After dark visions, when the spectral forms That lodge and haunt there, turmoil all my soul. Some mystery some strange antipathy Torments me with abhorrence and distrust. K. Dav. If intimations visit thee from Heaven, We speak. His daughter's welfare I would leave Is politic to judge, and loves the maid Even to her rich deservings. They best know Nath. Hath she escaped Syria's foul rites, to yield, Even in the precincts of the sanctuary, To an uncircumcised, the heart where faith Too like ambition. Geshur cleaves to him, K. Dav. Wrong not my son. The sin of Lucifer hath snared his heart! Say why such state attends him? - why he rides K. Dav. You misinterpret venial things Nath. He doth insult the throne, and take from age, And royalty, their reverence. K. Dav. You love him not, and ever strained his faults. Nath. Why are the Chiefs and Princes of the Tribes, Who come to solemnize our holy feasts, Caressed about his table till they deem The crown upon his brows? - Your chiefest men, Ancients, and reverend Judges, flock to hear His Syrian Parasite sweeten their cups With honeyed flattery, and golden hopes, And promises of days when Absalom VOL. L. No. 106. 31 Shall make the desert blossom, and the rock K. Dav. Days like these Were welcome, Seer. Nath. You know not what you utter; Woe to the hour of his anointing! - King! A dreadful vintage shall be trod that day, With purple garments!-Lo! the noise of arms, K. Dav. Say on, Heaven's will is ours. Nath. 'Tis gone It passed me, like a cloud of blood, with sounds K. Dav. (after a pause.) Nought from thy hallowed lips For Israel's sceptre, may refuse, or grant, The same to Absalom. His will be done! A kingdom's burden. Nath. Son of Jesse, K. Dav. What! hath he not, since fourteen summers old, Served with me in the field, slept in my tent, Hungered, and suffered, watched, and toiled with me; Shed his young blood by veteran captains' sides, Beneath mine eyes, in dire and mutual hazards, Nath. Son of Jesse, K. Dav. (waving his hand) 'Tis near the hour of sacrifice. We'll pause ere we decide the Syrian's suit. Nath. (making obeisance.) Dwell, ever, in the hollow of His hand! (Exit NATHAN. King DAVID retires into his closet.) " - - Pp. 10 - 108. Of the remaining piece in the first volume, the writer says; "If the artless structure of Demetria,' now for the first time published, disappoint, the author takes refuge under the plea, that it was an early work, the earliest written of the three. If, on the other hand, it be objected to him, that it is, in some respects, more deeply wrought than either of the others, and they argue no improvement, he rejoins, that it is the last finished." This beautiful poem is certainly not the less effective on account of the perfect simplicity of its plot; nor, on the other hand, has any of the ample time, which has been given to a minute finish of the details, been lost. It is a story of love crossed by jealousy, and is wrought up to that painful degree of interest, which is only within the power of genius and study united. The lovers are thus introduced in the first scene. Cosmo has just returned from the wars. Nothing can be more exquisite than the manner in which the passionate character of the interview is subdued by the memory of the departed mother of Demetria. "An apartment communicating with the garden; glass doors Some Nymph, or Muse, such as the old Greek herdsmen, One of the choir, (as holy legends have it,) Demetria. O, Cosmo, This is a sacred anniversary, An ever-hallowed season, when my heart Cos. Think me not Incapable of sympathy. Thou know'st How dear I loved her. - But to be, once more, Dem. Hither we came, that last sad night, to breathe The freshness. There she sat. - I see, still see Cos. (snatching her hand.) Then hear, Demetria "Tis hers, 't is consecrated solemnly, — And images of grief are up before me. I joy that thou art here, at last; yet O! Cos. But now, my gentle one, the dark dream's o'er; We wake, we wake, to blissful certainty. Dwell, now, on brighter days, on the fair future, And deem the sainted parent we adore Dem. Ah! She promised, sometimes to be near me, To hover round me, if such favor might be. - oft (A lively measure strikes up beyond the garden wall.) Cos. Savoyards! O! the jocund strain Chimes here; but o'er the wild Hungarian hills, When years divided me from Italy, Beshrew the rogues! they minted from me tears As fast as florins. - Merry vagabonds! Come, shall we list their lays? - or whither wilt thou? Come forth a while; for like familiar faces The slopes and shadows of the garden look ; Let us revisit the old myrtle walk : Rememberest thou our last hour there? - Come, come, (They pass into the garden.)" - pp. 7-9. The next scene is between Olivia, an elder sister of Deme tria, and Jacquelina, her attendant, the villain (if that word be feminine) of the piece. Olivia cherishes a desperate love for Cosmo. Jacquelina had been dismissed from Demetria's service, and partly from revenge and an essential devilishness of disposition, and partly with a view to such rewards of treachery as she sees the means of gaining, she encourages Olivia to contrive obstacles in the course of that true love, which was never yet known to run smooth. The art, with which Jacquelina, marking the chafed mood of her mistress, works upon her envy of Demetria, and her love for Cosmo, is conceived in the highest style of dramatic talent. The vulgar, and, at the same time, adroit, determined, and unscrupulous, character of the confidant is admirably brought out on her first appearance. She tempts Olivia to a plot against her sister's life, by telling her a story of a Venetian lady, who, under similar circumstances, had made away with her rival, by shutting her in a chest with a spring lock, like that which is the subject of one of the poems in Rogers's "Italy"; but, finding this scheme too bold to be well received, she follows it up with another suggestion, to which Olivia assents, that Barbadeca, a rejected lover of Demetria, who had, at the same time, a grudge against Cosmo on account of some other offence, shall be used in such way as Jacquelina may devise, to bring about a misunderstanding between Cosmo and his mistress. And so, with the end of the first act, the woof of mischief is spread. - At the beginning of the second act, Barbadeca, who, for obvious reasons of his own, had been easily won to be an accomplice in the plot, furnishes Jacquelina with the envelope, addressed to him in the handwriting of Demetria, which had conveyed her rejection of his suit. In this, Jacquelina encloses a letter of her former mistress, of which she had possessed herself, 66 one of her scores of tender notes to Cosmo, seen only by herself;" and, placing herself in Cosmo's way, in a manner to excite his curiosity, is prevailed upon, with much show of reluctance, to surrender the letter to his examination, and to add explanations of her own. His generous, but too credulous, nature is at once imposed upon, if the reader thinks too easily, yet not more easily, perhaps, than Othello's before him, and he gives himself up to the misery of thinking his mistress faithless. We cannot say, that this scene is entirely to our taste. We cannot get entirely rid of the idea, that so great a ruin is somewhat too cheaply wrought. |