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ON VERSIFICATION.

MANY by Numbers judge a Poet's song;
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong:
In the bright muse though thousand charms conspire,
Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire;

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Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear,
Not mend their minds; as some to church repair,
Not for the doctrine, but the music there.
These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft the ear the open vowels tire;
While expletives their feeble aid do join ;
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line;
While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Where'er you find the cooling western breeze,"
In the next line, it "whispers through the trees;"
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"
The reader's threatened, (not in vain,) with "sleep;"
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught

With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know
What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow;
And praise the easy vigour of a line,

Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense :
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar :
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow;

Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!
While, at each change, the son of Libyan Jove
Now burns with glory, and then melts with love;
Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow,
Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow:
Persians and Greeks like turns of Nature found,
And the world's victor stood subdued by Sound!

CRAZY KATE.

THERE often wanders one, whom better days
Saw better clad, in cloak of satin trimmed
With lace, and hat with splendid riband bound.
A serving maid was she, and fell in love

With one who left her, went to sea, and died.
Her fancy followed him through foaming waves
To distant shores; and she would sit and weep
At what a sailor suffers; fancy too,
Delusive most where warmest wishes are,
Would oft anticipate his glad return,

And dream of transports she was not to know.
She heard the doleful tidings of his death-
And never smiled again! and now she roams
The dreary waste; there spends the livelong day,
And there, unless when charity forbids,
The livelong night. A tattered apron hides,
Worn as a cloak, and hardly hides, a gown
More tattered still; and both but ill conceal
A bosom heaved with never-ceasing sighs.
She begs an idle pin of all she meets,

And hoards them in her sleeve; but needful food,
Though pressed with hunger oft, or comelier clothes,

Though pinched with cold, asks never.-Kate is crazed!

FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, AND TRUTH.

WHEN Friendship, Love, and Truth abound
Among a band of BROTHERS,
The cup of joy goes gaily round,

Each shares the bliss of others:
Sweet roses grace the thorny way
Along this vale of sorrow;

The flowers that shed their leaves to-day
Shall bloom again to-morrow :
How grand in age, how fair in youth,
Are holy FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, and TRUTH!

On halcyon wings our moments pass,
Life's cruel cares beguiling;

Old TIME lays down his scythe and glass,
In gay good humour smiling:
With ermine beard and forelock grey,
His reverend front adorning,
He looks like Winter turned to May,
Night softened into morning.
How grand in age, how fair in youth,
Are holy FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, and TRUTH!

From these delightful fountains flow
Ambrosial rills of pleasure:

Can man desire, can Heaven bestow,
A more resplendent treasure?
Adorned with gems so richly bright,
We'll form a Constellation,

Where every Star, with modest light,
Shall gild his proper station.

How grand in age, how fair in youth,
Are holy FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, and TRUTH!

THE PHILOSOPHER'S SCALES.

IN days of yore, as Gothic fable tells,
When learning dimly gleamed from grated cells,
When wild Astrology's distorted eye

Shunned the fair field of true philosophy,

And wandering through the depths of mental night, Sought dark predictions mid the worlds of light:When curious Alchymy, with puzzled brow, Attempted things that Science laughs at now, Losing the useful purpose she consults,

In vain chimeras and unknown results ::
In those grey times there lived a reverend sage,
Whose wisdom shed its lustre on the age.
A monk he was, immured in cloistered walls,
Where now the ivyed ruin crumbling falls:
'Twas a profound seclusion that he chose;
The noisy world disturbed not that repose:
The flow of murmuring waters, day by day,
And whistling winds, that forced their tardy way
Through reverend trees, of ages growth, that made,
Around the holy pile a deep monastic shade;
The chanted psalm, or solitary prayer,-

Such were the sounds that broke the silence there.

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'Twas here when his rites sacerdotal were o'er,
In the depth of his cell with its stone-covered floor,
Resigning to thought his chimerical brain,

He formed the contrivance we now shall explain;
But whether by magic or alchymy's powers
We know not, indeed 'tis no business of ours:
Perhaps it was only by patience and care,
At last that he brought his invention to bear.
In youth 'twas projected; but years stole away,
And ere 'twas complete he was wrinkled and
But success is secure unless energy fails,
And at length he produced The Philosopher's Scales.

grey;

What were they?—you ask: you shall presently see;
These scales were not made to weigh sugar and tea;
O no;-for such properties wondrous had they,
That qualities, feelings, and thoughts they could weigh;
Together with articles small or immense,

From mountains or planets, to atoms of sense:
Nought was there so bulky, but there it could lay;
And nought so ethereal but there it would stay;
And nought so reluctant but in it must go ;
All which some examples more clearly will show.
The first thing he tried was the head of Voltaire,
Which retained all the wit that had ever been there;
As a weight, he threw in a torn scrap of a leaf,
Containing the prayer of the penitent thief;
When the skull rose aloft with so sudden a spell,
As to bound like a ball, on the roof of the cell.
Next time he put in Alexander the Great,

With a garment that Dorcas had made for—a weight;
And though clad in armour from sandals to crown,
The hero rose up, and the garment went down.
A long row of alms houses, amply endowed
By a well-esteemed pharisee, busy and proud,
Now loaded one scale, while the other was prest
By those mites the poor widow dropped into the chest ;
Up flew the endowment, not weighing an ounce,
And down, down, the farthing's worth came with a
bounce.

Again, he performed an experiment rare:

A monk, with austerities bleeding and bare,
Climbed into his scale; in the other was laid
The heart of our Howard, now partly decayed;

When he found, with surprise, that the whole of his brother

Weighed less, by some pounds, than this bit of the other. By further experiments, (no matter how,)

He found that ten chariots weighed less than one plough,

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