The Sun.
London, England, 1856-02-07 00:00:00

tenderly pencilled in one sweet and graceful
st za—

The quiet ripple of her smile
Revealed the peaceful mind,
The mellow moonlight of her eyes
Her sympathies refined ;
And when; she spoke, the audible charm
Was Beauty for the blind.
Occasionally in the melodious versification there is,
all unconsciously no doubt to the author, the
vibration of an old familiar strain. As where
(1). 18)

All his heart's history,
All his thought's mystery—

is the echo of

J'irad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery, &c—
-in Hood's exquisite " Bridge of Sighs." Or again,
as where (p. 83)—

And cursed, in my deep, deep agony,
The gold for which I'd slain
A life that all the gold in the world
Could ne'er bring back again—
chimes upon the memory in the closing syllables
like the iteration of Tennyson's lamentation--
Break, break, break.
At the foot of thy crags, 0 Sea !
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to use.
Repeatedly we have reason to regret a violation of
grammar as distressing as the ellipse of a participle
—for the sake, obviously, of smoothing the words
" trippingly to the tonguein the glib hurry of a
merely rhythmical arrangement. " Tradition itself
has forgot them" (p. 114)—" The Pharaohs
are forgot" (p. 219)—" That civil discord might
have broke" (p. 226) are flaws nol to be passed by
entirely sub silentio. Even theith it be but mo-
mentarily, we cannot help wincing with a wry face,
as at the sharpening of a saw, or at the sourness of
an unripe gooseberry. Nov and then we come
upon a charming little " touch of nature" in the
incidental descriptions. As when it is written
(during the account of the Parson's sermon against
Mammon worship)—
So vast the silence as he spoke,
You might have heard the grass
Rustle and wave to the fitful winds,
And the bee in haste to pass,
Sounding a trump like a martial ca 7.2 •
On a clarion of brass.
You might have heard the sparroN cheep ,
Mid the yew-berries, juicy red,
And the long rank nettles singing a dirge
Over the nameless dead.
A noble sentiment rings out through the music of
that simple utterance—

Tim form of the worship
Is rind on the bole,
The fruit of religion
Is Lore in the soul.

Several of the minor poems appended to the
" Lump of Gold," and forming, in truth, the prin-
cipal part of Dr. Mackay's new ♦olume of poetry,
are remarkable for their freshness of feeling and
the tender melody of their intonations. One,
written at Venice in the April of 1855 (from which
piece, indeed, our last extract has been taken), is
entitled " The }festival of St. Marc." Another,
dated from Vienna, in the same month of last year,
celebrates " The. Old Magdalen of St. Stephan's."
An effusion, by the way, in which a Catholic de-
votee is made to sing as we would wager no Catho-
lic devotee would ever dream of singing—
Oh, Mary ! heat. me when I speak ;

Oh, Virgin Mary, Angelminti:
without any reminiscence whatever of the prophetic
" omnes generationes beata me dicent." Another
poem, coming immediately afterwards, and appa-
rently written in Paris as long ago as 1853, a poem
entitled " The Column of Luzor," talks of Louis
Philippe, of all men in the wide world, as " tho
Great King"—an adjective so applied altogether
passing our comprehension. Here it is that we find
our author writing—
Speak home to their business and passions,

as by a repetition of the famous phrase " coming
home to their business and bosoms," a phrase
which the readers of .Notes and Queries may be in-
terested to learn, originally occurs in Lord Vern-
lam's preface to his immortal " Essays." In the
fugitive piece called " Panic at the Bourse," we
cannot but recognise through the lines—

Then a stifled rambling,
Then a crash and fall,—
Down comes Babel tumbling,
Dome and towers and all :

a recollection of the close of the nursery song
" Hushaby Baby"—

When the tree rocks
The cradle will fall--
Down comes baby
Cradle and all.
As in the two stanzas headed " Returning Mes-
sengers," it would be difficult not to detect a para-
phrase of the wise old sailor's axiom, that " Curses,
like Mother Cary's chickens, come home to roost."
The verses "'On the Portrait of Queen Victoria,"
are written throughout in the courtly spirit of a
Laureate, warmed into enthusiasm by potations of
Malmsey and crowned with an odoriferous chaplet
of golden pieces and bay leaves intermingled. As
the lines " Man to Man" are .penned from first to
last, there is no other way of expressing it in the
true spirit of—Charles Mackay. Answer if it be
not so—the nervous opening syllables !
Stand up, man ! stand !
God's over al!.
Why do you cringe to me,
Why do you bend the knee,
And creep, and fawn, and crawl
Stand up, man ! stand !
With which manly, moving adjuration ringing in
his memory, the reader of " The Lump of Gold,
and other Poems " may, as in the happiest mood
and at the aptest moment, close for awhile this new
volume by Charles Mackay—a volume, be sure !
not by any, means to be closed for ever afterwards
—but meanwhile, in the intervals of perusal, to be
deposited, as such a "Lamp of Gold deserves to
be, among our book-treasures, as another nugget of
literature.