But let it have its praise as belonging to the order which we may call "third among the sons of light," and its place on a sloping shelf, at the top of which shines in its starry lustre, the "Night Thoughts," perched

"Like some dark beauteous bird, whose plume

Is sparkling with a thousand eyes."

Robert Pollok was, himself, a remarkable man. All the anecdotes we have heard of him, leave the impression of a strong minded, courageous, determined, sarcastic, earnest, and somewhat dogmatic spirit; with a thoroughly formed and fledged opinion of himself-with a hectic heat in his blood,-holy contempt, rather than love, the element of his soul; and with a gay and bitter principle alternating in his mind and talk, now eliciting stormy glee, and now severe and pungent sarcasm. At college, he scarcely signalized himself at all;-how could he, whose thoughts were already consecrated to the "Course of Time." He was no great prizeman; none of those who effloresce early and die away soon,-who mortgage the chance of immortality for a gilded book,-who leave college loaded with laurels, and are never heard of more. For this he was at once too modest and too proud. Yet, during his curriculum, he wrote those little. tales, "Helen of the Glen," &c., which, though full of fine descriptive touches, are hardly equal to "Arcades" and "Lycidas," and will never, even in the deep wake of "The Course of Time," sail on to posterity. Every one has heard the fate of his first sermon in the hall,-the loud and silly laughter with which that boyish burst was received,the fierce retort which broke from his lips, and the lofty indignation with which he drew back the first feeler of his great poem into the den, and sheathed, for years, the bright weapon of his imagination. Every one knows, too,

the effect which the buzzing announcement of a great forthcoming work made, in Secession circles especially, and all the particulars of its after history. The despised of the hall" awoke one morning and found himself famous." He was straightway fawned on, and crouched to, by many who had derided him before. He bore ill the strictures of honest and sincere friends. A review of the poem appeared in Blackwood, written by a friend of our own, which, though by many thought too favourable, roused Pollok's ire, and terminated their friendship. It is told, in illustration of his excessive elation with his success, that, going in from his father's farm to Glasgow, it was proposed that he should ride, as he had often done when a boy, in a butter-milk cart. At this he stormed, and exclaimed, "What! do you imagine that the author of The Course of Time' would demean himself by riding in a milk cart?" although, had he known it, the chariot of the sun had not been a nobler vehicle. Meanwhile the arrow of death had fixed itself deeply in his vitals. He resolved on many plans of works never to be accomplished; among others, a huge libel upon the ancient heathen world, which he wanted the learning to have executed, and which would have been the grave of his reputation. He died at length, in a strange land, unknowing and unknown; but exchanging, we trust, the fast brightening blaze of earthly fame for the glories of Immanuel's land.

CHARLES LAMB.

It is a singular circumstance, in the present day, that the commercial and the literary character have, in certain

instances, been blended, without destroying each other. Literature, in our strange era, has entered the countingroom. Wit, of the rarest grain, has assisted in unpacking bales of goods. Genius, of the true and sovereign seed, has seated itself upon the tall three-legged stool, and worn a quill, instead of laurel, behind its "trembling ears." The genius, thus enthroned, has not, to be sure, been of the most romantic or ethereal order. The idea is ridiculous, of a clerk, now with fire and fury inditing a Mystery, and now taking in a consignment of muslin ;-dropping the pen, which had been dashing down the terrible syllables of a Walpurgis night, to make out an invoice of yarns. With all reverence for trade, in its various departments, we cannot believe it possible for a Goethe or a Schiller, a Byron or a Shelley, a Coleridge or a Wilson, to have been bred in a warehouse. Had they not been "wild and woodland rovers," known, through broad lands, to "every star and every wind that blows," with foot free to tread, as it listed, the deck or the heather, the soft sod or the incrusted lava, the sand or the snow; and, with faces embrowned by the sunbeams which had smote them by day, and spiritualized by the starry eyes which had shot down influence upon them by night, they could not have been what, to the honour of their species and the glory of the universe, they have become. Only conceive Goethe, with that lofty forehead, and stately form, bending over a ledger; or the wizard Coleridge, with those dreamy eyes, deep in calculation of the price of stocks. And yet Charles Lamb, Coleridge's dear friend, thus spent the greater portion of his life. But then Charles Lamb, though as true a genius as any of those we have named, was a genius of quite a different and inferior order. And we know not how much greater he might have become, had he received a diverse training, and instead of

one.

being a slave of a counting-room, had been free of that city, the builder and maker of which is God. Meanwhile, let us be thankful for him as he was. If not a passionate, and earnest, and high-toned poet, he was a gay and chirruping rhymster, the quaintest of humorists-the most delicate and refined of critics,-the most delightful of essayists,-the most genial of companions. We have a theory-nor do we hold it alone that heart and soul are always found together, that a man sees as he loves, and loves as he sees; that the distinction between cherubim, knowing ones, and seraphim, burning ones, (unknown to Scripture,) must be spurned away, as we mount up along the ladder of being, to the throne of Him, all whose perfections meet in that one transcendent love, which is his essence and his all. The heart has an eye of its own, and its vision is clear, far, and true. In Charles Lamb, at least, the two qualities were He reasoned with his heart,—with his heart he loved, with his heart he laughed, in heart he lived, moved, and had his being. And what a strange, wild, hot, large heart Lamb's was! It was only less than that which lies in Dumfries kirk-yard, belonging to the man of whom it was said, that if you touched his hand, it would have burnt yours. And, as this heart taught him to love the outcasts of society, to associate with its excommunicates, to cry halves to every pelt of calumny which assailed their devoted heads, so it led him, in search of matter for his genius, into the oddest and most out-of-the-way corners. From the beaten track of authorship he turned aside into a narrow zig-zag footpath, where he has, hitherto, had no follower. He shunned aerial heights of speculation, and vertigo raptures of passion; he cut no Gordian knots; he winked hard at all abstruse questions; he babbled not about green fields; he detested politics; he had small sympathies with

the spirit and literature of his age; but he sat still in his study, with Ben Jonson and Webster, or he puffed out poetry from his inseparable pipe-or he looked into Mary's face till quiet tears' bedimmed his eyelids-or he mounted the old Margate hoy, and enjoyed its strange humours-or he strolled forth alone into the "sweet security of streets"or he bent over a book-stall, rather in search of his former self than to read-or he threw in puns like small crackers between the cannonades of Coleridge's talk-or he shook poor Hazlitt by the hand till the blood was like to ooze out at his finger nails-or he threw forth the deepest strokes of sense and sagacity, as if he were ashamed of them-or he blurted out the strangest, wildest paradoxes till he made some people take him for a madman, and others for an atheist or he revelled like a Rabelais in the regions of abysmal nonsense. Lamb's works excel all men's in this, that they fully reflect and embalm his own singular character. Every line, every word, is just like him. In fact, he could write nothing that was not instinct with himself. In his smallest composition you find all his qualities-his serious laugh-his quaint originality-his intolerance of canthis instinctive attachment to all odd things, and all queer ambiguous people-his "very tragical mirth," the arabesque border of fun that edges his most serious speculations-his hatred of solitude-his love of cities-his shyness of all contested questions-his style so antique, yet racy, imitative, yet original-his passion for old English authors -his enjoyment of recondite beauties, and the fine subtlety of his critical judgment.

His poetry is the least poetical thing he has written. He wants the highest form of the " vision and the faculty divine." And that very veering between the serious and the comic, which renders it difficult for you to tell whether he be in jest