The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-09-22 00:00:00

i 1 L . ~.:

1_.~; 7

HOPE.
Written for the Liverpool Standard:

Away ! Ambition's 1 open. depart
Ye phantoms to deceive us
Ye promise to thq.trusting he:rt
What naught of earth can give us.
Away ye elves of Pintos soon
We loathe your sordid pleasures;
I woo ye not, I see!: a boon
Above your richest treasures.
Your beams are shed oii fleeting things,
Like light on vapours ~laying;
Your flowers, alas! ye plant, where time
Is evermore decaying.
A hope that Virtue's pilgrim knows,
There is, untoucli'd by sadness ;
A light that shines through cares and woes,
And bursts, alone in gladness.
This hope can Sorrow's tears assuage,
And give to Want new treasure ;
And in the wintry heart of age
Can re-awaken pleasure.
And shed around perennial bloom,
When otter hopes are blighted ;
Strew flowers of Eden en the tomb
Of job s that once delighted.
Death may not quench its radiant light—
This hope can ne'er grow hoary ;
On through mortality's dark night
It burns with bright'ising glory.
And whence this hope? 'tis not of earth,
Nor with its sunshine blended ;
The world nor gives nor steals its worth,
'Tis from above descended.
It looks beyond life's charging clime,
Where flood and temp .r niges ;
Builds not upon the sa..ds of time,
But on eternal ages.
Whit is this hope? a voice he hears,
Here in li e's narrow portal,
Of heritage in happier sphere's :
His destiny immortal?
His Cynosure ! it beams on high—
Through snare and trouble guldeth;
Gives foretaste of the ecstacy
Where deity abideth. •
The soul on this shall soar on high,
Yet keep her wings unspotted;
Till erown'd a ith
And Virtue's treed allotted.

SAMUEL HU GGINS.

Brunswick-road, September 18th, 1846

A FIRST LOVE.

(Written for the Liverpool Standard.)
There are periods in the life even of those the most
deeply immersed in the world's concerns, when the mind
impulsively wanders bark into the past, and sees the
events and the persons of long-forgotten scenes flit in
spectral panorama before its vision. The merchant in his
dusky counting- house, surrounded with records of profit
and loss ; the lawyer in his solitary chambers, poring over
abstracts or briefs ; the reveller amidst Iris brimming cups,
with the laughter or the wit of boon companions ringing
in his ears, at times feels an irresistible spirit-summons,
which drags him from this material world, to wander over
again through some bright oasis, or to shudder through
some dark passage, of his bygone career. All men have
experienced, more or less, acecirding to their various tem-
peraments. these casual awakenings of slumbering me-
mory, in which the soul seems to assert its independence
of, and supremacy over, the dull matter in which it is
cloth;d, and the sordid passions and feelings with which
its etherial essence is clogged. But there are some, of
more mercurial and irn ginative temperament, to whom
not merely the acted passages and the persons of the
drama of.past years, but even some flitting thought, some
look of our beloved, some indistinct and isolated event,
or scene, or feeling has presented itself at times, which
we cannot connect intelligibly with the context of our life,
and which is, pleasingly or painfully bewildering, accord-
ing to its character and the impress which it leaves upon
us. Many, indeed, there are, upon whom some long-
dropped link in the chain of memory—some bright or
bitter thought—for which we have long ransacked in vain
the records of the past, Hashes up, when the severed por-
tions to which it belongs are lost to us for ever.
Such a casual and uricqnnected glimpse of the past pre-
sented itself to us a few days ago, whilst indulging our-
selves with a cigar and our nocturnal tumbler of punch.
It was the remembrance of a summer afternoon, and of
the thoughts and feelings which stole with its beauty over
our mind and heart. Wordsworth, by the bye, had a si-
milar return of
" One summer's day, when he was young,
And Matthew seventy-two."
Shelly, in his dreamy roetry, talks of

The swift elision of a thought;"
and Colle4lge's mast sublime poems seem more like the
portaiti of the dimly-.remembered dreams of an opium
slumber, ban the productions of waking existence. We
were young on that summer afternoon; but, unlike
Wordsworth, were alone, immersed in our own medita-
tions. The precise locus in quo of our reverie we cannot
distinctly call to mind. It was a cricket ground, how-
ever, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the place of our
nativity ; and baying been ingloriously caught out, with-
out making a score, we had retired to a secluded corner of
the field, and were reclining on the green sward, luxuri-
ating in an upward vision of " cloud-land, gorgeous land,"
watching pile upon pile of fle.ecy sun-tipped exhalations
changing their fantastic forms as the wind drifted them
over the blue face of heaven, and peopling them with in-
habitants fitted for such a world of etherial loveliness,
each female resembling a certain terrestrial goddess of
Our ac9uaintacce, and each happy male a kind of fancy
portrait of what we imagined our own interesting person
might be when a few more years should have passed•over
our heads. 'We do not know how lone we had indulged
in this sublimated love-dream, when our senses were re-
called to vulgar earth and its concerns, by the not over
gentle application of the spike of a cricket shoe to our
person, and an impatient summons to take our place in
the " long field off." Here our treacherous memory
leaves us in the lurch ; and of the remaining events, of
that summer afternoon we have no record left.
But of the goddess of that day-dream shall we ever lose
the remembrance ? Sweet Mary Bennett ! We see her even
now, as when in her blooming girlhocd, she stood behind
the counter of her father's odious shop in our native
town, her small fat hand folding ur ounces of tea, half
ounces of tobacco, or half pounds of sugar. Her plump
round arm—somewhat of the reddest to be sure—her
buxom little figure, and her round rosy face, with eyes
looking out from it, to our imagination like the eyes of a
Howl, but more roguish in their expression than quite
became an inhabitant of paradise. are before us still. The
smile with which she occasionally exchanged the sixpence
which we weekly mustered for rusine or figs ; and,
when we bad reached the ambition of a diurnal Havanab,
the gentle squeeze of our fingers as she handed us the
neatly tied up copper, dwelt with us for many a year.
Poor Mary Bennett !—but we must not allow our feelings
to run away with us and anticipate our story.
We were just fourteen when we first left the grammar
school of our native town, to gather the graces and ac-
complishments of manhood and to be " finished" by a
two years course of classics and belles leitres at the board-
ing school of an eminent pedagogue in a distant part of
the country. How indelibly is the evening before depar-
ture impressed upon our memory ! We had slipped out
unperceived from the company of a few friends of the
family, who were assembled upon the occasion, to take a
parting walk with dear Mary—for by this time the in-
nate bashfulness of our nature had given way before the
powerful impulse of a first love ; and we encountered
each other beneath the elms of the old church yard, from
which a style led to a pleasant shaded path by the stream,
which watered the neighbouring meadows. What a taste
for the beauty in scenery and situation bad the church-
men of the olden time ! The sacred Panes erected by our
fathers arose in the pleasant places of the land. They
gleam out from eminences. upon whose beauty even the
wearied traveller pauses for a moment to gaze ere he hur-
ried on in his absorbing worship of the world. They are
seen noon gentle slopes, hall dby surrounding wood and
Coppice, meandering and a hose base is washed by rivu-
lets, or they l:e bedded in the heart of sequestered val-
lies •, as if placed there, that no ruder sound than that of
their church-summoning bell, or the tread of their little
throng of simple-hearted worshippers, might break in
upon the quiet of those who :Amber in their grassy
grave yards. Seek one of these sweetly located monu-
ments of the devotional feeling of a past age; and mark
the chaste beauty of the few flower and shrub-embow-
ered cottages which surround it—for the " Cottage near
the Church" is ever associated, and justly, in the mind
of an observer of the scenery of rural England with such
dwellings, for which the hand of taste and of nature has
done far more than the skill of the bui'der or the design
of the architect. Branching off from the village church
are the sweetest walks, the mast sequestered retreats, the
most cooling shades. The church of the little town of
G was a building thus picturesquely and beautifully
situated. Alas ! the clear, purling stream, by which we
walked that summer evening, is now made turbid by a
neighboring worsted factory ; and the once quiet shady
path alorig its margin resounds daily with the ribald talk.
or the more offensive curses of a demoralized and over-
toiled population. But we are digressiog,.
We loitered along that path, poor Mary and ourselves,
hand in hand and in silence which, caused by overcharged
hearts, is more expressive than words. Language came
at length, and it is wonderful how much each had then to
Bay ; and, when when so little time was left to -say that
much, it was wonderful we thought how we could have
trifled with that time. What was said, however, need not
be recapitulated here nor what was left unsaid noticed.
The reader. male or female, is doubtless in a position to
imagine both for him or herself. Enough that the moment
of parting came at length, and language again having
failed us the sad word farewell took the shape of a part-
ing caress, of which we 'may say of poor Mary, with the
poet—

" 'Twas partly love and partly fear,
And partly 'twas a gentle art,
That we might rather feel than hear
The beating of her heart."
Arrangements were, however, made for mutual corres-
pondence, and the sad ceremony over, we returned home
by separate routes. This, we have an indistinct idea,
was from some fear of our respective parents. Next day,
we left behind us our native town, and our hearts' first
objet of affection.
The events of our first year's absence at boarding-school
we need not detail. The novelty of situation and scene,
the change of associates, and more strict devotion to study,
we must state, despite the sneers with which the assertion
way be met by worldly minded or giddy people, did not
divert our thoughts from dwelling, at every leisure oppor-
tunity upon dear Marv. Eery pulchra puella whom
Virgil, Horace, or Tibullus painted in lachrymose mood,
deserted of her Titvrus, or her Daphni,,, we adorned with
the lineaments of Mary Bennett. We pictured her de-
jected at our departure, sighing occasionally at the thoughts
of our recent delicious converse, and of that last thrilling