They little think, in mirth and din, The Spirit steed sent up the neigh; It rang along the vaulted sky: the shore It rang in ears that knew the sound; And hot, flushed cheeks are blanched with fear. "I cannot sit;-I needs must go: Strong man! His hoofs upon the door-stone, see, Thy hair pricks up!—“O, I must bear Art mad to mount that Horse!" A power within, He's now upon the Spectre's back, Borne by an unseen power, right on he rides, He goes with speed; he goes with dread! The Horse stops short,-his feet are on the verge! And nigh, the tall ship's burning on, Her hot, red flame is beating, all the night, On man and Horse, in their cold, phosphor light. Through that cold light the fearful man How fast he moves the lip! And yet he does not speak, or make a sound! "I look, where mortal man may not,- I see them in their sleep. A dreadful power is mine, which none can know, Save he who leagues his soul with death and woe." Thou mild, sad mother, silent moon, Thy last low, melancholy ray Shines towards him. Quit him not so soon! Despair and death are with him; and canst thou, O, thou wast born for worlds of love; Burn softer; earth, in silvery veil, seems heaven. The far, low west is bright no more. How still it is! No sound is heard At sea, or all along the shore, But cry of passing bird. Thou living thing,-and dar'st thou come so near And long that thick, red light has shone But now its lurid fire less fiercely burns: That Spectre-Steed now slowly pales, He doth not hear their joyous call; he sees A stranger to earth's beauty, human love,- The sun beats hot upon his head. Of some unearthly horror, all he knows,— But, see, he moves, he turns, as asking where Go, get ye home, and end your mirth! They're fled the isle; and o'er the earth As he his door-stone passed, the air blew chill. He ne'er shall hear it more,-more taste his wine! Day came again; and up he rose, No shadowy-coming night, to bring him rest,- He walks within the day's full glare, Terror and madness drive him back to men; Time passes on, and he grows bold; But still at heart there lies a secret fear; For now the year's dread round is drawing near. He laughs, but he is sick at heart; That will be told: it needs no words from thee. Bond-slave of sin! again the light! And nights must shine and darken o'er thy head, Again the ship lights all the land; Gone ship and Horse; but Lee's last hope is o'er; His spirit heard that Spirit say, Ay, cling to earth as sailor to the rock! He goes! So thou must loose thy hold, Nor sit thee in the calm Of gentle thoughts, where good men wait their close. Who's sitting on that long, black ledge, So weak and pale? A year and little more, And on the shingle now he sits, And rolls the pebbles 'neath his hands; Then tries each cliff, and cove, and jut, that bounds They ask him why he wanders so, From day to day, the uneven strand? "I wish, I wish that I might go! But I would go by land; And there's no way that I can find; I've tried All day and night!"—He seaward looked, and sighed. It brought the tear to many an eye, He shook.-"You know the Spirit-Horse I ride! He views the ships that come and go, Making it light around them, as they keep Their course right onward through the unsounded deep. And where the far-off sand-bars lift Into the air; then rush to mimic strife: But not to Lee. He sits alone; That asking eye. O, how his worn thoughts crave—- The rocks are dripping in the mist Lee hearkens to their voice." I hear, I hear And now the mist seems taking shape, Lee kneels, but cannot pray.-Why mock him so! And he must listen till the stars grow dim, Should bind the soul with bands of fear; The man should dread to hear. But sin hath broke the world's sweet peace,-un strung The harmonious chords to which the angels sung. In thick dark nights he'd take his seat With savage roar, then pause and gather strength, But he no more shall haunt the beach, Watching the swaying weeds:-another day, To-night the charmed number's told. Twice have I come for thee," it said. So hears his soul, and fears the gathering night; Again he sits in that still room; Weakened with fear, lone, haunted by remorse, Poor, shattered wretch, there waits he that pale Horse. Not long he waits. Where now are gone Of airy glory?-Sudden darkness fell; All but the ocean's dull, low moan. "Tis close at hand; for there, once more, He treads the waters as a solid floor; "I know that I must go with thee: It was not I alone that did the deed!"— Lee cannot turn. There is a force "O, spare me," cries the wretch," thou fearful One!" "The time is come,-I must not go alone." "I'm weak and faint. O, let me stay!" Hard breathes the Spectre through the silent night; He's on the beach; but stops not there; Holds him by fearful spell; he cannot leap: It lights the sea around their track,— The earth has washed away its stain; The sealed-up sky is breaking forth, Mustering its glorious hosts again, From the far south and north; The climbing moon plays on the rippling sea. -O, whither on its waters rideth Lee? EDMUND KEAN'S LEAR-FROM THE PAPER ON KEAN'S ACTING. It has been so common a saying, that Lear is the most difficult of characters to personate that we had taken it for granted no man could play it so as to satisfy us. Perhaps it is the hardest to represent. Yet the part which has generally been supposed the most difficult, the insanity of Lear, is scarcely more so than that of the choleric old king. Inefficient rage is almost always ridiculous; and an old man, with a broken-down body and a mind falling in pieces from the violence of its uncontrolled passions, is in constant danger of exciting, along with our pity, a feeling of contempt. It is a chance matter to which we may be most move.l. And this it is which makes the opening of Lear so difficult. We may as well notice here the objection which some make to the abrupt violence with which Kean VOL. II.-7 begins in Lear. If this be a fault, it is Shakespeare, and not Kean, who is to blame; for, no doubt, he has conceived it according to his author. Perhaps, however, the mistake lies in this case, where it does in most others, with whose who put themselves into the seat of judgment to pass upon great men. In most instances, Shakespeare has given us the gradual growth of a passion, with such little accompaniments as agree with it, and go to make up the whole man. In Lear, his object being to represent the beginning and course of insanity, he has properly enough gone but a little back of it, and introduced to us an old man of good feelings enough, but one who had lived without any true principle of conduct, and whose unruled passions had grown strong with age, and were ready, upon a disappointment, to make shipwreck of an intellect never strong. To bring this about, he begins with an abruptness rather unusual; and the old king rushes in before us, with his passions at their height, and tearing him like fiends. Kean gives this as soon as the fitting occasion offers itself. Had he put more of melancholy and depression, and less of rage into the character, we should have been much puzzled at his so suddenly going mad. It would have required the change to have been slower; and besides, his insanity must have been of another kind. It must have been monotonous and complaining, instead of continually varying; at one time full of grief, at another playful, and then wild as the winds that roared about him, and fiery and sharp as the lightning that shot by him. The truth with which he conceived this was not finer than his execution of it. Not for a moment, in his utmost violence, did he suffer the imbecility of the old man's anger to touch upon the ludicrous, when nothing but the justest conception and feeling of the character could have saved him from it. It has been said that Lear is a study for one who would make himself acquainted with the workings of an insane mind. And it is hardly less true, that the acting of Kean was an embodying of these workings. His eye, when his senses are first forsaking him, giving an inquiring look at what he saw, as if all before him was undergoing a strange and bewildering change which confused his brain,-the wandering, lost motions of his hands, which seemed feeling for something familiar to them, on which they might take hold and be assured of a safe reality,-the under monotone of his voice, as if he was questioning his own being, and what surrounded him,-the continuous, but slight, oscillating motion of the body, -all these expressed, with fearful truth, the bewildered state of a mind fast unsettling, and making vain and weak efforts to find its way back to its wonted There was a childish, feeble gladness in the eye, and a half piteous smile about the mouth, at times, which one could scarce look upon without tears. As the derangement increased upon him, his eye lost its notice of objects about him, wandering over things as if he saw them not, and fastening upon the creatures of his crazed brain. The helpless and delighted fondness with which he clings to Edgar as an insane brother, is another instance of the justness of Kean's conceptions. Nor does he lose the air of insanity, even in the fine moralizing parts, and where he inveighs against the corruptions of the world: There is a madness even in his reason. reason. The violent and immediate changes of the passions in Lear, so difficult to manage without jarring upon us, are given by Kean with a spirit and with a fitness to nature which we had hardly thought possible. These are equally well done both before and after the loss of reason. The most difficult scene. in this respect, is the last interview between Lear and his daughters, Goneril and Regan,-(and how wonderfully does Kean carry it through!)-the scene which ends with the horrid shout and ery with which he runs out mad from their presence, as if his very brain had taken fire. The last scene which we are allowed to have of Shakespeare's Lear, for the simply pathetic, was played by Kean with unmatched power. We sink down helpless under the oppressive grief. It lies like a dead weight upon our hearts. We are denied even the relief of tears; and are thankful for the shudder that seizes us when he kneels to his daughter in the deploring weakness of his crazed grief. It is lamentable that Kean should not be allowed to show his unequalled powers in the last scene of Lear, as Shakespeare wrote it; and that this mighty work of genius should be profaned by the miserable, mawkish sort of by-play of Edgar's and Cordelia's loves: Nothing can surpass the impertinence of the man who made the change, but the folly of those who sanctioned it. INFLUENCE OF HOME-FROM THE PAPER ON DOMESTIC LIFE. Home gives a certain serenity to the mind, so that everything is well defined, and in a clear atmosphere, and the lesser beauties brought out to rejoice in the pure glow which floats over and beneath them from the earth and sky. In this state of mind afflictions come to us chastened; and if the wrongs of the world cross us in our door-path, we put them aside without anger. Vices are about us, not to lure us away, or make us morose, but to remind us of our frailty and keep down our pride. We are put into a right relation with the world; neither holding it in proud scorn, like the solitary man, nor being carried along by shifting and hurried feelings, and vague and careless notions of things, like the world's man. We do not take novelty for improvement, or set up vogue for a rule of conduct; neither do we despair, as if all great virtues had departed with the years gone by, though we see new vices, frailties, and follies taking growth in the very light which is spreading over the earth. Our safest way of coming into communion with mankind is through our own household. For there our sorrow and regret at the failings of the bad are in proportion to our love, while our familiar intercourse with the good has a secretly assimilating influence upon our characters. The domestic man has an independence of thought which puts him at ease in society, and a cheerfulness and benevolence of feeling which seem to ray out from him, and to diffuse a pleasurable sense over those near him, like a soft, bright day. As domestic life strengthens a man's virtue, so does it help to a sound judgment and a right balancing of things, and gives an integrity and propriety to the whole character. God, in his goodness, has ordained that virtue should make its own enjoyment, and that wherever a vice or frailty is rooted out, something should spring up to be a beauty and delight in its stead. But a man of a character rightly cast, has pleasures at home, which, though fitted to his highest nature, are common to him as his daily food; and he moves about his house under a continued sense of them, and is happy almost without heeding it. Women have been called angels, in love-tales and sonnets, till we have almost learned to think of angels as little better than woman. Yet a man who knows a woman thoroughly, and loves her truly,and there are women who may be so known and loved,-will find, after a few years, that his relish for the grosser pleasures is lessened, and that he has grown into a fondness for the intellectual and refined without an effort, and almost unawares. He has been led on to virtue through his pleasures; and the delights of the eye, and the gentle play of that passion which is the most inward and romantic in our nature, and which keeps much of its character amidst the concerns of life, have held him in a kind of spiritualized existence: he shares his very being with one who, a creature of this world, and with something of the world's frailties, is yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light. With all the sincerity of a companionship of feeling, cares, sorrows, and enjoyments, her presence is as the presence of a purer being, and there is that in her nature which seems to bring him nearer to a better world. She is, as it were, linked to angels, and in his exalted moments, he feels himself held by the same tie. In the ordinary affairs of life, a woman has a greater influence over those near her than a man. While our feelings are, for the most part, as retired as anchorites, hers are in play Lefore us. We hear them in her varying voice; we see them in the beautiful and harmonious undulations of her movements, in the quick shifting hues of her face, in her eye, glad and bright, then fond and suffused; her frame is alive and active with what is at her heart, and all the outward form speaks. She seems of a finer mould than we, and cast in a form of beauty, which, like all beauty, acts with a moral influence upon our hearts; and as she moves about us, we feel a movement within which rises and spreads gently over us, harmonizing us with her own. And can any man listen to this,-Can his eye, day after day, rest upon this, and he not be touched by it, and made better? The dignity of a woman has its peculiar character; it awes more than that of man. His is more physical, bearing itself up with an energy of courage which we may brave, or a strength which we may struggle against; he is his own avenger, and we may stand the brunt. A woman's has nothing of this force in it; it is of a higher quality, and too delicate for mortal touch. RICHARD DABNEY. RICHARD DABNEY was born about 1787, in the county of Louisa, Virginia, of a family settled for several generations in that state, and which had, in early times of England, been Daubeney. Earlier still it is said to have been D'Aubigny or D'Aubigné, of France. His mother had been a Meriwether, aunt to Meriwether Lewis, who, with Captain Clarke, in Jefferson's presidency, explored the sources of the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. Richard's father, Samuel Dabney, was a wealthy farmer and planter, with twelve children. None of them were regularly or thoroughly educated. Richard's instruction was but in the plainest rudiments of knowledge, till his sixteenth or eighteenth year, when he went to a school of Latin and Greek. In these languages he strode forward with great rapidity; learning in one or two years more than most boys learned in six. Afterwards he was an assistant teacher in a Richmond school. From the burning theatre of that city, in December, 1811, he barely escaped with life, receiving hurts which he bore with him to his grave. In 1812, however, he published in Richmond a thin duodecimo volume of Poems, Original and Translated, which, though of some merit, mortifyingly failed with the public, and he then endea vored to suppress the edition. Going to Philadelphia with general undefined views to literary pursuits, he published, through Mathew Carey, a much improved edition of his poems in 1815. This too was, as the publisher said, "quite a losing concern." Yet it had pieces remarkable for striking and vigorous thought; and the diversity of translation (from Grecian, Latin, and Italian poets) evinced ripeness of scholarship and correctness of taste. In the mechanical parts of poetry-in rhythm and in rhymes-he was least exact. Nearly half the volume consisted of translations. A short one from Sappho is not inelegant, or defective in versification: I cannot 'tis in vain to try- Dabney was said to have written a large portion of Carey's "Olive Branch, or Faults on Both Sides," designed to show how flagrantly both of the great parties (Federal and Republican) had sinned against their country's good, and against their own respective principles, whenever party interests or party rage commanded. In a few years more he returned to his native place, where his now widowed mother, with some of her children, lived upon her farm. Here he spent the rest of his life; in devouring such books and periodicals as he could find-in visits among a few of the neighboring farmers-and in such social enjoyments as rural Virginia then afforded, in which juleps and grog-drinking made a fearfully large part. Dabney had become an opium-eater, led on, it seems, by prescriptions of that poison for some of his injuries in the burning theatre. To this he added strong drink; and in his last years he was seldom sober when the means of intoxication were at hand. Some friends who desired to see his fine classical attainments turned to useful account, prevailed upon him to take a school of five or six boys, and that pursuit he continued nearly to the last. Dnring his country life, in 1818, was published a poem of much classic beauty, called "Rhododaphne, or the Thessalian Spell," which was attributed to Dabney by a Richmond Magazine, but he always denied the authorship; and Carey the publisher, in a letter dated 1827, says, "It was an English production, as my son informs me." Dabney died in November, 1825, at the age of thirty-eight; prominent among the myriads to whom the drinking usages of America have made appropriate the deep self-reproach We might have won the meed of fame, The prevailing traits of his mind were memory and imagination. His excellence was only in li terature. For mathematics and the sciences he had no strong taste. He was guileless, and had warm affections, which he too guardedly abstained from displaying, as he carried his dislike of courtliness and professions to the opposite extreme of cynicism.* YOUTH AND AGE 1. As numerous as the stars of heaven, Are the fond hopes to mortals given; But two illume, with brighter ray, The morn and eve of life's short day. 2. Its glowing tints, on youth's fresh days, And bids its opening joys declare That all its minutes, all its hours Shall breathe of pleasure's sweetest flowers. But false the augury of that star The Lord of passion drives his car, Swift up the middle line of heaven, And blasts each flower that hope had given. 3. Its gentle beams, on man's last days, THE TRIBUTE. When the dark shades of death dim the warrior's eyes, When the warrior's spirit from its martial form flies, The proud rites of pomp are performed at his grave, And the pageants of splendor o'er its cold inmate wave; Though that warrior's deeds were for tyrants performed, And no thoughts of virtue that warrior's breast warmed, Though the roll of his fame is the record of death, And the tears of the widow are wet on his wreath. What then are the rites that are due to be paid, To the virtuous man's tomb, and the brave warrior's shade! To him, who was firm to his country's love? To him whom no might from stern virtue could move? Be his requiem, the sigh of the wretched bereft; We are indebted for this sketch of Richard Dabney to a gentleman of Virginia, Lucian Minor, Esq., of Louisa County. + Col. E. Carrington, a revolutionary patriot, who died in the autumn of 1810, in Richmond, Virginia. |