"He was always," says Mr. Smyth, one of his intimate companions, "extremely fond of walking in the fields, particularly in Redcliffe Meadows, and of talking about these manuscripts, and sometimes reading them there. 'Come,' he would say, 'you and I will take a walk in the meadow. I have got the cleverest thing for you imaginable; it is worth half a crown merely to have a sight of it, and to hear me read it to you.' When we arrived at the place proposed, he would produce his parchment, show it me, and read it to me. There was one spot in particular, full in view of the church, in which he would take a particular delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. Then, on a sudden, abruptly he would tell me, 'That steeple was burned down by lightning; that was the place where they formerly acted plays.' "His Sundays were commonly spent in walking alone into the country about Bristol, as far as the duration of daylight would allow; and from those excursions he never failed to bring home with him drawings of churches, or some other objects which had impressed his romantic imagination." This was one of those brief seasons in the poet's life when the heaven of his spirit has cast its glory on the nether world. When the light and splendor of his own beautiful creations invest the common earth, and he walks in the summer of his heart's joy. Every imagination seems to have become a reality; every hope to expand before him into fame and felicity; and the flowers beneath his tread, the sky above him, the air that breathes upon his cheek--all nature, in short, is full of the intoxication of poetic triumph. Bristol was become quite too narrow for him and Rowley; he shifted the field of his ambition to London, and the whole enchanted realm of his anticipations passed like a Fata Morgana, and was gone! There came instead, cruel contempt, soul-withering neglect, hunger, despair, and suicide! Such was the history of the life of one of England's greatest poets, who perished by his own hand, stung to the soul by the utter neglect of his country, and too proud to receive that bread from compassion which the reading public of Great Britain refused to his poetic labors. Of this, of Walpole, and Gray, and Sam Johnson, and the like, we will speak more anon. Here let us pause, and select a few specimens of that poetry which the people of England, at the latter end of the eighteenth century, would fain have suffered to perish with its author. That they may be better understood, we will modernize them. The chief of his Rowley Poems are, Ella, a tragical Interlude, or discoursing Tragedy; Godwin, the fragment of another Tragedy; the Battle of Hastings, the fragment of an Epic; and the Parliament of Sprytes, a most merry Interlude; with smaller ones. ROUNDELAY, SUNG BY THE MINSTRELS IN ELLA.