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Long with the billows strove the boat, and from its bosom

dark,

Rose sounds of wild and bitter grief, to wail that noble bark, And when that wasted band were cast upon a foreign shore, Enshrined within their faithful souls, those buried friends they bore.

Proud dauntless hearts that night did rest beneath the billows high,

And temples, white with honour'd years, and woman's love

lit eye;

While twining round its mother's breast, in silence calm and deep,

Sweet slumbering innocence went down, amid the pearls to sleep.

Yes, some to ocean's grasp did yield, without a struggling breath,

So tranquilly their mortal dream had melted into death,
That still the soul bewilder'd sought the vanish'd scenes of

time,

Even when eternity's dread shore spread out in

lime.

ON SHAKSPEARE'S LOVER.

And then, a lover;

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eye-brow—As you like it.

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The language of lovers in all civilized society has been usually tinctured with enthusiasm. Their description of successful love, and their complaints of slighted passion, are in most instances exhibited in a style very unsuitable to the views and feelings of the grave moralist; such was the character of Jaques, who has called forth the image of the roaring furnace, to pourtray the effects of the lover's distress; intending thereby a satire upon the extravagance of the passion itself.

On this subject, however, the licentia poetica has taken a range so extensive as to render it no difficult task to show that our poet has not, even in what he intended as a caricature, gone beyond either his predecessors, with whose writings he was probably unacquainted, or those who have succeeded him, in his description of the effects of love.

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In a critique upon an ode of Sappho, in which the writer has collected and displayed a great variety of anxieties and tortures, that are considered as the inseparable attendants upon jealous love. Longinus, the great author of the Sublime, has observed that the description is an exact copy of nature, and that all the circumstances which follow one another in such a hurry of sentiments, though they appear repugnant to each other, are constantly experienced in the frenzies of love " sighing like furnace." Ovid, the great master of the art, speaking of the effects of love, says,

What piteous sobs, as if his heart would break,

Shake his swoln cheek.

Even the stern god of war, when affected with this passion, is exhibited by Anacreon as groaning deeply :

Mars, with sudden pains possest

Sighed from out his inmost breast.

And our own poet, Thomson, represents the lover as swelling "the breeze with sighs unceasing." Again, on the same subject, he says,—

Straight the fierce storm involves his mind anew,
Flames through the nerves, and boils along the veins.

With these authorities Shakspeare cannot be accused of having trespassed beyond the poetical licence, although in satyrizing the passion of love he has described the subject of it, sighing like furnace." The bellowing noise of a furnace is rather characteristic of the agonies of a mind which has no other method of venting the passion, with which it is affected, than by deep and loud groans;-of a mind distracted through despair of a remedy:

"To cure the pains of love, alas! no plant avails."

This part of Shakspeare's description sets the painter's art at defiance. Canvass is not capable of exhibiting sighs, however deep, nor groans, though loud as the boisterous furnace; we have therefore in our picture the lover

With a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eye-brow.

The extravagance of the passion is very aptly and characteristically described by the seemingly unimportant and trivial part of the person who is the object of it. Inconsiderable, however, as this part of the lady's face may to some appear, yet the ancients paid a special regard to it, holding it in high estimation, supposing that a fine eye-brow constituted an essential part of beauty. Anacreon, in his direction to a painter for drawing the picture of his mistress, among other remarks, gives particular orders for the accurate delineation of the eye-brow :

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With care the sable brows extend,
And in two arches nicely bend,

That the fair space which lies between

The meeting shade, may scarce be seen.

Shakspeare and Spencer have concurred in attributing beauty to the eye-lid:

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes.

Winter's Tale.

Upon her eye-lids many graces sate,
Under the shadow of her even brows.

Fairy Queen.

Fine eye-brows and fine hair are everywhere represented as of great importance in contributing to female beauty. Hence the high value at which Horace estimated a lock of his mistress' hair :

Say, shall the wealth by kings possest,
Or the diadems they wear,

Or all the treasures of the east,

Purchase one lock of Licymria's hair?

The reader will likewise recollect an exquisitely fine couplet in The Rape of the Lock :

Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.

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