Even this, however, ceases, and at length the "bearers" gently remove the corse, yet still she moves not. Then Gently the lovely mourner from the earth Her azure eye is fix'd upon the earth— It is a pity that the mind, which could conceive an image such as this, should linger, and appear to do so with a kind of cannibal propensity, amid" mangled corpses, and "gnawed bowels," and "parted carcases gushing out floods of blood" and "grinning corses shrivelled, and shrunk, and black"!!! Such subjects, we repeat again, are not within the province of poetry-few can contemplate them without loathing, and none most certainly will dwell on them for pleasure. Even morals are not mended by exhibitions so abhorrent and disgusting-humanity in stinctively revolts; and if the heart is touched, it is also bruised by them. We speak thus to Mr. Atherstone, in the spirit both of friendship and admiration. There are passages in his volume of great simplicity, and great strength; and we deem it only a merited remuneration, for the pleasure he has afforded us, to tell him where and why that pleasure has been mingled with any alloy. We could point out, if captiously inclined, some minor defects, but they are both too trifling to be dwelt upon, and too obvious to escape the attention of such a writer.-We are quite confident, if this be a first essay, that the public will not suffer it to be a last: and if it be not-if it be the work of a practised author, and that "Edwin Atherstone" is, like "Barry Cornwall," only the modest disguise of a man of genius, we see no reason why he should not fairly avow himself, and soar in his own proper shape, " amongst the swans of Thames." THE CONFESSIONS OF H. F. V. H. DELAMORE, ESQ. MR. EDITOR, A correspondent in your last Number,* blesses his stars, that he was never yet in the pillory; and, with a confidence which the uncertainty of mortal accidents but weakly justifies, goes on to predict that he never shall be. Twelve years ago, had a Sibyl prophesied to me, that I should live to be set in a worse place, I should have struck her for a lying beldam. There are degradations below that which he speaks of. Sackville-street, 25th March, 1821. current of our blood hath flowed unimpeachably. And must it stagnate now? Can a family be tainted backwards?-can posterity purchase disgrace for their progenitors?— or doth it derogate from the great Walter of our name, who received the sword of knighthood in Cressy field, that one of his descendants once sate ***? Can an honour, fairly achieved in quinto Edwardi Tertii, be reversed I come of a good stock, Mr. Edi- by a slip in quinquagesimo Georgii tor. The Delamores are a race Tertii? how stands the law? singularly tenacious of their honour; what dictum doth the college deliver? men who, in the language of Ed-O Clarencieux! O Norroy! mund Burke, feel a stain like a wound. My grand uncle died of a fit of the sullens for the disgrace of a public whipping at Westminster. He had not then attained his four teenth year. Would I had died young! For more than fivè centuries, the Can a reputation, gained by hard watchings on the cold ground, in a suit of mail, be impeached by hard watchings on the cold ground in other circumstances was the endurance equal?-why is the guerdon só disproportionate? A priest mediated the ransom of * Elia :-Chapter on Ears. the too valorous Reginald, of our house, captived in Lord Talbot's battles. It was a clergyman, who by his intercession abridged the period of my durance. Have you touched at my wrongs yet, Mr. Editor?-or must I be explicit as to my grievance? Hush, my heedless tongue. Something bids me-"Delamore, be ingenuous." Once then, and only onceStar of my nativity, hide beneath a cloud, while I reveal it! Ancestors of Delamore, lie low in your wormy beds, that no posthumous hearing catch a sound! Let no eye look over thee, while thou shalt peruse it, reader! Once these legs, with Kent in the play, though for far less ennobling considerations, did wear" cruel garters." Yet I protest it was but for a thing of nought-a fault of youth, and warmer blood-a calendary inadvertence I may call it—or rather a temporary obliviousness of the day of the week-timing my Saturnalia amiss.— Streets of Barnet, infamous for civil broils, ye saw my shame !-did not your Red Rose rise again to dye my burning cheek? It was but for a pair of minutes, or so-yet I feel, I feel, that the gentry of the Delamores is extinguished for ever. Try to forget it, reader.- HENRY FRANCIS VERE HARRINGTON DELAMORE, A QUAKER'S MEETING. Still-born Silence! thou that art Frost o' the mouth, and thaw of the mind! Who makes religion mystery! Admiration's speaking'st tongue! Leave, thy desert shades among, Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb! * scend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses.-Retire with me into a Quaker's Meeting. Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; would'st thou enjoy at once solitude and society; would'st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; would'st thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not deso- What is the stillness of the desert, late; singular, yet not without some compared with this place? what the to keep thee in countenance; a unit uncommunicating muteness of fishes? in aggregate; a simple in compo- here the goddess reigns and revels. site:-come with me into a Quaker's Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" go not out into the wilderness, de For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery. -"Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their interconfounding uproars more augment the brawl-nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed From "Poems of all sorts" by Richard Fleckno, 1653. sounds-than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but no where so absolutely as in a Quaker's Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by-say, a wife -he, or she, too, (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral communication?— can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?-away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-andcavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympa thetic solitude. To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some Cathedral, timestricken ; Or under hanging mountains, is but a vulgar luxury, compared sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kingsbut here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the foreground-SILENCE-eldest of things -language of old Night-primitive Discourser to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. How reverend is the view of these hushed Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! convocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory!-if my pen treat of you lightly-as haply it will wander-yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury.-I have witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests, and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the out-cast and off-scowring of church and presbytery-I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth,)—James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still! -so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the Writings of John Wool man by heart; and love the early Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted forma lity for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better en gaged, in which I could possibly de tect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings.-If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is sel dom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for what I have observed, speak sel domer.* Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced "from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit-I dare not say, of delusion-the strivings of the outer man were unutterable he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from-I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail his joints all seemed loosening-it was a figure to set off against Paul Preaching the words he uttered were few, and sound-he was evidently resisting his will-keeping down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. "He was a WIT in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession-understanding the term in its worldly acceptation-with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities-the Joci Risus-quefaster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna.-By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the TONGUE, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness.-O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers! Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity, tranquil, and Is this confined to Quaker Meetings ?-ED. herd-like-as in the pasture-" forty feeding like one." The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily'; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. ELIA. CONSOLATION. We are much obliged to a Correspondent' for the following Verses, "found in a portfolio." They seem to us very tender and pleasing. TO A FRIEND ON THE LOSS OF HIS CHILD. bud that grows Not every Of heart or bough that's broken. There is a pulse in man The smile shall leave no traces: The tear itself effaces. Then, if apart from all Thou still indulge the tear, Too early doom'd to fall On wounds of deepest feeling. |