But yet, with fortitude resigned, I thank the inflictor of the blow; Forbid the sigh, compose my mind, Nor let the gush of misery flow. The gloomy mantle of the night, Which on my sinking spirit steals, Will vanish at the morning light Which God, my East, my Sun, reveals." But pride and despair triumphed over this deep feeling of trust in Divine goodness. These words were the rending cry of the dying giant; they were the mighty poetry of forlornest misery; and, independently of the poems of Thomas Rowley, stamped beyond dispute the high poetical renown of Thomas Chatterton. They showed that, notwithstanding the unworthy subjects on which necessity had forced him to attempt the waste of his sublime endowments, and had forced him in vain, for the soul of poesy within him had refused to come forth at the call of booksellers and political squabblers, there lay still in his bosom the great heart and the great mind of the first-rate poet. But what were all these flashes and indications of the _mens divinior_ to the broad and dazzling display of it in the Rowley poems themselves; those poems which would have crowned any grown man a king in the realms of intellectual reputation, which yet the towering pride of the boy--"that damned, native, unconquerable pride" which he said "plunged him into distraction," that "nineteen twentieths of his composition," as he himself asserted it to be--flung determinedly from him? These poems, now admitted on all hands to be his own boyish compositions, and which, indeed, were thrust upon him as crimes by those of his cotemporaries who ought to have seen in them the proofs of a genius which should have been carefully and kindly cherished for the good of humanity and the honor of England--these are, indeed, more stately and beautiful than the fair pile of St. Mary, which had first awoke in his spirit the deathless love of poetry and antique romance. Ah! what a sad, beautiful, but heart-wringing romance is itself the story of Chatterton! His real history is this.