Surely this is the most populous city of the East! What a wilderness of people! What a jumble of all ranks and ages! What a multiplicity of sects and nations! What a variety of costumes! What a Babel of languages! What a screaming of beasts! What a tinkling of instruments! What a parcel of philosophers! Come let us be off! Stay a moment! I see a vast hubbub in the Hippodrome. What is the meaning of it I beseech you? That? Oh nothing! The noble and free citizens of Epidaphne being, as they declare, well satisfied of the faith, valor, wisdom, and divinity of their king, and having, moreover, been eye witnesses of his late superhuman agility, do think it no more than their duty to invest his brows (in addition to the Poetic Crown) with the wreath of victory in the foot race--a wreath which it is evident he _must_ obtain at the celebration of the next Olympiad. TO HELEN. Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfum'd sea, The weary wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the beauty of fair Greece, And the grandeur of old Rome. Lo! in that little window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand! The folded scroll within thy hand-- Ah! Psyche from the regions which Are Holy land! E. A. P. ON THE POETRY OF BURNS.[1] BY JAMES F. OTIS. [Footnote 1: This paper was written at the request of a literary society of which the author was a member, and the facts are gathered principally from Currie. Some extracts from the poet's own letters, and from an eloquent review of Lockhart's Burns, which appeared a few years since in the Edinburgh Review, are interwoven, and the whole made up as an essay to be "read not printed."]