He deeply feels it in her winning endearments, in her burning
enthusiasms, in her gentle charities, in her meek and devotional
endurance, but above all, ah, far above all, he kneels to it, he
worships it in the faith, in the purity, in the strength, in the
altogether divine majesty of her _love._

Let me conclude by the recitation of yet another brief poem, one very
different in character from any that I have before quoted. It is by
Motherwell, and is called "The Song of the Cavalier." With our modern
and altogether rational ideas of the absurdity and impiety of warfare,
we are not precisely in that frame of mind best adapted to sympathize
with the sentiments, and thus to appreciate the real excellence of the
poem. To do this fully we must identify ourselves in fancy with the soul
of the old cavalier:

A steed! a steed! of matchless speede!
A sword of metal keene!
Al else to noble heartes is drosse--
Al else on earth is meane.
The neighynge of the war-horse prowde.
The rowleing of the drum,
The clangor of the trumpet lowde--
Be soundes from heaven that come.
And oh! the thundering presse of knightes,
When as their war-cryes welle,
May tole from heaven an angel bright,
And rowse a fiend from hell,

Then mounte! then mounte, brave gallants all,
And don your helmes amaine,
Deathe's couriers, Fame and Honor, call
Us to the field againe.
No shrewish teares shall fill your eye
When the sword-hilt's in our hand,--
Heart-whole we'll part, and no whit sighe
For the fayrest of the land;
Let piping swaine, and craven wight,
Thus weepe and puling crye,
Our business is like men to fight,
And hero-like to die!

* * * * *

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION.

Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an
examination I once made of the mechanism of _Barnaby Rudge_, says--"By
the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his _Caleb Williams_ backwards?
He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second
volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of
accounting for what had been done."

I cannot think this the _precise_ mode of procedure on the part of
Godwin--and indeed what he himself acknowledges is not altogether in
accordance with Mr. Dickens's idea--but the author of _Caleb Williams_
was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage derivable fro