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Thou who beheldest, 'mid the assassins' din,
At thy bath'd base the bloody Cæsar lie,
Folding his robe in dying dignity,
An offering to thine altar from the queen
Of gods and men, great Nemesis! did he die,
And thou, too, perish, Pompey? have ye been
Victors of countless kings, or puppets of a
scene?

88.

And thou, the thunder-stricken nurse of Rome!

She-wolf! whose brazen-imaged dugs impart The milk of conquest yet within the dome Where, as a monument of antique art, Thou standest:-Mother of the mighty heart, Which the great founder suck'd from thy

wild teat,

Scorch'd by the Roman Jove's etherial dart, And thy limbs black with lightning-dost thou yet

Guard thine immortal cubs, nor thy fond charge forget? 89.

Thou dost ;-but all thy foster-babes are dead

The men of iron; and the world hath rear'd
Cities from out their sepulchres: men bled
In imitation of the things they fear'd,
And fought and conquer'd, and the same
course steer'd,

At apish distance; but as yet none have,
Nor could, the same supremacy have near'd,
Save one vain man, who is not in the grave,
But, vanquish'd hy himself, to his own
slaves a slave-
90.

The fool of false dominion-and a kind
Of bastard Cæsar, following him of old
With steps unequal; for the Roman's mind
Was modell'd in a less terrestrial mould,
With passions fiercer, yet a judgment cold,
And an immortal instinct which redeem'd
The frailties of a heart so soft, yet bold,
Alcides with the distaff now he seem'd
At Cleopatra's feet, and now himself he
beam'd,

91.

And came and saw-and conquer'd! But the man

Who would have tamed his eagles down to flee, Like a train'd falcon, in the Gallic van, Which he, in sooth, long led to victory, With a deaf heart which never seem'd to be A listener to itself, was strangely fram'd; With but one weakest weakness-vanity, Coquettish in ambition-still he aim'd

At what? can he avouch-or answer what he claim'd?

92.

And would be all or nothing-nor could wait

For the sure grave to level him; few years Had fix'd him with the Cæsars in his fate, On whom we tread: For this the conqueror

rears

The arch of triumph! and for this the tears And blood of earth flow on as they have flowed, An universal deluge, which appears

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The mosses of thy fountain still are sprinkled With thine Elysian water-drops; the face Of thy cave-guarded spring, with years unwrinkled,

Reflects the meek-eyed genius of the place, Whose green wild margin now no more erase Art's works; nor must the delicate waters sleep,

Prisoned in marble, bubbling from the base Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap The rill runs o'er, and round, fern, flowers, and ivy, creep, 117.

Fantastically tangled; the green hills
Are clothed with early blossoms, through the
grass

The quick-eyed lizard rustles, and the bills
Of summer-birds sing welcome as ye pass;
Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class,
Implore the pausing step, and with their dyes,
Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy mass;
The sweetness of the violet's deep blue eyes,
Kiss'd by the breath of heaven, seems co-
loured by its skies.
118.

Here didst thou dwell, in this enchanted

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With her most starry canopy, and seating
Thyself by thine adorer, what befel?
This cave was surely shap'd out for the
greeting

Of an enamour'd Goddess, and the cell Haunted by holy Love-the earliest oracle!

119.

And didst thou not, thy breast to his replying,

Blend a celestial with a human heart; And Love, which dies as it was born, in sighing,

Share with immortal transports? could thine

art

Make them indeed immortal, and impart
The purity of heaven to earthly joys,
Expel the venom and not blunt the dart-
The dull satiety which all destroys-
And root from out the soul the deadly weed
which cloys ?

The intensely personal nature of Byron's poetry was never so perfectly displayed, as in his meditations over the ruins of the imperial city. Deeply as he is impressed with the nothingness of individual sorrows, when set by the side of departed nations and deserted cities, he cannot look either at the coliseum, the pantheon, the forum, or the capitol, without mingling with the meditations which these excite,the agonizing wanderings of his own wounded spirit. He is standing by moonlight within the coliseum-our readers have not forgotten the beautiful allusion to the same scene in Manfred.

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133.

It is not that I may not have incurr'd
For my ancestral faults or mine the wound
I bleed withal, and, had it been conferr'd
With a just weapon, it had flowed unbound;
But now my blood shall not sink in the ground;
To thee I do devote it-thou shalt take
The vengeance, which shall yet be sought
and found,

Which if I have not taken for the sakeBut let that pass—I sleep, but thou shalt yet awake.

Our extracts have run out to a very fault for which we expect an easy pardisproportionate extent, but this is a don. Once more, and we have done. It was a thought worthy of the great spirit of Byron, after exhibiting to us ing scenes of earthly grandeur and his pilgrim amidst all the most strikearthly decay,-after teaching us, like him, to sicken over the mutability, and vanity, and emptiness of human greatness, to conduct him and us at last to the borders of " the great deep." It is there that we may perceive an image of the awful and unchangeable abyss of eternity, into whose bosom so much has sunk, and all shall one day sink,— of that eternity wherein the scorn and the contempt of man, and "the love of woman, and the melancholy of great, and the fretting of little minds, shall be at rest for ever. No one, but a true poet of man and of nature, would have dared to frame such a ter*2 E

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mination for such a pilgrimage. The image of the wanderer may well be associated for a time with the rock of Calpe, the shattered temples of Athens, or the gigantic fragments of Rome; but when we wish to think of this dark personification as of a thing which is, where can we so well imagine him to have his daily haunt as by the roaring of the waves? It was thus that Homer represented Achilles in his moments of ungovernable and inconsolable grief for Patroclus. It was thus he chose to depict the paternal despair of Chriseus.

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Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. 184.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers-they to me
Made them a terror-'twas a pleasing fear,
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane-as I

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LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE.

On the raising of Olive Trees."-Trials have been frequently made, but without success, to multiply the olive by sowing the seeds; it has always been found necessary either to employ cuttings, or to procure wild plants from the woods. One of the inhabitants of Marseilles, astonished to find that we cannot obtain by cultivation what nature produces spontaneously, was led to reflect upon the manner in which the wild plants were produced. They proceed from the kernels, which kernels have been carried into the woods, and sown there by birds, who have swallowed the olives. By the act of digestion, these olives have been deprived of their natural oil, and the kernels have become permeable to the moisture of the earth, the dung of the birds has served for manure, and, perhaps, the soda which this dung contains, by combining with a portion of the oil which has escaped digestion, may also favour germination. From these considerations the following experiments were made:

A number of turkeys were caused to swallow ripe olives; the dung was collected, containing the kernels of these olives, the whole was placed in a stratum of earth, and was frequently watered. The kernels were found to vegetate, and a number of young plants were procured. In order to produce upon olives an effect similar to that which they experienced from the digestive power of the stomach, a quantity of them was macerated in an alkaline lixivium; they were then sown, and olive plants were produced from them as in the former experiment.

This ingenious process may be regarded as a very important discovery, and may be applied to other seeds besides that of the olive, which are, in the same manner, so oily, as that, except under some rare circumstances, the water cannot penetrate them and cause their developement. Of this description is the nutmeg, which will seldom vegetate in our stoves; but which, perhaps, would do so, was it submitted to the action of the stomach, or of the alkaline solution.

On the Magnetizing Power of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum.-The reported discovery of M. Morichini, respecting the magnetizing power of the violet rays, which was scarcely credited in this country, has received the confirmation of Professor Playfair, as related in one of the late Numbers of the Bibliotheque Universelle. He gives the following account of an experiment of which he was a witness, and which was performed by M. Carpe:

After having received into my chamber a solar ray through a circular opening made

• Journ. Phram. de March 1817.

in the shutter, the ray was made to fall upon a prism, such as those which are usually employed in experiments in the primitive colours. The spectrum which resulted from the refraction was received upon a skreen; all the rays were intercepted except the violet, in which was placed a needle, for the purpose of being magnetized. It was a plate of thin steel, selected from a number of others, and which, upon making the trial, was found to possess no polarity, and not to exhibit any attraction for iron filings. It was fixed horizontally on the support by means of wax, and in such a direction as to cut the magnetic meridian nearly at right angles. By a lens of a sufficient size, the whole of the violet ray was collected into a focus, which was carried slowly along the needle, proceeding from the centre towards one of the extremities, and always the same extremity, taking care, as is the case in the common operation of magnetizing, never to go back in the opposite direction. After operating in this manner for half an hour, the needle was examined; but it was not found either to have acquired polarity or a sensible attraction for iron filings. The process was then continued for 25 minutes more, 55 in the whole, when the needle was found to be strongly magnetic; it acted powerfully on the compass, the end of the needle which had received the influence of the violet ray repelling the north pole, and the whole of it attracting and keeping suspended a fringe of iron filings.

It is stated, that a clear and bright atmosphere is essential to the success of the experiment, but that the temperature is indifferent. At the time when the above experiment was made, about the end of April. the temperature was rather cool than warm,

Blue Iron Earth.-The blue iron earth, or native Prussian blue, as it was formerly called, has been found in many parts of the Continent of Europe, and also in Iceland and in Shetland; but it had never been discovered in the island of Great Britain, until it was observed by Dr Bostock, at Knotshole, near Liverpool. On the north-east bank of the Mersey, about a mile and a half above the town, a small glen, or dingle, is formed, apparently by a fissure in the brown sandstone, which, in this place, rises up to the edge of the water; the sides of the dingle are covered with brush-wood, and at the bottom is a flat swampy pasture. The upper stratum of the soil of the pasture is chiefly sand, mixed with a little vegetable mould; but at the depth of four or five feet, there is a body of stiff white clay, mixed with a considerable quantity of vegetable matter, consisting principally of the roots and stems of different species of rushes, and other aquatic plants.

Improvement in the purification of CoalGas. It is sufficiently known, that the production of carburetted hydrogen obtained from coal, and its fitness for the purpose of illumination, varies much according to the circumstances under which the gas is obtained, and the means employed for purifying it. To deprive coal-gas of that portion of sulphuretted hydrogen, with which it is always more or less contaminated, it has hitherto been made to act on quicklime, either in a dry state, or combined with water in particular vessels, so constructed as to bring a large surface of the lime into contact with the gas. This method must naturally be very imperfect, on account of the feeble action of sulphuretted hydrogen upon lime. In proof of this statement, the gas supplied to this metropolis, need only be examined in in the following manner: Collect a four ounce phial full of the gas, in a wash-hand bason, or other vessel full of water, in the usual manner, and then plunge into it a slip of paper moistened with a solution of nitrate of silver, or super-acetate of lead. The paper will instantly acquire a brown colour.

last Number, Mr J. H. viz. that the particles of water ascend upward from the sea, in the phenomenon called a water spout:

"Barkworth, Dec. 11, 1816, in lat. 4° N. long. 129 E. (having passed through the Siao channel yesterday) at 11 A.M. the officer of the watch, Mr Dudman, came down and informed me there had been a whale blowing close to the ship for several minutes, and that it was continuing to do so. I then, from curiosity, went upon deck, and was surprised to find it was the vortex of a water spout, within one hundred yards of the ship, on the windward quarter :ordered a gun to be got ready, by which time it had passed under the stern, within thirty yards of the ship, which afforded us an excellent opportunity of observing this wonderful phenomenon.

"The space it occupied upon the sea was apparently about thirty feet in circumference, and the water so much agitated in the centre, as to be quite frothy, ascending in a spiral form in visible particles like rain, and making a rushing noise about as loud as the blowing of a whale continued, and communicating with a spout depending from a black cloud over head, gradually passing to leeward, and disappearing about a mile off."-Phil. Mag. for April 1818.

New Alkali. The experiments of Arvedson, relative to the discovery of the new alkali called lethson, have been confirmed in France by M. Vanquelin.

Ice.-As every fact relative to the state of the Arctic regions is now of more than usual interest, we transcribe the following postscript to the journal of the brig Jemima, which sailed last summer from London to the Moravian Missions in Labrador:

A new method of getting rid of the sulphuretted hydrogen gas has been lately resorted to with success; and the facility, cheapness, and expedition, with which this process may be employed in the large way, give reason to believe that it will be highly beneficial to the manufacturer of coal-gas in general. The process consists in passing crude coal-gas, as it is disengaged from coal, through a heated iron cylinder, or other vessel, containing fragments of metallic iron (the waste clippings of tinned iron will do very well), or any oxide of iron at a minimum of oxidation; for example, clay iron-stone, so disposed as to present as large a surface as possible: by this means the sul-"The captain and mate report, that though phuretted hydrogen becomes decomposed by the metallic iron, and the gas is obtained in a pure state. This iron, if in a state of a metal, acquires by this process a crystalline structure, and affords abundance of sulphuretted hydrogen by the affusion of dilute sulphuric or muriatic acid, a proof that it is converted into a sulphuret ;-a quantity of sulphuric and sulphureous acid is likewise collected at the extremity of the vessel. The gas thus treated, affords no disagree able odour during combustion, and its purity is attested by its not acting upon the solutions of lead, silver, or any of the white metals.

Water Spouts.-The following observations of Captain Thomas Lynn, commander of the East India Company's ship Barkworth, afford a striking corroboration of the statement of the ingenious writer in our

for these three years past they have met with an unusual quantity of ice on the coast of Labrador, yet in no year since the commencement of the mission in 1769, has it appeared so dreadfully on the increase. The colour likewise of this year's ice was different from that usually seen, and the size of the ice-mountains and thickness of the fields immense, with sand-stone imbedded in them." As a great part of the coast of Greenland, which for centuries has been choaked up with ice, apparently immoveable, has, by some revolution been cleared, perhaps this may account for the great quantity alluded to.

We could not perceive the communication with the spout, the particles being too minute for the eye to discern much above the sea, but we had no doubt of the fact.

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