A Mortal. Blessed are the dead Who die in the Lord! And though the waters be o'er earth outspread, Yet, as his word, Be the decree adored! He gave me life-he taketh but The breath which is his own: And though these eyes should be for ever shut, Nor longer this weak voice before his throne Be heard in supplicating tone, Still blessed be the Lord, For what is past, For that which is: For all are his, From first to last Time-space-eternity-life-death-- The vast known and immeasurable unknown. He made, and can unmake; And shall I, for a little gasp of breath, Blaspheme and groan? No; let me die, as I have lived, in faith, Nor quiver, though the universe may quake! Chorus of Mortals. Where shall we fly? Not to the mountains high; For now their torrents rush with double roar, To meet the ocean, which, advancing still, Already grasps each drowning hill, Nor leaves an unsearch'd cave. Enter a Woman. Woman. Oh, save me, save! Our valley is no more: My father and my father's tent, My brethren and my brethren's herds, The pleasant trees that o'er our noonday bent And sent forth evening songs from sweetest birds, Our pastures green, No more are to be seen. When to the mountain cliff I climb'd this morn, I turn'd to bless the spot, And not a leaf appear'd about to fall; And now they are not!— Why was I born? Japh. To die! in youth to die; And happier in that doom, Than to behold the universal tomb Which I Am thus condemn'd to weep above in vain. [The Waters rise: Men fly in every direction; many are overtaken by the waves; the Chorus of Mortals disperses in search of safety up the Mountains; Japhet remains upon a rock, while the Ark floats towards him in the distance. END OF PART FIRST. THE GIULI TRE. OUR readers would miss one of the good things that there are in this world, or rather three of them, if they were not made aware of the existence of our facetious friends, the Giuli Tre. The author says, in one of his sonnets, that as there are Three Fates, and Three Harpies, and Cerberus has Three Heads, so Three Giuli contain some fatal mystery of triplicity hieroglyphical of his troubles. Had he lived now, he would have added the three members of the Holy Alliance. On the other hand, we are rather reminded of something triple and pleasant; of the three corners of his own cocked hat, or the Three Graces, or the three Miss Smiths (who were perpetually recurring to a friend of ours), or above all, of the three Mrs. Wigginses who haunt an old gentleman of that name in the farce. Had our author been acquainted with those ladies, he would unquestionably have devoted a sonnet to their memory, under the title of the Tre Vigginise. The Giuli Tre (Three Juliuses, so called, we suppose, from a head of one of the Popes of that name) are three pieces of money, answering to about fifteen-pence of our coin, for which the Italian poet, Casti, says he was pestered from day to day by an unblushing creditor. The poet accordingly had his revenge on him, and incarcerated the vermin in immortal amber, by devoting to the subject no less than 200 sonnets, which he published under the above 66 title. The Abate Casti is known to the English public, by means of Mr. Stewart Rose's pleasant abridgment, as the author of the Animali Parlanti; and he is also known to what we suppose must be called the English private, as the writer of a set of tales in verse, which an acquaintance of ours says every body has read, and nobody acknowledges to have read." The Animali Parlanti is justly celebrated throughout Europe. The tales have the undeniable merit which a man of genius puts into whatever work he condescends to perform; but they are a gross mistake in things amatory, and furnish one of those portentous specimens of excess on the side of indecent writing, which they who refer every detail of the world to Providence could only account for by supposing, that some such addition of odd fuel was necessary to the ordinary inflammability of the young and unthinking. The work before us, as the Florentine editor observes, is in every respect unexceptionable. He informs us, that it is not liable to a charge brought against the Abate's other works, of being too careless in point of style, and unidiomatic. The Giuli Tre, according to him, speak the true Italian language; so that the recommendation they bring with them to foreigners is complete; and we really think it would be worth the while of some bookseller to print a London edition. It would make a neat pocketvolume; and we would lend him our copy for the purpose, if he could not get one at home. We proceed to give some specimens. The fertility of fancy and learned allusion, with which the author has written his 200 sonnets on a man's coming to him every day and asking him for Tre Giuli, is inferior only to what Butler or Marvell might have made of it. The very recurrence of the words becomes a good joke. Let statesmen say what they will of "the principle of resurrection," the principles of imagination and continuation are the intense things in this our mortal state. As the perpetual accompaniment and exaggeration of one image is the worst thing in sorrow, so it is the merriest thing in a piece of wit. A metaphysician once attempted to persuade us, that there was nothing laughable in Andrew Marvell's account of the amphibious Dutch and their cousins-german the fishes. We answered him by an irrepressible fit of laughter at the recollection. We hope nobody will go about to take our Giuli Tre out of our pockets, or to persuade us that they are not three of the pleasantest, readiest, and yet never-to-be-forthcoming pieces of money extant. We are grateful to the mere sound, to the very chink of their names. It has amply repaid us for our attempt to translate some of it into English metal, though the reader may lose by the exchange. The Giuli Tre are henceforth among our standing jokes, among our Lares and Penates of pleasantry "Familiar in our mouths as household words." Nobody that we have met with in Italy could resist the mention of them. The priest did not pretend it. The ladies were glad they could find something to approve in a poet of so erroneous a reputation. The man of the world laughed as merrily as he could. The patriot was happy to relax his mustachios. Even the bookseller, of whom we bought them, laughed with a real laugh, evidently not the mercenary and meretricious grin with which he laughs at the customer instead of the book, when he has the luck to get rid of some heavy facetiosity by a chance sale,-not "the bought smile, Loveless, joyless, unendeared, Casual fruition." |