beautiful story of Aimée—the delight of all children—is in the collection entitled "The Temple of the Fairies."
[V] According to the exploded hypothesis of Voltaire, that the Gipsies are a Syrian tribe, the remains of the long scattered fraternity of Isis.
[W] Whoever is well acquainted with the heathen learning must often have been deeply impressed with the mournful character of the mythological Elysium. Even the few admitted to the groves of asphodel, unpurified by death, retain the passions and pine with the griefs of life; they envy the mortal whom the poet brings to their moody immortality; and, amidst the disdained repose, sigh for the struggle and the storm.
[X] Not only were the lofty and cheering notions of the soul, that were cherished by the more illustrious philosophers of Greece, confined to a few, but even the grosser and dimmer belief in a future state, which the vulgar mythology implied, was not entertained by the multitude. Plato remarked that few, even in his day, had faith in the immortality of the soul; and indeed the Hades of the ancients was not for the Many. Amongst those condemned we find few criminals, except the old Titans, and such as imitated them in the one crime—blasphemy to the fabled gods: and the dwellers of Elysium are chiefly confined to the poets and the heroes, the oligarchy of earth.
[Y] If a man wishes to leave a portion to his natural child, his lawyer will tell him to name the child as if it were a stranger to his blood. If he says, "I leave to John Tompson, of Baker-street, £10,000," John Tompson may probably get the legacy; if he says, "I leave to my son, John Tompson, of Baker-street, £10,000," and the said John Tompson is his son (a natural one), it is a hundred to one if John Tompson ever touches a penny! Up springs the Inhuman Law, with its multiform obstacles, quibbles, and objections—proof of identity—evidence of birth!—Many and many a natural child has thus been robbed and swindled out of his sole claim upon redress—his sole chance of subsistence. In most civilised countries a father is permitted to own the offspring, whom, unless he do so, he has wronged at its very birth—whom, if he do not so, he wrongs irremedially; with us the error is denied reparation, and the innocence is sentenced to outlawry. Our laws, with relation to illegitimate children, are more than unjust—they are inhuman.
CONSTANCE; OR, THE PORTRAIT.
PART THE FIRST.
I.
On Avon's stream, in day's declining hours,
The loitering Angler sees reflected towers;
Adown the hill the stately shadows glide,
And force their frown upon the gentle tide:
Another shade, as stately and as slow,
Steals down the slope and dims the peace below:
There, side by side, your noiseless shadows fall,
Time-wearied Lord, and time-defying hall!
As Song's sweet Master fled the roar of Rome,
For the Bandusian fount and Sabine home,
A soul forsook the beaten tracks of life,
Sought the lone bye-path and escaped the strife;
And paused, reviving 'mid the haunts of youth,
To conjure fancies back, or muse on truth.
One home there is, from which, howe'er we stray,
True as a star, the smile pursues our way;
The home of thoughtful childhood's mystic tears,
Of earliest Sabbath bells on sinless ears,
Of noonday dreamings under summer trees,
And prayers first murmur'd at a mother's knees.
Ah! happy he, whose later home as man
Is made where Love first spoke, and Hope began,
Where haunted floors dear footsteps back can give,
And in our Lares all our fathers live!
Graced with those gifts the vulgar mostly prize,
And if used wisely, precious to the wise,
Wealth and high lineage;—Ruthven's name was known
Less for ancestral greatness than its own:
With boyhood's dreams the grand desire began
Which, nerved by labour, lifts from rank the man Ev'n as the eye in Art's majestic halls Not on the frame but on the portrait falls; So to each nobler life the gaze we bound, Nor heed what casework clasps the picture round.
But who can guess that crisis of the soul
When the old glory first forsakes the goal?
When Knowledge halts and sees but cloud before;
When sour'd Experience whispers 'hope no more;'
When every onward footstep from our side
Parts the slow friend or hesitating guide;
When envy rots the harvest in the sheaf;
When faith in virtue seems the child's belief;
And life's last music sighs itself away
On some false lip, that kiss'd but to betray?
Thus from a world that wrong'd him, self-exiled,
The man resought the birthplace of the child.
Rest comes betimes, if toil commence too soon;
The brightest sun is stillest at the noon;
Weary at mid-day, genius halts the course,
And hails the respite which renews the force.
II.
Deep in the vale from which those towers arose,
A life more shatter'd, sought more late repose;
In Seaton long had men and marts obey'd
The unerring hierarch in thy temple, Trade.
Trade, the last earth-god; whom the Olympian Power
Begot on Danaë, as the Golden Shower,
