ck with flowers each holy bed--
Nor deem thyself forsaken,
When one by one, they fall away,
Who were to thee as summer day.

Weep for the babes of guilt, who sleep
With scanty rags stretch'd o'er them,
On the dark road, the downward steep
Of misery; while before them
Looms out afar the dreadful tree,
And solemn, sad Eternity!

Nor weep alone; but when to Heaven
The cords of sorrow bind thee,
Let kindest help to such be given
As God shall teach to find thee;
And, for the sake of those above,
Do deeds of Wisdom, Mercy, Love.

The child that sicken'd on thy knee,
Thou weeping Christian mother,
Had learn'd in this world, lispingly,
Words suited for another.
Oh, dost thou think, with pitying mind,
On untaught infants left behind?

BENJAMIN WEST.

BY LEIGH HUNT.

The two principal houses at which I visited, till the arrival of our
relations from the West Indies, were Mr. West's (late President of the
Royal Academy), in Newman-street, and Mr. Godfrey Thornton's (of the
distinguished city family), in Austin-Friars. How I loved the Graces in
one, and every thing in the other! Mr. West (who, as I have already
mentioned, had married one of my relations) had bought his house, I
believe, not long after he came to England; and he had added a gallery
at the back of it, terminating in a couple of lofty rooms. The gallery
was a continuation of the house-passage, and, together with one of those
rooms and the parlor, formed three sides of a garden, very small but
elegant, with a grass-plot in the middle, and busts upon stands under an
arcade. The gallery, as you went up it, formed an angle at a little
distance to the left, then another to the right and then took a longer
stretch into the two rooms; and it was hung with the artist's sketches
all the way. In a corner between the two angles was a study-door, with
casts of Venus and Apollo, on each side of it. The two rooms contained
the largest of his pictures; and in the farther one, after stepping
softly down the gallery, as if reverencing the dumb life on the walls,
you generally found the mild and quiet artist at his work; happy, for he
thought himself immortal.

I need not enter into the merits of an artist who is so well known, and
has been so often criticised. He was a man with regular, mild features;
and, though of Quaker origin, had the look of what he was, a pai