There is another story of a similar character associated with a steep flight of steps at the north-east corner of Capstone Promenade:

Four or five years ago the large house from which these steps descend was temporarily occupied by two ladies of rank, one of whom, among other accomplishments not very common to her sex, was distinguished as an expert and fearless swimmer. She was accustomed to plunge from these private steps when the water was high, and swim out to sea, over yonder belt of horrid rocks, in all weathers. On the occasion I speak of, a morning in autumn, she had boldly, nay rashly, sought her favourite amusement, though a gale of wind was blowing, and the foaming sea was breaking in furious violence almost to the very top of the wall.

The fishermen and idlers on the quay were just going to their breakfasts, when the sister of the swimmer rushed out of the house with a scream of distress. "A lady is drowning behind! who will save her?" was her eager demand, as she passed one young man after another. None replied, for the weather was tremendous; till a poor shoemaker offered himself. “I'll save her, if I can," said he; and he followed her swiftly through the house and yard to the head of the steps.

There indeed was the lady still bravely breasting the rolling waves; she had taken her outward range, and was returning, but the rebound of the sea from the cliffs was so powerful that she could not come in to the steps; her strength too was failing fast, and it failed all the faster because she was thoroughly frightened.

The young cordwainer, throwing off his coat and shoes, and taking a rope in his hand, leaped at once into the waves, and being himself a skilful swimmer, he quickly reached the drowning lady. He managed to pass the noose of the cord round her, by means of which she was presently drawn up by other men who had congregated on the steps. "Take care of the poor man!" was her first exclamation, even before her own feet had touched the firm ground. But "the poor man" was past their care; he had saved her life chivalrously, but it I was with the sacrifice of his own.

As soon as he had secured the lady's hold of the rope, he sought the shore for himself, but scarcely had he swam half a dozen strokes, when the spectators on shore beheld his arms suddenly cease their vigorous play and hang down ; his legs, too, sank into the same pendent posture, and his head dropped upon his breast with the face submerged. Thus he continued to float for a short time, but moved no more. He had been subject to occasional swooning fits, from a severe blow which he had received on the head some time before, and his brother, from whose mouth I received these details, conjectured that one of his attacks had suddenly come upon him, his predisposition being perhaps aggravated by his having gone out without having broken his fast.

The tide soon carried the body away out of sight; efforts were made as soon as practicable to recover it by dragging; and it was once hooked and brought to the surface, but before it could be hauled into the boat it sank again, and it was not till more than a fortnight after that it was found at Comb-Martin, some five miles to the eastward.

Nothing could exceed the distress of the lady at the death of her courageous deliverer; for awhile she appeared inconsolable, and the effect of the whole transaction is said to have been a permanent melancholy. Her gratitude was shown in providing for the widow and children of her benefactor, who continue to this day her pensioners.

And with this we must conclude our notice of Mr. Gosse's charming work, which is well calculated to render the pursuit of natural history more popular than ever, to show to sea-side visitors that they have other resources at hand besides the monotonous promenade, and to open their hearts by the contemplation of the excellence impressed on everything which God has created.

AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

No. VIII.-WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

POETRY has been pronounced by Wordsworth, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings-taking its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity;" the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” In such a mood, according to the great poet, successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on.* This species of re-action, this revival of powerful emotion, this living over again the passionate experience, between which in its historical reality and the present time a tranquillising medium has been interposed,-this revivification of olden sensibilities, in all their quick energy and moving influences, we seem to miss in the poetry of Mr. Bryant. The tranquillity somewhat overlays the emotion. The philosophic mind, brought by rolling years, somewhat over-rides, checks, confines the soul of poesy, and sometimes

lies upon it with a weight Heavy as frost.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Bryant was cavalierly characterised by a Blackwood critic as, "in fact, a sensible young man, of a thrifty disposition, who knows how to manage a few plain ideas in a very handsome way"but wanting fire, wanting the very rashness of a poet-the prodigality and fervour of those who are overflowing with inspiration. The smartest of American satirists thus delineates him :

There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,
As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,

Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights,

With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation,
(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation)
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,-
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on :
Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em,†
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm ;
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,

Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.

Tuckerman, who is so decided an admirer of this bard, admits a remarkable absence of those spontaneous bursts of tenderness and passion, which

* See Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads.

We can fancy the "too smooth and too polished" poet looking grim horror, or blank perplexity, at the scansion of this rough-shod line of his critic's.

A Fable for Critics.

66

constitute the very essence of a large portion of modern verse-and allows that he has none of the spirit of Campbell, or the narrative sprightliness of Scott; and that love is merely recognised in his poems, rarely forming the staple of any composition; and that even sentiment, except that which springs from benevolence, seldom lends a glow to his pages. We remember, however, Wilson's quoting "A Song of Pitcairn's Island" with the remark, "This is the kind of love-poetry in which we delight”—and his eulogising "The Hunter's Serenade" as a sweet love-lay," and the Song of Marion's Men" as a spirit-stirring, beautiful ballad, instinct with the grace of Campbell and the vigour of Allan Cunningham. Nor has Mr. Bryant ever, perhaps, been more justly appraised than by the same renowned critic, when he defines the chief charm of the poet's genius to consist in a tender pensiveness, a moral melancholy, breathing over all his contemplations, dreams, and reveries, even such as in the main are glad, and giving assurance of a pure spirit, benevolent to all living creatures, and habitually pious in the felt omnipresence of the Creator. The inspiration of many of his poems is traced to a profound sense of the sanctity of the affections. That love, which is the support and the solace of the heart in all the duties and distresses of this life, is sometimes painted by Mr. Bryant in its purest form and brightest colours, as it beautifies and blesses the solitary wilderness. The delight that has filled his own being, from the faces of his own family, he transfuses into the hearts of the creatures of his imagination, as they wander through the woods, or sit singing in front of their forest bowers." The tenderness and pathos which mark "The Death of the Flowers," "The Indian Girl's Lament," "The Rivulet," and other pieces, produce in the reader a feeling not exactly, not even approximately, like that (if we may dogmatise at all on so indefinite a sensation) of

-being stirred up by the very North Pole.

Bryant loves to put into simple verse some simple story of the heart, or fragment of legendary lore. For instance, the "African Chief," which tells how a captive prince stood in the market-place, "all stern of look and strong of limb, his dark eye on the ground,"-and there besought his elated conqueror to accept ransom, for the sake of those who were weeping their loss in the shade of the cocoa-tree; and how, when the conqueror spurned that petition, the conquered became at once broken of heart and crazed of brain, and wore not long the chain of serfdom-for at eventide "they drew him forth upon the sands, the foul hyæna's prey." Or again, "The Hunter's Vision,"-which describes the slumber of a weary huntsman upon a rock that rose high and sheer from the mountain's breast-and how he dreamed of a shadowy region, where he beheld dead friends, dear in days of boyhood, and one fair young girl, long since housed in the churchyard, but now bounding towards him as she was wont of yore, and calling his name with a radiant smile on that sweet face which the death damps have so dishonoured-and how the dreamer started forward to greet the rapturous delusion, and, plunging from that craggy height, ended dream and life at once! Or again, "The Murdered Traveller"-a touchingly mournful elegy on one who died a fearful death in a narrow glen, and whose bones were found and buried there by un

weeping strangers-the fragrant birch hanging her tassels above him, and the blossoms nodding carelessly, and the redbreast warbling cheerily :* But there was weeping far away;

And gentle eyes for him,

With watching many an anxious day
Were sorrowful and dim.

They little knew, who loved him so,
The fearful death he met,

When shouting o'er the desert snow,
Unarmed, and hard beset ;-

Nor how, when round the frosty pole
The northern dawn was red,

The mountain wolf and wild-cat stole
To banquet on the dead.

But long they looked, and feared, and wept,
Within his distant home;

And dreamed, and started as they slept,
For joy that he was come.

These lines are a fine specimen of the condensed, pithy, chaste picturesqueness of expression in which Mr. Bryant excels. A corresponding terseness as well as delicacy distinguishes his similitudes, which if sparsely, are almost ever effectively introduced, and evidence true feeling and taste. The breeze at summer twilight he bids

go forth,

God's blessing breathed upon the fainting earth.†

The intellectual prowess of man he suggests by the discoveries of the he whose eye

astronomer

Unwinds the eternal dances of the sky.

To a maiden sinking under a decline he says—

Glide softly to thy rest then; Death should come
Gently to one of gentle mould like thee,

As light winds wandering through groves of bloom
Detach the delicate blossom from the tree.§

When "frosts and shortening days portend the aged year is near his end," then does the gentian flower's

Sweet and quiet eye

Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.||

Man, a probationer between two eternities, is thus apostrophised:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.*

The poem which concludes with these lines, "Thanatopsis," is slightingly said by a popular critic to have for its main thought the world as a huge sepulchre, rolling through the heavens, while its moral is to inculcate upon the death-devoted dust, which we call man, the duty of dropping into its kindred dust as quietly and gracefully as possible. So to "sacrifice to the graces" is hardly, however, the poet's wont. And this particular poem merits a higher estimate, mingling as it does so finely, a "mild and healing sympathy, that steals away their sharpness" with man's "darker musings on the wormy grave, and with thoughts of the last bitter hour that "come like a blight over his spirit," and with "sad images of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, and breathless darkness, and the narrow house." Not a few of Mr. Bryant's admirers admire" Thanatopsis" beyond the rest of his poems; and "Thanatopsis" it is which Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his dreamt of a generation to come, beheld "gleaming" over the dead and buried bard, “like a sculptured marble sepulchre by moonlight." And "Thanatopsis" it is, of which we are told that Dana, and other critics to whom it was shown in MS., affirmed that it could not have been written by an American -there being, says Mr. Griswold, "a finish and completeness about it, added to the grandeur and beauty of the ideas, to which, it was supposed, none of our own writers had attained." America owns another sort of critics, now.

guess

As a descriptive poet, with the national characteristics of his country's scenery for a theme, those who are familiar with such characteristics, accord to Mr. Bryant lofty praise. Cis-Atlantic readers are apt to complain of a seeming lack of nationality in his pictures of lake and prairie, and to find them tame and colourless beside the impressive and vivid studies, from the same objects, of Fenimore Cooper. But Trans-Atlantic critics assure us, that any of our "auld warld" selves, "gifted with a small degree" of common imagination and sensibility, and free from a very large degree of prejudice and chronic amaurosis, may derive from Bryant's poems" the very awe and delight with which the first view of one of America's majestic forests would strike his mind." We are to regard him with the respect due to one who, in Wordsworth's language, Having gained the top

Of some commanding eminence, which yet
Intruder ne'er beheld, from thence surveys
Regions of wood and wide savannah, vast
Expanse of unappropriated earth,

With mind that sheds a light on what he sees.‡

• Thanatopsis.

† See "P.'s Correspondence," in the Mosses.
Excursion. Book IV.