'Till some would chide and others grieve;
But she had marked the rising flame,
And led and nourish'd it to fame!

When verse his mind to writing bore,
And genius shed its lustre there,
How proudly did she con it o'er,
Unconscious fell the blissful tear:
'Twas her's to lighten care's control,
And raise the drooping, pensive soul.

Her labour past, another breast,
Still lovely woman's, urged his pen--
Pure love was sent to make him blest,
And bid his fancies flow again:
She yielded to his minstrel pride
The heart, the hand to lips denied!

Quick roll'd the years in tranquil peace,
The peace by harmony begun.
And numbers charm'd each day of bliss,
That flowing verse and concord won:
His Mary's music soothed his woe,
And chased the tear that chanced to flow.

Death came--and Poetry was o'er,
The chords of song had ceas'd to thrill,
The Minstrel's name was heard no more,
But one true heart was heaving still--
His Mary's voice would nightly weave
Its lone, deep notes around his grave!

* * * * *

CLAUDE LORRAINE.

Lanzi, in his _History of Italian Painting_, gives the following
exquisite encomium on this prince of landscape painters:

"His landscapes present to the spectator an endless variety; so many
views of land and water, so many interesting objects, that, like an
astonished traveller, the eye is obliged to pause and measure the extent
of the prospect, and his distances of mountain and of sea, are so
illusive, that the spectator feels, as it were, fatigued by gazing. The
edifices and temples which so finely round off his compositions, the
lakes peopled with aquatic birds, the foliage diversified in conformity
to the different kinds of trees, all is nature in him; every object
arrests the attention of an amateur, every thing furnishes instruction
to a professor. There is not an effect of light, or a reflection in
water which he has not imitated; and the various changes of the day are
nowhere better represented than in Claude. In a word, he is truly the
painter who, in depicting the three regions of air, earth, and water,
has combined the whole universe. His atmosphere almost always bears the
impress of the sky at Rome, whose horizon is, from its situation, rosy,
dewy, and warm. He did not possess any peculiar merit in his figures,
which are insipid, and generally too much attenuated; hence he was
a