,
A holy mother is that sister sweet.
And that bold brother is a pastor meet
To guide, instruct, reprove a sinful age,
Almost I fear, and yet I fain would greet;
So far astray hath been my pilgrimage.

How shall a man fore-doom'd to lone estate,
Untimely old, irreverently gray,
Much like a patch of dusky snow in May,
Dead sleeping in a hollow--all too late--
How shall so poor a thing congratulate
The blest completion of a patient wooing,
Or how commend a younger man for doing
What ne'er to do hath been his fault or fate?
There is a fable, that I once did read.
Of a bad angel that was someway good,
And therefore on the brink of Heaven he stood,
Looking each way, and no way could proceed;
Till at the last he purged away his sin
By loving all the joy he saw within.

Here is another poem of very touching reference to his personal story:

"When I received this volume small,
My years were barely seventeen;
When it was hoped I should be all
Which once, alas! I might have been.

"And now my years are thirty-five,
And every mother hopes her lamb,
And every happy child alive,
May never be what now I am.

"But yet should any chance to look
On the strange medley scribbled here.
I charge thee, tell them, little book,
I am not vile as I appear.

"Oh! tell them though thy purpose lame
In fortune's race, was still behind,--
Though earthly blots my name defiled,
They ne'er abused my better mind.

"Of what men are, and why they are
So weak, so wofully beguiled,
Much I have learned, but better far,
I know my soul is reconciled."

Before we shut the volumes--which will often and often be re-opened by
their readers--we may instance, in proof of the variety of his verse,
some masterly heroic couplets on the character of Dryden, which will be
seen in a series of admirable "sketches of English poets" found written
on the fly-leaves and covers of his copy of _Anderson's British Poets_.
The successors of Dryden are not less admirably handled, and there are
some sketches of Wilkie, Dodsley, Langhorne, and rhymers of that class,
inimitable for their truth and spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[J] Poems by Hartley Coleridge. With a Memoir of his Life. By his
Brother. Two vols. Moxon.

From the Cincinnati Commercial Advertiser.

LYRA.--A LAMENT.

BY ALIC