Those volumes contain the weighty, if not wise opinions of one who, amidst penury and wretchedness, first learnt to moralize with companions as poor and wretched as himself. Even in his latter years, when sought by a monarch, and listened to with submission by all who approached him, his life can scarcely be called a happy one; yet he must have enjoyed some moments of triumph, if not of happiness, in contemplating the severe but well-merited rebuke which he inflicted upon that courtier, who could behold his difficulties with all the indifference that belongs to good breeding, and then thought fit, in the hour of his success, to encumber him with paltry praises. Those poems were the burning words of one '... Cradled into poetry by wrong, Who learnt in suffering what he taught in song.' The slightest foibles of this unhappy man have been brought into odious prominence, for he was the favourite author of his age, and therefore the property of the public. That boyish book absolved its author from a father's cares; and he was one to whom those cares would have been dearest joys, who loved to look upon a poor man's child. Listen to the music of his sadness-- 'I see the deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolv'd in star-showers, thrown: I sit upon the sands alone, The lightning of the noon-tide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion!' The sharp arrows of criticism were successfully directed against that next volume, and are said to have been the means of hurrying its author to that world of dreams and shadows, for which, in the critic's opinion, he was so pre-eminently fitted. 'Where is the youth, for deeds immortal born, Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn, And clustered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream Endymion's beauteous passion for a dream?' You already smile, my friend; but to know the heights and the depths, you must turn your attention to those numberless, unread, unheard-of volumes. Their authors did not suffer from the severity of the critic or the judge, but were only neglected. If Mephistopheles ever requires rest and seclusion--But, hark! is there not a laugh? and that grotesque face in the carved woodwork, how scoffingly it is looking down upon us!--SIR A. HELPS. _Thoughts in a Cloister._ THE TRUE POEM ON THE LIBRARY