And lays lit up with Poesy's

Purer and holier fires:

Yet read the names that know not death;
Few nobler ones than BURNS are there;
And few have won a greener wreath
Than that which binds his hair.

His is that language of the heart,

In which the answering heart would speak, Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start, Or the smile light the cheek;

And his that music, to whose tone

The common pulse of man keeps time, In cot or castle's mirth or moan,

In cold or sunny clime.

And who hath heard his song, nor knelt
Before its spell with willing knee,
And listen'd, and believed, and felt
The poet's mastery.

O'er the mind's sea, in calm and storm,

O'er the heart's sunshine and its showers, O'er Passion's moments, bright and warm, O'er Reason's dark, cold hours;

On fields where brave men "die or do,"

In halls where rings the banquet's mirth, Where mourners weep, where lovers woo, From throne to cottage hearth;

What sweet tears dim the eyes unshed, What wild vows falter on the tongue, When "Scots wha hac wi' WALLACE bled," Or "Auld Lang Syne" is sung!

Pure hopes, that lift the soul above,

Come with his Cotter's hymn of praise,
And dreams of youth, and truth, and love,
With "Logan's" banks and braes.

And when he breathes his master-lay
Of Alloway's witch-haunted wall,
All passions in our frames of clay
Come thronging at his call.

Imagination's world of air,

And our own world, its gloom and glee,
Wit, pathos, poetry, are there,
And death's sublimity.

And BURNS-though brief the race he ran,
Though rough and dark the path he trod-
Lived-died-in form and soul a man,

The image of his God.

Though care, and pain, and want, and wo, With wounds that only death could heal, Tortures-the poor alone can know,

The proud alone can feel;

He kept his honesty and truth,

His independent tongue and pen, And moved, in manhood and in youth, Pride of his fellow-men.

Strong sense, deep feeling, passions strong,
A hate of tyrant and of knave,

A love of right, a scorn of wrong,
Of coward, and of slave;

A kind, true heart, a spirit high,

That could not fear and would not bow, Were written in his manly eye,

And on his manly brow.

Praise to the bard! his words are driven,
Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,
Where'er, beneath the sky of heaven,
The birds of fame have flown.

Praise to the man! a nation stood
Beside his coffin with wet eyes,
Her brave, her beautiful, her good,
As when a loved one dies.

And still, as on his funeral day,

Men stand his cold earth-couch around, With the mute homage that we pay

To consecrated ground.

And consecrated ground it is,

The last, the hallow'd home of one Who lives upon all memories,

Though with the buried gone.

Such graves as his are pilgrim-shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined-
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.

Sages, with Wisdom's garland wreathed,
Crown'd kings, and mitred priests of power,
And warriors with their bright swords sheathed,
The mightiest of the hour;

And lowlier names, whose humble home
Is lit by Fortune's dimmer star,
Are there-o'er wave and mountain come,
From countries near and far;

Pilgrims, whose wandering feet have press'd
The Switzer's snow, the Arab's sand,
Or trod the piled leaves of the west,
My own green forest-land;

All ask the cottage of his birth,

Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung,
And gather feelings not of earth
His fields and streams among.

They linger by the Doon's low trees,
And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr,
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries!
The poet's tomb is there.

But what to them the sculptor's art,
His funeral columns, wreaths, and urns?
Wear they not graven on the heart
The name of ROBERT BURNS?

RED JACKET,

A CHIEF OF THE INDIAN TRIBES, THE TUSCARORAS.

COOPER, whose name is with his country's woven,
First in her files, her PIONEER of mind,
A wanderer now in other climes, has proven
His love for the young land he left behind;
And throned her in the senate hall of nations,
Robed like the deluge rainbow, heaven-wrought,
Magnificent as his own mind's creations,

And beautiful as its green world of thought.

And faithful to the act of Congress, quoted
As law-authority-it pass'd nem. con.-
He writes that we are, as ourselves hare voted,
The most enlighten'd people ever known.
That all our week is happy as a Sunday

In Paris, full of song, and dance, and laugh; And that, from Orleans to the bay of Fundy, There's not a bailiff nor an epitaph.

And, furthermore, in fifty years or sooner,
We shall export our poetry and wine;
And our brave fleet, eight frigates and a schooner,
Will sweep the seas from Zembla to the line.
If he were with me, King of Tuscarora,
Gazing as I, upon thy portrait now,

In all its medall'd, fringed, and beaded glory,
Its eyes' dark beauty, and its thoughtful brow-
Its brow, half-martial and half-diplomatic,

Its eye, upsoaring, like an eagle's wings;
Well might he boast that we, the democratic,
Outrival Europe-even in our kings;

For thou wert monarch born. Tradition's pages
Tell not the planting of thy parent tree,
But that the forest-tribes have bent for ages

To thee, and to thy sires, the subject knee.

Thy name is princely. Though no poet's magic Could make RED JACKET grace an English Unless he had a genius for the tragic,

[rhyme,

And introduced it in a pantomime;
Yet it is music in the language spoken
Of thine own land; and on her herald-roll,
As nobly fought for, and as proud a token
AS CŒUR DE LION's, of a warrior's soul.

Thy garb-though Austria's bosom-star would

frighten

That medal pale, as diamonds the dark mine, And GEORGE the FOURTH Wore, in the dance at Brighton,

A more becoming evening dress than thine;
Yet 'tis a brave one, scorning wind and weather,
And fitted for thy couch on field and flood,
As ROB ROY's tartans for the highland heather,
Or forest-green for England's ROBIN HOOD.
Is strength a monarch's merit? (like a whaler's)
Thou art as tall, as sinewy, and as strong
As earth's first kings-the Argo's gallant sailors,
Heroes in history, and gods in song.

Is eloquence? Her spell is thine that reaches
The heart, and makes the wisest head its sport;
And there's one rare, strange virtue in thy speeches,
The secret of their mastery-they are short.
Is beauty? Thine has with thy youth departed,
But the love-legends of thy manhood's years,
And she who perish'd, young and broken-hearted,
Are-but I rhyme for smiles, and not for tears.
The monarch mind-the mystery of commanding,
The godlike power, the art NAPOLEON,
Of winning, fettering, moulding, wielding, banding
The hearts of millions till they move as one;