A leaf succeeded, and another leaf, Who lived when thou wast such? Oh, couldst thou speak, As in Dodona once thy kindred trees The future, best unknown, but, at thy mouth By thee I might correct, erroneous oft, And Time hath made thee what thou art-a cave For owls to roost in. Once thy spreading boughs O'erhung the champaign; and the numerous flocks That grazed it stood beneath that ample cope Uncrowded, yet safe shelter'd from the storm. No flock frequents thee now. Thou hast outlived Thy popularity, and art become (Unless verse rescue thee awhile) a thing Forgotten, as the foliage of thy youth. The shipwright's darling treasure, didst present seems A huge throat calling to the clouds for drink, While thus through all the stages thou hast Though all the superstructure, by the tooth push'd Of treeship-first a seedling, hid in grass; Then twig; then sapling; and, as century roll'd Slow after century, a giant-bulk Of girth enormous, with moss-cushion'd root Upheaved above the soil, and sides emboss'd With prominent wens, globose-till at the last The rottenness, which time is charged to inflict On other mighty ones, found also thee. What exhibitions various hath the world That we account most durable below! The force that agitates not unimpair'd; Thought cannot spend itself, comparing still deck Of some flagg'd admiral; and tortuous arms, Pulverized of venality, a shell Stands now, and semblance only of itself! Thine arms have left thee. Winds have rent them off Long since; and rovers of the forest wild have left A splinter'd stump bleach'd to a snowy white; But since, although well qualified by age One man alone, the father of us all, TO MY COUSIN ANNE BODHAM. ON RECEIVING FROM HER A NETWORK PURSE, MADE BY HERSELF. My gentle Anne, whom heretofore, When I was young, and thou no more Than plaything for a nurse, I danced and fondled on my knee, I thank thee for my purse. Gold pays the worth of all things here; I, therefore, as a proof of Love, The best things kept within it. My Mary! But well thou play'dst the housewife's part, And all thy threads with magic art Have wound themselves about this heart, My Mary! LINES ON HIS MOTHER'S PICTURE. OH that those lips had language! Life has pass'd With me but roughly since I heard thee last. O welcome guest, though unexpected here! I will obey, not willingly alone, But gladly, as the precept were her own: A momentary dream, that thou art she. My mother! when I learn'd that thou wast dead, Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed! Hover'd thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son, Wretch even then, life's journey just begun! Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss; Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in blissAh, that maternal smile! it answers-Yes. I heard the bell toll'd on thy burial day, I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away, And, turning from my nursery window, drew A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu! But was it such ?-It was.-Where thou art gone Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, The parting word shall pass my lips no more! (Mrs. Unwin) one of the most touching, and certainly the most widely-known of all his poems. for it has been read by thousands who have never perused "The Tant perhaps seen or heard of any other of his works. —SCTBIT, Life of Cooper, vol. iii. p. 150.] Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern, Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went, Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hours, When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers, The violet, the pink, and jessamine, I prick'd them into paper with a pin, (And thou wast happier than myself the while, Could those few pleasant days again appear, Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here? I would not trust my heart-the dear delight Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast " Where tempests never beat nor billows roar," And, while the wings of Fancy still are free, Wouldst softly speak,and stroke my head,and smile,) | Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left. ERASMUS DARWIN. [Born, 1732. Died, 1802.] ERASMUS DARWIN was born at Elton, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, where his father was a private gentleman. He studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, and took the degree of bachelor in medicine; after which, he went to Edinburgh, to finish his medical studies. Having taken a physician's degree at that university, he settled in his profession at Litchfield; and, by a bold and successful display of his skill in one of the first cases to which he was called, established his practice and reputation. About a year after his arrival, he married a Miss Howard, the daughter of a respectable inhabitant of Litchfield, and by that connection strengthened his interest in the place. He was, in theory and practice, a rigid enemy to the use of wine, and of all intoxicating liquors; and, in the course of his practice, was regarded as a great promoter of temperate habits among the citizens: but he gave a singular instance of his departure from his own theory, within a few years after his arrival in the very place where he proved the apostle of sobriety. Having one day joined a few friends who were going on a water-party, he got so tipsy after a cold collation, that, on the boat approaching Not tingham, he jumped into the river and swam ashore. The party called to the philosopher to return; but he walked on deliberately, in his wet clothes, till he reached the market-place of Nottingham, and was there found by his friend, an apothecary of the place, haranguing the town'speople on the benefit of fresh air, till he was persuaded by his friend to come to his house and shift his clothes. Dr. Darwin stammered habitually; but on this occasion wine untied his tongue. In the prime of life, he had the misfortune to break the patella of his knee, in consequence of attempting to drive a carriage of his own Utopian contrivance, which upset at the first experiment. He lost his first wife, after thirteen years of domestic union. During his widowerhood, Mrs. Pole the wife of a Mr. Pole, of Redburn, in Derbyshire, brought her children to his house to be cured of a poison, which they had taken in the shape of medicine, and, by his invitation, she continued with him till the young patients were perfectly cured. He was soon after called to attend the lady, at her own house, in a dangerous fever, and prescribed with more than a physician's interest in her fate. Not being invited to sleep in the house in the night after his arrival, he spent the hours till morning beneath a tree, opposite to her apartment, watching the passing and repassing lights. While the life which he so passionately loved was in danger, he paraphrased Petrarch's celebrated sonnet on the dream which predicted to him the death of Laura. Though less favoured by the muse than Petrarch, he was more fortunate in love. Mrs. Pole, on the demise of an aged partner, accepted, Dr. Darwin's hand in 1781; and, in compliance with her inclinations, he removed from Litchfield to practice at Derby. He had a family by his second wife, and continued in high professional reputation till his death, in 1802, which was occasioned by angina pectoris, the result of a sudden cold. ⚫ Dr. Darwin was between forty and fifty before he began the principal poem by which he is known. Till then he had written only occasional verses, and of these he was not ostentatious, fearing that it might affect his medical reputation to be thought a poet. When his name as a physician had, however, been established, he ventured, in the year 1781, to publish the first part of his "Botanic Garden." Mrs. Anna Seward, in her life of Darwin, declares herself the authoress of the opening lines of the poem; but as she had never courage to make this pretension during Dr. Darwin's life, her veracity on the subject is exposed to suspicion.* In 1789 and 1792, the second and third part of his botanic poem appeared. In 1793 and 1796, he published the first and second parts of his "Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life." In 1801, he published "Phy FROM "THE BOTANIC GARDEN," CANTO II. DESTRUCTION OF CAMBYSES'S ARMY. WHEN Heaven's dread justice smites in crimes o'ergrown The blood-nursed Tyrant on his purple throne, [*"I was at Licthfield," writes R. L. Edgeworth to Sir Walter Scott, "when the lines in question were tologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening;" and, about the same time, a smail treatise on female education, which attracted little notice. After his death appeared his poem, "The Temple of Nature," a mere echo of the "Botanic Garden." Darwin was a materialist in poetry no less than in philosophy. In the latter, he attempts to build systems of vital sensibility on mere mechanical principles; and, in the former, he paints every thing to the mind's eye, as if the soul had no pleasure beyond the vivid conception of form, colour, and motion. Nothing makes poetry more lifeless than description by abstract terms and general qualities; but Darwin runs to the opposite extreme of prominently glaring circumstantial description, without shade, relief, or perspective. His celebrity rose and fell with unexampled rapidity. His poetry appeared at a time peculiarly favourable to innovation, and his attempt to wed poetry and science was a bold experiment, which had some apparent sanction from the triumphs of modern discovery. When Lucretius wrote, science was in her cradle; but modern philosophy had revealed truths in nature more sublime than the marvels of fiction. The Rosicrucian machinery of his poem had, at the first glance, an imposing appearance, and the variety of his allusion was surprising. On a closer view, it was observable that the Botanic goddess, and her Sylphs and Gnomes, were useless, from their having no employment; and tiresome, from being the mere pretexts for declamation. The variety of allusion is very whimsical. Dr. Franklin is compared to Cupid; while Hercules, Lady Melbourne, Emma Crewe, Brindley's canals, and sleeping cherubs, sweep on like images in a dream. Tribes and grasses are likened to angels, and the truffle is rehearsed as a subterranean empress. His laborious ingenuity in finding comparisons is frequently like that of Hervey in his " Meditations," or of Flavel in his "Gardening Spiritualized.” If Darwin, however, was not a good poet, it may be owned that he is frequently a bold personifier, and that some of his insulated passages are musical and picturesque. His Botanic Garden once pleased many better judges than his affected biographer, Anna Seward; it fascinated even the taste of Cowper, who says, in conjunc tion with Hayley, "We, therefore pleased, extol thy song, That will not weave a wreath for thee, Gnomes! your bold forms unnumber'd arms outstretch, And urge the vengeance o'er the guilty wretch.Thus when Cambyses led his barbarous hosts From Persia's rocks to Egypt's trembling coasts, written by Miss Seward."-Edgeworth's Memoirs, vil. B p. 267.] Defiled each hallow'd fane and sacred wood, In dread divisions march'd the marshall'd bands, cones. Day after day their deathful route they steer, Gnomes! as they march'd, you hid the gather'd The bladed grass, sweet grains and mealy roots; Scared the tired quails that journey'd o'er their heads, Retain'd the locusts in their earthy beds; Bade on your sands no night-born dews distil, Stay'd with vindictive hands the scanty rill.— Loud o'er the camp the fiend of Famine shrieks, Calls all her brood and champs her hundred beaks; O'er ten square leagues her pennons broad expand, And twilight swims upon the shuddering sand: Perch'd on her crest the griffin Discord clings, And giant Murder rides between her wings; Blood from each clotted hair and horny quill, And showers of tears in blended streams distill; High poised in air her spiry neck she bends, Rolls her keen eye, her dragon claws extends, Darts from above, and tears at each fell swoop With iron fangs the decimated troop. Now o'er their head the whizzing whirlwinds And the live desert pants, and heaves beneath; Gnomes! o'er the waste you led your myriad powers, Climb'd on the whirls, and aim'd the flinty showers! Onward resistless rolls the infuriate surge, Clouds follow clouds, and mountains mountains urge; Wave over wave the driving desert swims, Bursts o'er their heads, inhumes their struggling limbs ; Man mounts on man, on camels camels rush, Hosts march o'er hosts, and nations nations crush- Wheeling in air the winged islands fall, To earth, and listened to the groans below,- FROM CANTO III. Persuasion to Mothers to suckle their own Children. CONNUBIAL Fair! whom no fond transport warms To lull your infant in maternal arms. FROM THE SAME. Midnight Conflagration; Catastrophe of the families of Woodmason and Molesworth. FROM dome to dome when flames infuriate climb, Sweep the long street, invest the tower sublime; Gild the tall vanes, amid the astonish'd night, And reddening Heaven returns the sanguine light; While with vast strides and bristling hair aloof Pale Danger glides along the falling roof; And giant Terror howling in amaze Moves his dark limbs across the lurid blaze. Nymphs! you first taught the gelid wave to rise, Hurl'd in resplendent arches to the skies; In iron cells condensed the airy spring, And imp'd the torrent with unfailing wing; -On the fierce flames the shower impetuous falls, And sudden darkness shrouds the shatter'd walls; Steam, smoke, and dust in blended volumes roll, And night and silence repossess the pole. Where were ye, Nymphs! in those disastrous hours, Which wrapp'd in flames Augusta's sinking towers? Why did ye linger in your wells and groves, When sad Woodmason mourn'd her infant loves? When thy fair daughters with unheeded screams, Ill-fated Molesworth! call'd the loiteringstreams?The trembling nymph on bloodless fingers hung, Eyes from the tottering wall the distant throng, With ceaseless shrieks her sleeping friends alarms, Drops with singed hair into her lover's arms,The illumined mother seeks with footsteps fleet, Where hangs the safe balcony o'er the street, Wrapp'd in her sheet her youngest hope suspends, And panting lowers it to her tiptoe friends; |