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

etteraturr.

P OET R Y.

H OPE.
Written for the Liverpool Standard.

Away Ambition's'. apes, depart
Ye phantoms to deceive us !
Ye promise to the trusting heart
What naught of earth can give us.
Away ye elves of Plutus ! soon
We loathe your sordid pleasures;
I woo ye not, I see!: a boon
Above your richest treasures.
Your bear s are shed on flectiag things,
• Like light on vapours plaiting ;
Your flowers, alas ! ye plant, where time
Is evermore decaying.
A hope that Virtue's pilgrim knows,
There is, untouch'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 otl er hopes are blighted ;
Strew flowers of Eden on the tomb
Of joys 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'riing 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 changing clime,
Where flood and tempest rages ;
Builds not upon the sands of time,
But on eternal ages.
What 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 guideth ;
Gives foretaste of the ecstacy
Where deity abideth.
The soul on this shall soar on high,
Yet keep her wings unspotted;
Till crown'd with immortality,
And Virtue's mood allotted.
Brunswick-road, September 18th, 1846.

SAMUEL HUGGINS.

A FIRST LOVE.

(Written for the LiveiTcol Standard.)
There are periods in the life even of those the most
deeply immersed in the vrorld's concerns, when the mind
impulsively wanders back 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 countinghouse, surrounded with records of profit
and loss ; the lawyer in his solitary chambers, poring over
abstracts or briefs ; the reveller amidst his 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, according 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
clothed, and the sordid passions and feelings with which
its etherial essence is clogged. But there are some, of
more mercurial and imaginative temperament, to whom
not merely the seed passages and the persons of tl'e
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
as. 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, flashes up, when the severed por-
tions to which it belongs are lost to us for ever.
Such a casual and unconnected glimpse of the past pre-
seated 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 st.)le 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 poetry, talks of

_ .
The swift elisfon of a thought ;"
and Coleridge's most sublime poems seem more like the
portaitures of the dimly-remembered dreams of an opium
slumber, than the productions of waking existence. We
were young on that summer afternoon ; but, unlike
Wordsworth, were done, 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 having 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 fleecy 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 acquaintance, 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 long 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 girlhood, she stood behind
the counter of her father's odious shop in our native
town, her small fat hand folding up 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
Ilouri, 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 woekly mustered for raisins or figs ; and,
when we had reached the ambition of a diurnal Havanah,
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 rot 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 arid belles lettres 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
tmperceived 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 had 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 upon gentle slopes, half hid by surrounding wood and
coppice, and whose base is washed by meandering rivu-
lets, or they lie 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 slumber 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 builder or the design
of the architect. Branching off from the village church
are the sweetest walks, the most 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 along its margin resounds daily with the ribald talk.
or the more offensive curses of a demoralized and over-
toiled population. But we are digressing.
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
say ; 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—

"'Tomas 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
object 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 Mary. Every pulchra puella whom
'Virgil, Horace, or Tibullus painted in lachrymose mood.
deserted of her Tityrus, or her Daphnis, we adorned with
the lineaments of Mary. Bennett. We pictured her de-
jected at our departure, sighing occasionally at the thoughts
our recent delicious converse, and of that last thrilling

embrace, flurried at any mention of our name, and giving,
in her embarrasment, wrong change to a customer, moist
sugar for brown, or tobacco for tea. Hence when three
months had passed over since our parting, we became
indescribably anxious for the promised letter, with all the
protestations of continued love, which our heart told us it
must contain ; and day by day we made inquiry of the
private channel, through which we had arranged to inter-
change our fond communications. At length it came—a
dumpy little epistle, written upon something between
whitey-brown and tea-paper, and sealed with a thimble.
Although not over-impressed with the elegance of the out-
side, we opened the letter with a flutter of delight, first
kissing the seal, as the next best thing to kissing the
dear dumpy little finger which had impressed it. The
contents, however, although not displaying great excel-
lence of orthography, grammar, or penmanship, were
abundantly gratifying, if professions of " fervent love,"
" true affection," and all the other al 'ctives, positive,
comparative, and superlative, which are usually :,ffixed to
these magic words, can convey gratification. We were
happy, and should have remained so, but for the discovery
of a hitherto unnoticed postscript, ia which the dear girl
apologized for not writing sooner, on the ground that
" she had been afraid of John seeing her write to any
body."
Now, who was John ? Our mind misgave us that there
was an individual of that name, who had recently been
engaged in the shop of Mary's father, as journeyman or
assistant—a spruce personage with a shock head of curly
red hair, and an undeniably good opinion of himself,
prompted, perhaps, by the circumstance that he had served
his apprenticeship in a third-rate shop in the county town,
and afterwards graduated for a year in London. What
John, however, could have to do with Mary's correspond-
ence puzzled us, until the thought suggested itself that,
probably, her abstracted air and the dejection occasioned
by the absence of one so titer had' prompted her father's
suspicions that a love affair was the cause; and that this
monster had been set to watch her movements with a view
to get at her secret. The flattering thought that it was
for our sake that she feared John, restored us to happiness;
and in the tender reply, which we forwarded at the earliest
c pportunity, we thanked her ardently for the consideration
shown for our love.

The year of absence passed rapidly away, contrary to
the general rule of such years. Young hearts, let other
hearts be what they may, are not very susceptible of
undue depression. The non-arrival of further commu-
nications from our adored—for she never wrote save that
one dumpy whitey-brown epistle—troubled us at times;
but we thought of John's surveillance, and looked for-
ward to a meeting under the churchyard elms for an eclair-
cissement and an exchange of raptures. The time for
return home srriced at lengi h. and at dusk in a fine sum-
mer's evening, we stood once more in our paternal abode ;
and when, late at night, we retired to rest, it was to dream
of the dear old fashioned shop of Peter Bennett and of its
presiding goddess, our beloved little Mary, with a sight of
both of which dear objects, the morning sun, we trusted,
would favor us.