After this beautiful imagery, the blank verse of another poet of the same period sounds somewhat prosaic ;-but it has its charms :

Nay, William, nay, not so! the changeful year

In all its due successions to my sight
Presents but varied beauties, transient all,
All in their season good. These fading leaves,
That with their rich variety of hues

Make yonder forest in the slanting sun

So beautiful, in you awake the thought

Of winter-cold, drear winter, when these trees,
Each like a fleshless skeleton shall stretch

Its bare brown boughs; when not a flower shall spread
Its colours to the day, and not a bird
Carol its joyaunce,—but all nature wear
One sullen aspect, bleak and desolate,
To eye, ear, feeling, comfortless alike.
To me their many-colour'd beauties speak
Of times of merriment and festival,
The year's best holiday: I call to mind
The school-boy days, when in the falling leaves
I saw with eager hope the pleasant sign
Of coming Christmas; when at morn I took
My wooden kalendar, and counting up
Once more its often-told account, smooth'd off
Each day with more delight the daily notch.
To you the beauties of the autumnal year
Make mournful emblems, and you think of man
Doom'd to the grave's long winter, spirit-broken,
Bending beneath the burthen of his years,
Sense-dull'd and fretful, "full of aches and pains,
Yet clinging still to life. To me they show
The calm decay of nature, when the mind
Retains its strength, and in the languid eye
Religion's holy hope kindles a joy
That makes old age look lovely. All to you
Is dark and cheerless; you in this fair world
See some destroying principle abroad,
Air, earth, and water, full of living things,
Each on the other preying; and the ways
Of man, a strange, perplexing labyrinth,
Where crimes and miseries, each producing each,
Render life loathsome, and destroy the hope
That should in death bring comfort. Oh, my friend,
That thy faith were as mine! that thou couldst see

Death still producing life, and evil still
Working its own destruction; couldst behold
The strifes and troubles of this troubled world

With the strong eye that sees the promised day
Dawn through this night of tempest! All things then
Would minister to joy; then should thine heart

Be heal'd and harmonized, and thou wouldst feel
God always, everywhere, and all in all.

SOUTHEY.

SHELLEY, the great master of harmony, has one of his finest lyrics for Autumn :

The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

And the year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,

Is lying.

Come, months, come away,

From November to May,

In your saddest array;
Follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the night-worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;

Come, months, come away,
Put on white, black, and gray,

Let your light sisters play—
Ye follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

Who has not felt that Autumn is a mournful type of human life? Who ever expressed the feeling more tenderly than SHAKSPERE?

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest,
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The Ayrshire ploughman paints the season with his own transparent col

ours:

'Twas when the stacks get on their winter-hap,
And thack and rape secure the toil-won crap;
Potato bings are snuggèd up frae skaith
O' coming winter's biting, frosty breath;
The bees rejoicing o'er their summer toils,
Unnumber'd buds an' flow'rs delicious spoils,
Seal'd up with frugal care in massive waxen piles,
Are doom'd by man, that tyrant o'er the weak,
The death o' devils, smoor'd wi' brimstone reek:
The thund'ring guns are heard on every side,
The wounded coveys, reeling, scatter wide;
The feather'd field-mates, bound by nature's tie
Sires, mothers, children, in one carnage lie:
(What warm poetic heart, but inly bleeds,
And execrates man's savage, ruthless deeds!)
Nae mair the flow'r in field or meadow springs,
Nae mair the grove with airy concert rings,
Except perhaps the robin's whistling glee,
Proud o' the height o' some bit half-lang tree:

The hoary morns precede the sunny days,

Mild, calm, serene, wide spreads the noontide blaze,
While thick the gossamour waves wanton in the rays.

COLERIDGE looks upon the fields with the unerring eye of the poet-natu ralist:

The tedded hay, the first fruits of the soil,
The tedded hay and corn-sheaves in one field,
Show summer gone, ere come. The fox-glove tall
Sheds its loose purple bells, or in the gust,

Or when it bends beneath the up-springing lark,
Or mountain-finch alighting. And the rose
(In vain the darling of successful love)
Stands like some boasted beauty of past years.
The thorns remaining, and the flowers all gone

Nor can I find, amid my lonely walk

By rivulet or spring, or wet road-side,

That blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook,
Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not!

One of our own day not less poetically and truly describes the Autumn

flower-garden :

A spirit haunts the year's last hours

Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers
To himself he talks ;

For at eventide, listening earnestly,

At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks ;

Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

Of the mouldering flowers.

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i̇' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

The air is damp, and hush'd, and close,
As a sick man's room when he taketh repose

An hour before death;

My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,

And the breath

Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the year's last rose.

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

HAVEN, an American poet, thus moralises :

Autumn, I love thy bower,

With faded garlands drest;

How sweet alone to linger there,
When tempests ride the midnight air,
To snatch from mirth a fleeting hour,
The sabbath of the breast!

Autumn, I love thee well;

Though bleak thy breezes blow,

TENNYSON.

I love to see the vapours rise,

And clouds roll wildly round the skies,
Where from the plain the mountains swell,
And foaming torrents flow.

Autumn, thy fading flowers

Droop but to bloom again;

So man, though doom'd to grief a while,
To hang on Fortune's fickle smile,
Shall glow in heaven with nobler powers,
Nor sigh for peace in vain.

Character of Jonathan Wild.

FIELDING.

[HENRY FIELDING, "the father of the English novel," as he has been justly called, was born in 1707. He was the son of General Fielding, a descendant of the Earls of Denbigh. His means, however, were limited; his habits expensive. His life was one of difficulty in its middle period, and of physical suffering in his decline. He died at the age of forty-seven. Fielding's first novel was 'Joseph Andrews,' which was intended as a burlesque on Richardson's 'Pamela.' But, unlike most satirists, the author was led away by his genius to produce something more enduring than banter or travestie. He found out his power of delineating character-and 'Parson Adams' will live as long as the language. 'Tom Jones' is unquestionably Fielding's greatest work. 'Amelia' is more unequal. How greatly is it to be deplored that productions of such undoubted genius have corrupting and grovelling passages in them-in a great degree the result of the habits of the age in which they were produced—which exclude them from general acceptation! 'Jonathan Wild,' from which our extract is taken, is a remarkable production, full of that knowledge of the world which made Fielding the first of novelists, and the most acute of magistrates.]

man.

Jonathan Wild had every qualification necessary to form a great As his most powerful and predominant passion was ambition, so nature had, with consummate propriety, adapted all his faculties to the attaining those glorious ends to which this passion directed him. He was extremely ingenious in inventing designs, artful in contriving the means to accomplish his purposes, and resolute in executing them; for as the most exquisite cunning and most undaunted boldness qualified him for any undertaking,