The following lines felicitously copied were thrown upon the stage to him one evening in a bouquet: TO EDWIN FORREST. When Time hath often turned his glass, And Memory scans the stage, Foremost shall then thy image pass, The Roscius of this age. The succeeding piece was written in 1828: TO EDWIN FORREST. Young heir of glory, Nature’s bold and favorite child, Nurtured ’midst matchless scenes of wild sublimity, Thou who wert reared with sternest truth in groves of song, To thy bare arm the grasp is given to hurl the bolts Of wrathful heaven. ’Tis thine, with thundering voice to shake Creation to her centre, wakening love or rage, And show thyself as angels or as demons are. Yea, thou didst seem, as at the shrine I saw thee kneel, With that bold brow of thine, like some creation bright From higher spheres breathing thy inspiration there, As if the Altar’s flame itself had lit thine eye With all the dazzling radiance of the Deity. Go forth. Already round thy brow the wreath of fame Amidst thy godlike locks with classic grace is curled. Go forth, and shine, the Sun of the dramatic world! R. M. WARD. The next piece, in which he is associated with his friend Halleck, is dated 1830: TO EDWIN FORREST. When genius, with creative fancy fraught, Moulds some new being for the sphere of thought, How the soul triumphs as, supremely blest, She opes her temple to the welcome guest, And her white pulses feel, with answering glow, The kindred breath of the young presence flow! Such moments, bright as hours in heaven that bring To spirits life, a pure and deathless thing, Cheer him who, warm with poesy’s true flame, Rears in his bower of song the birds of fame; He whose wreathed locks the lyric laurels wear Green with immortal dew and cloudless air; Whose harp-chords wildly echoed back the swell Of glory’s clarion when BOZZARIS fell,— Thus knew his human fancies grow divine, And poured their spirit o’er the happy line. Yet not alone the sons of song can feel This joy along the grateful senses steal. To him who, musing, waits at Nature’s throne, And feels, at last, her wealth become his own, Then with the priceless gold, thought, passion, heart, And feeling, tempers to the test of art, Blends these with poesy’s mysterious spell Strange as the sigh of ocean’s rosy shell, No less belong the triumph-throb, the pride To mind-ennobling sympathies allied, The deep emotion, and the rapture free; And these, O Forrest, we behold in thee!