,
The chastened passions sleep,
And dove-eyed Peace prevails.
And thou, fair Hope! when other comforts fail--
When night's thick mists descend--thy beacon flames,
Till glow the dark clouds round
With beams of promised bliss.
Thou failest not, when, mute the soothing lyre,
Lives thy unfading solace: sweet to raise
Thy eye, O quiet Hope,
And greet a friend in heaven!--
A friend, a brother, one whose awful throne
In holy fear heaven's mightiest sons approach:
Man's heart to feel for man--
To save him God's great power!
Conqueror of death, joy of the accepted soul,
Oh, wonders raise no doubt when told of thee!
Thy way past finding out,
Thy love, can tongue declare?
Cheered by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storm;
Held by thy hand, the floods assail in vain;
With grief is blent a joy,
And beams the vault of death.

Passing, in one of my walks this autumn, the cave in which I used to
spend in boyhood so many happy hours with Finlay, I found it smoking, as
of old, with a huge fire, and occupied by a wilder and more careless
party than even my truant schoolfellows. It had been discovered and
appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on
its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the
gipsies of other days, had without consulting factor or landlord, at
once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its former
occupants. They were a savage party, with a good deal of the true gipsy
blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down class of
apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish.
From what I had previously heard about gipsies, I was not prepared for a
mixture of this kind; but I found it pretty general, and ascertained
that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was
exemplified by the case of the one Irish woman. Her gipsy husband had
served as a soldier, and had married her when in the army. I have been
always exceedingly curious to see man in his rude elements--to study him
as the savage, whether among the degraded classes of our own country,
or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and voyagers, in his
aboriginal state; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and
to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company. They at first
seeme