button to main menu  Gents Mag 1851 part 1 p.587
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Gentleman's Magazine 1851 part 1 p.587
Take next a sonnet, as an example of his moral vein:-

Pains have I known that cannot be again,
And pleasures to that never can be more.
For loss of pleasure I was never sore,
But worse, far worse it is, to feel no pain.
The throes and agonies of a heart explain
Its very depth of want at inmost core;
Prove that it does believe, and would adore,
And doth with ill for ever strive and strain.
I not lament for happy childish years,
For loves departed that have had their day,
Or hopes that faded when my head was grey;
For death hath left me last of my compeers;
But for the pain I felt, the gushing tears
I used to shed, when I had gone astray.

Vol.ii. p.7.
As an example of thought playing with fancy perhaps we cannot choose a better than the lines on "Fairy Land:"-

My fairy land was never upon earth,
Nor in Heaven to which I hoped to go;
For it was always by the glimmering hearth,
When the last faggot gave its reddest glow,
And voice of eld waxed tremulous and low,
And the slow taper's intermittent light
Like a slow-tolling bell declared good night.
Then could I think of Peri and of Fay,
As if their deeds were things of yesterday.
I felt the wee maid in her scarlet hood,
Real as the babes that wandered in the wood.
And could as well believe a wolf could talk,
As that a man besides the babes could walk
With gloomy thoughts of murder in his brain;
And then I thought how long the lovely twain
Threaded the paths that wound among the trees,
And how at last they sank upon their knees,
And said their little prayers, as prettily
As e'er they said them at their mother's knee,
And went to sleep. I deemed them still asleep,
Clasped in each other's arms, beside a heap
Of fragrant leaves; so little then knew I
Of bare-bone famine's ghastley misery.
Yet could I weep and cry and sob amain
Because they never were to wake again.
But if 'twas said "they'll wake at the last day,"
Then all the vision melted quite away;
As from the steel the passing stain of breath,
So quickly parts the fancy from the faith.

And I thought the dear babes in the wood no more true
Than Red Ridinghood - aye, or the grim loup-garou
That the poor little maid for her granny mistook.
I knew they were both only tales in a book.

Vol.ii. p.173.
We cannot attempt to give samples of each variety of excellence which the book exhibits, but we must make room for one specimen of the playful-pathetic, which might be mistaken for Cowper:-

TO A CAT.

Nelly, methinks, 'twixt thee and me
There is a kind of sympathy;
And could we interchange our nature -
If I were cat, thou human creature -
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