the unhappy Colony, but its miseries were we not having any use of parliaments, plaises, soon aggravated by the delusive rage for gold. petitions, admiralls, recorders, interpreters, There was no talke, no hope, no worke, chronologers, courts of plea, nor justices of but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade peace, sent master Wingfield and Captain gold." Smith, not indulging in these empty Archer home with him, that had ingrossed dreams of imaginary wealth, laughed at their all those titles, to seeke some better place of infatuation in loading "such a drunken ship imployment." Newport returned to Engwith guilded dust." land. Ratcliffe, the president, lived in luxuNewport, not long after his arrival, accom- rious ease, peculating on the public store. panied by Smith and thirty or forty picked Upon the approach of spring, Smith and men, visited Powhatan. Upon their arrival Scrivener, newly made one of the council, at Werowocomoco, Smith landed with twen- undertook to rebuild Jamestown, repair the ty men. Crossing several creeks on bridges palisades, fell trees, prepare the fields, plant of poles and bark, they were met and es- corn and erect another church. Captain corted to the town by Opechancanough, Nelson at length arrived with the Phoenix, Nontaquaus, Powhatan's son, and two hun- which had been supposed to be lost at sea. dred warriors. Powhatan was found seated She brought the remainder of the first supat the farther end of the house on his throne-ply, which altogether comprized one hunlike bed of mats, his pillow of leather rudely dred and twenty settlers. Nelson having embroidered with pearl and beads. More found provisions in the West Indies had husthan forty trays of bread stood without, in banded his own, and now imparted them rows, on each side of the door. Four or five generously to the Colony, so that now there hundred Indians were present. Some days was a store sufficient for half a year. t were passed in feasting, dancing and tra- Smith found it necessary to inflict severe ding, in which last Powhatan displayed a cu- chastisement on some of the Indians and to rious mixture of cunning and pride. Smith imprison others, to deter them from stealing gave him a suit of red cloth, a white grey-arms. Pocahontas "not only for feature, hound and a hat. Charmed with some blue countenance and proportion, much exceedbeads, for one or two pounds of them he eth any of the rest of his people, but for wit gave in exchange two or three hundred bush- and spirit the only Nonpareil of his counels of corn. Newport presented him a boy try." Powhatan hearing that some of his named Thomas Savage in return for an In- people were kept prisoners at Jamestown, dian named Namontack. Smith acted as in- sent her with Rawhunt, (who was as remarkterpreter. The English next visited Ope-able" for deformitie of person, but of a subchancanough at his seat, Pamunkey. The till wit and crafty understanding,") with presblue beads now came to be in great request, ents of a deer and bread to procure their and none dared to wear them save the chiefs ransom. They were released, and the youthand their families. † ful embassadress was dismissed with presents ‡

After Newport's return to Jamestown and when about to sail for England, he received a present of twenty turkies from Powhatan, to whom twenty swords were sent in return. This fowl, peculiar to America, had been many years before carried to England by some of the early discoverers. ‡ Captain Newport being ready to sail for England, and

* Newes from Virginia, p. 11.

t Smith, vol. I, p. 168.

note.

66

THE NEW TIMON:

A Romance of London. Philadelphia, Carey and
Hart, 1846. First American from the third

London edition.

therefore leaves him in India to shift for himself.
He grows up leading a sort of half-civilized, half-
outlaw life, by which his evil propensities are fos-
For
tered, and his good qualities crusted over.
the author gives him some very good as well as
some very abominable characteristics, much of
heaven as well as much of hell,-something

crimes," as may be seen in the following lines.

How different is the position which poetry main-more than "one virtue linked with a thousand tains in the literature of the present day from that which it held thirty years ago. Every week then

brought forth more and better verse than we now see in the whole year. What a constellation of bright stars then gladdened the world's eye-Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Moore, and fifty others,

"Worthy on Fame's eternal bead-rod to be filed."

All the chords of that glorious" Lyra" are now unstrung. A few years ago, when, amid the "inhuman dearth of noble natures," Festus, that splendid monument of mad genius, loomed upon our sight, we thought there was at least one great poet left upon the earth; but its author too, though not dead, must at present be regarded as the "lost Pleiad" of our literary heaven. Music "now not always meets the ear;" and therefore when at long and rare intervals the strain does come, we are proportionably anxious to listen.

"In truth our Morvale, (such his name,) could boast
Those kingly virtues which subject us most;
The ear inclined to every voice of grief-
The hand that ope'd spontaneous to relief,
The heart, whose impulse stayed not for the mind
To freeze to doubt what charity enjoined,
But sprang to man's warm instinct for mankind:
The antique honor, with its nameless power,
Which is to Virtue, as to plants the flower;
And that rare valor which confronts with scorn
The monster shape, of Vice and Folly born,
Which some the World,' and some 'Opinion,' call,
Owned by no heart, and yet enslaving all;
The bastard charter of the social state,
Which crowns the base to ostracize the great;
The eternal quack upon the itinerant stage,
This the good Public,' that the enlightened age,'
Ready alike to worship and revile,

To build the altar, or to light the pile;
Now Down with Stuart and the Reign of Sin,'-
Now Long live Charles II. and Nell Gwynne,'
Now mad for patriots,--hot for revolution,
Now all for hanging and the constitution;
Honor to him, who self-complete and brave
In scorn, cun carve his pathway to the grave,
And heeding nought of what men think or say,
Make his own heart his world upon his way!"

This is the cause of the great curiosity manifested by the public about the volume now before us-a poem professedly finished and elaborated, and published anonymously. In the work itself we are given to understand that the author is now engaged in political life, and has been for years a resident in At length a rich nabob takes a fancy to him and British India. It is a tale resembling in its scope leaves him his wealth; and at the same time his some of Byron's. The writer seems to have formed mother writes from her death-bed, beseeching his taste upon the study of this last mentioned him to take care of a daughter whom she has poet and of Crabbe, and his poetry possesses some borne to her second husband. He then returns to of the characteristics of both. But he is far in-civilized life to take charge of this half-sister; ferior to both of these lords of the lyre in power and in originality; and setting aside all comparison with Byron, the New Timon can never stand beside Crabbe's tale of the "Parting Hour," or "Sir Eustace Grey"-that story of

"The proud lost mind and rash done deed!" Still, the author writes with considerable force and the poem has merit. We will endeavor to give a bird's eye view of it, with some specimens of his style.

The character of Morvale, the hero, has a marvellous resemblance to Byron's Conrad, and evildisposed persons will say it is borrowed. He is the son of an East Indian half-blood, whom "heaven cursed with an English wife." The half blood gets himself knocked on the head at last, and his wife, who has become heartily ashamed of the connection, marries a European, and returns to her own land. She is also ashamed of her dusky son, and

VOL. XIII-11

but finds her name the jest of the town. Her lover
it seems had jilted her for some unknown cause on
the eve of marriage. Burning for revenge, yet
too fastidious to make the necessary inquiries to
obtain the name of this lover, (so the book tells us,)
he carries his sister to London, and places her in
a splendid establishment, but in seclusion from all
society. Meanwhile, by means of his great for-
tune, &c., he is enabled to mix with and entertain
the best classes of society at his fine house.

"Yet o'er that house there hung a solemn gloom;
The step fell timid in each gorgeous room,
Vast, sumptuous, dreary as some Eastern pile,
Where mutes keep watch, a home without a smile.
Noiseless as silence reigned there, like a law,
And the cold luxury saddened into awe;
Save when the swell of sombre festival
Jarr'd into joy the melancholy hall,

As some chance wind in mournful autumn wrings
Discordant notes although from music strings.
Wild were the wealthy master's moods and strange,

As one whose humor finds its food in change;
Now for whole days content apart to dwell
With books and thought-his world the student's cell.
And now with guests around the glittering board,
The hermit-Timon shone the Athenian lord;
There, bloomed the bright Ephemerals of the hour,
Whom the fierce ferment forces into flower-
The gorgeous nurslings of the social life,
Sprung from our hot-beds-Vanity and Strife!
Lords of the senate, wrestlers for the state,
Gray-haired in youth, exhausted, worn,-and great;
Pale book-men-charming only in their style;
And Poets, jaundiced with eternal bile ;-
All the poor Titans our Cocytus claims,

With tortured livers and immortal names :" &c.

Among these guests is my Lord Arden, who is described as a man of great wealth, great accomplishments, and a very killing fellow among the ladies. In most things he is the opposite of the hero of the tale; but

"Each had some points in common: mostly those
From which the plant of human friendship grows.
Each had known strong vicissitudes in life;
The present ease and the remembered strife.
Each, though from different causes, nursed a mind
At war with fate, and chafed against his kind.
Each with a searching eye had sought to scan
The solemn Future, soul predicts to man;
And each forgot how, cloud-like, passions mar,
In the vex'd wave, the mirror of the star;-
How all the unquiet thoughts which life supplies,
May swell the ocean but to veil the skies;
And dark to manhood grow the heaven that smiled
On the clear vision nature gave the child.
Each, too, in each, where varying most they seem,
Found that which fed half envy, half esteem.
If all which Europe's new Lucullus grac'd,
But made more rude the stoic of the waste,
Show'd clear the gulf, and clear the shadow gave
Of the dark exile mourning by the wave,
Still by the contrast more delightful seem
The bowers that lie beyond the barrier stream;-
Though Morvale's manhood in its native power,
If won the Armida had scorned the bower;
Yet, as some monk, whom holier cloisters shade,
Glimpses afar the glittering cavalcade,
And sighs, as sense against his will recalls
Fame's knightly lists and pleasure's festive halls," &c.

he pays his addresses to a lady of noble rank, and is on the eve of marriage with her. But just then, of course, he learns that Mary, his first love, is still alive. He instantly breaks off his second engagement and returns to England to marry her in earnest; but before he gets there, from some unaccountable cause, she hides herself again, and all his endeavors to find her are afterwards in vain. Meanwhile he becomes the heir of immense wealth, wealth equal to his rank; but it gives him no joy. He is eaten up by misanthropic melancholy. The memory of his young wife, whom he has lost by the selfishness of his secret marriage,-secret for the sake of his own advancement, haunts him everywhere

"Soft voice, fair face, I hear, I see thee still!
Shades and dim echoes from the blissful hill
Behind me left, to cast but darkness o'er
The waste slow lengthening to the grave before!"

Such is the state of the parties at the beginning of our book. In the opening scene we find our marvellous mulatto, Morvale, returning home late at night alone. On turning a corner, he finds a young lady seated on the curb stone-no very strange thing at that hour in a large city. He stops, and observes her for sometime; but finding she takes no notice of him, he gives her what is vulgarly called a "blowing up," for not rising up to beg from him. He finds that she is the daughter of a poor seamstress, who is just dead; and having no money, has been turned out of doors by their landlady. Mr. Morvale instantly finds his heart filled with sympathy and holy feeling; and without more ado, he carries her home and instals her in his palace under the care of his sister. The girl turns out to be everything that is charming, refined, and lovely; and he at last determines to marry her. Lucy then relates to him more at large the story of her life, and shows him a miniature which her mother gave her when dying, as the portrait of her father. Of course this is recognized as the portrait of Arden; and the sister, looking over his shoulder, sees in it also the portrait of the lover In short, they become sworn friends; and du- who jilted her abroad. Then comes the grand torring one of their evening rides, Arden relates the nado. Calantha, the sister, incontinently goes off story of his life and loves: How, when merely into shriekings and hysterics, and dies in a few the penniless younger son of a noble family, de- hours. Morvale then sends for Arden, intending pendent for his support and his prospects upon the to immolate him to his sister's manes. He leads favor of a powerful uncle, he had contracted a him to the room where the corpse is laid out, takes private marriage, (as he believed,) with a beauti-him by the collar, and draws a monstrous bowieful young girl in the middle walks of life, who had knife. But just when he is about to give the fatal borne him a daughter; how the friend, through coup de grace, Lucy, in due accordance with all whose assistance the ceremony had been perform- the roles of minor theatricals and clap-trap, rushes ed, had deceived him about it; how his wife had in, calling one "father," and the other “husband,” discovered while he was residing at a foreign court and so deprives the reader of the anticipated bloodas an attachè, that the marriage was a sham; and shed. Arden, having now found his daughter, how on this discovery she had withdrawn from wishes to make amends for Calantha's destruction all her friends and concealed herself from his by giving her as a wife to Morvale; and to this search. After some years, supposing her dead, she is nothing loth. But the hero, though dying

grand tableau of heroical despair. Morvale then leaves town and goes wandering about the country on foot :

with love for Lucy, will not have her from such erated under this " powerful preaching," looks forhands; and this part of the story winds up with a ward to a union with his Lucy in heaven, and longs ardently for an opportunity to declare his forgiving spirit to Arden. Meanwhile Arden is a prey to the blues. Both his sweethearts are dead, and he finds his attempt to engage his daughter's affections all in vain. He is an accomplished and talented worldling, but has not the qualities which fascinate the heart of youth:

"Sorrow, like the wind

O'er trees, stirs varying o'er each human mind;
Uprooting some, from some it doth but strew
Blossom and leaf which spring restores anew;
From some but shakes rich powers unknown in calm,
And wakes the trouble to extract the balm.

Let weaker natures suffer and despair,
Great souls snatch vigor from the stormy air;
Grief not the languor but the action brings;
And clouds the horizon but to nerve the wings."

The effect of sorrow on Morvale is to make a good Christian out of a very piratically disposed heathen. Finding all his hopes of happiness blighted, his thoughts turn back to his early life in the desert. But he soon reflects that such a life can never give him the pleasure which it did before he had enjoyed the luxuries of civilization, and he muses thus:

"Come then, my soul, thy thoughts thy desert be!
Thy dreams, thy comrades!-I escape to thee!
Within the gates unbar, the airs expand,
No bound but heaven confines the spirit's land!
Such luxury yet as what of nature lives

In art's lone wreck, the lingering instinct gives;
Joy in the sun and mystery in the star,
Light of the unseen, commune with the far;
Man's law his fellow, ev'n in scorn, to save,
And hope in some just world beyond the grave!'"

In short, he becomes very pious and unintel-
ligible. And while in this mood he suddenly
comes upon a sort of field-preacher, and hears him
detailing the end and character of Christ in a very
beautiful, though rather heterodox manner.
vale listens all day and then-

"Before the preacher bowed the pilgrim's head :
'Heaven to this bourne my rescued steps hath led,
Grieving, perplex'd, benighted, yet with dim
Hopes in God's justice-be my guide to Him:
In vain made man, I mourn and err!--restore
Childhood's pure soul and ready trust once more!'
The old man on the stranger gazed ;-unto
The stranger's side the young man softly drew,
And gently clasp'd his hand;-and on the three
The western sun shone still and smilingly ;
But, round, behind them, dark and lengthening lay
The massive shadow of the closing day.
'See,' said the preacher, 'Darkness hurries on,
But man, toil-wearied, grieves not for the sun;
He knows the light that leaves him shall return,
And hails the night because he trusts the morn!
Believe in God as in the sun,-and lo!
Along thy soul, morn's youth restored shall glow!
As rests the earth, so rest, O troubled heart;
Rest, till the burden of the cloud depart;
Rest, till the gradual veil from heaven withdrawn,
Renews thy freshness as it yields the dawn!'"

Mor

"Child, candid, simple, frank, to her allied,
Far more, the nature sever'd from her side,
With its fresh instincts, and wild verdure, fann'd
By fragrant winds from haunted Fable-land;
Then all the garden graces which betray
By the bough's riches the worn tree's decay.
What charms the ear of childhood ?-not the page
Of that romance which wins the sober sage;
Not the dark truths, like warning ghosts, which pass
Along the pilgrim path of Rasselas ;

Not wit's wrought crystal which, so coldly clear
Reflects, in Zadig, learning's icy sneer;
Unreasoning, wandering, stronger far the thrall
Of Aimée's cave, or young Aladdin's hall;
And so the childhood of the heart will find,
Charms in the poem of a child-like mind,
To which the vision of the world is blind!
Ev'n as the savage 'midst the desert's gloom,
Sees, hid from us, the golden fruitage bloom,
And, where the parchèd silence wraps us all,
Lists the soft lapse of the glad waterfall!"

66

Arden gives himself up to melancholy. His intellect becomes weakened; and remorse haunting the ruins of mental desolation," causes him to withdraw from the world of society. He carries the dust of his wife back to the hamlet where their unhappy acquaintance commenced, and visits the rambles, he falls into the river; and when almost tomb every midnight. In one of these nocturnal drowned, he is pulled out by Morvale, of course, who came there the Lord only knows how. Having thus proved his newly acquired Christian spirit, and declared to him his forgiveness, the hero returns to India. Arden falls into ill health. Though his career had been selfish and worldly, the author declares his originally noble nature in these fine lines,

"His eye not blind to Virtue; to his ear
Still spoke the music of the banished sphere;
Still in his thought the Ideal, though obscured,
Sham'd the rank meteor which his sense allur'd.
Wreck if he was, the ruin yet betray'd
The shatter'd fane for gods departed made;
And still, through weeds neglected and o'erthrown,
The blurr'd inscription show'd the altar-stone!"

Dying, he bequeathes his fortune "to his child;" but being his natural child, such a will was insufficient in law, and she is reduced to earn her bread in the village where her mother lived. Morvale

Morvale straightway becomes thoroughly regen- returns and finds her at the lady's grave, on a fine

summer evening. A tender scene then ensues, | far above anything in the well-digested lines of the selon reglè, and the author conjures up another of "New Timon," as the soaring grey peaks of the his favorite tableaux, over which the curtain falls, Andes are above a neat range of “Cheviot Hills." leaving the parties in the proper attitude of " marriage and happiness."

Before pouring out his scorn for Mr. Tennyson, he should have reflected on one thing; that while the author of the "New Timon" is only a man of ability, Mr. Tennyson is a man of genius. The author of Tinon is a man of taste and sense, and he runs into no absurdities; as to the rest, no very uncommon faculties were required to produce his Messrs. Cary and Hart, who published this first poen. Tennyson is also a man of taste and sense; American edition, have executed their task in a but that same great power which has produced his manner which deserves our thanks. It is beautifiner pieces has run him into many of those ridiculous fully printed in the most luxurious type, on clear, follies, into which every great poet has fallen. It is thick paper, and is enclosed in simple boards. true, that he has written a great deal of stuff as This is to our taste. We greatly prefer these plain, monstrously nonsensical as ever issued from the grey covers to those caskets of muslin, morocco brain of any other frenzied rhymster, be that one and gilding, which are the delight of the bookstores. whom you may; but he has also produced the When you take up the New Timon, you feel that "Ulysses" and the " Morte d'Arthur"-poems as you have in your hands a book and not a binding.