THE MAYFLOWER. DOWN in the bleak December bay Over the bay and over the ship Neither the desert, nor the sea On mother, maid, and child, may bring, For now the day begins to dip, Over the bay, and over the ship But Carver leads (in heart and health And Rose, his wife, unlocks a chest- Have seen, in visions of the air, While pillowed on the breast of prayer (When now the day began to dip, The night began to lower Over the bay, and over the ship The Canaan of their wilderness A boundless empire of success; And seen the years of future nights It would have cheered a thought of woe, Over the bay, and over the ship A POT POURRI OF POETRY AND PARODY. MARGARET.-CLARIBEL.-ZOE. CLARIBEL.-Zoe, may I ask why, in spite of the promise that you early gave of poetical ability, no one has seen of late any of the productions of your pen? ZOE (with animation.)-Pretty good poetry is like a pretty good egg. Who ever relished an egg that was at all doubtful? CLARIBEL.-True: poetry is.a luxury; one must have it of the best, or not at all. ZOE.-I have been looking this evening through this volume. 'Tis one of the old Annuals so popular in England, when poetical glow-worms were treated as great lights, and shams of every kind were in "first fashion, for Royal Turveydrop was gentleman of Europe,” and England is too loyal not to follow the example of her kings. In those days poetastering was at its height, and society was afflicted with a flux of rhyme. She put him on a little shroud, A chaplet on his head, And gathered early violets To strew above the dead. once True poetry ought to be tonic-strengthening, refreshing, and stimulating. Such honored "little things as this shroud," do not even rise to the dignity of bosh:-they are mere twaddle,-the paper baskets of poetry; trumpery nothings, made out of materials the most flimsy which become in the making flimsier still. CLARIBEL.-Bosh! What is bosh? ZOE.-The Turkish word for nothing. Bosh is a wind-bag composition, whether in poetry or prose. MARGARET.-There is great distinction to be drawn between " and "twaddle "bosh." Of the former any poet's-corner in Annual, or Country Newspaper, will furnish us a prompt example-some affecting historical or familiar incident done into fluent rnyme. The latter is less common. It has sound and fury--but not sense. It partakes of galimatias and phébus.* It soars into the regions of It has the incomprehensibly sublime. varieties. The Bosh grandiloquent, and the Bosh transcendental being prominent kinds. Of the former, many admirable specimens may be found in modern fiction. "Isabel,' he exclaimed, in a voice that ran through her heart like ice"—is an instance I read recently in a popular work. But the richest preserve of striking passages of "bosh" is to be found, I think, in the works of a modern Bard, called the "Poet of the West" by his admirers. Hear him describing the sensations of a bridegroom. He stood before the altar; and a shade Of darkness flashed one moment o'er his brow, Then melted into beauty on his lip. And by the same author is a poem called the "Wreck at Sea" of which the first verse and the last are printed and published as follows: The sun was low-a flood of light And night's dark robes were journeying up La galimatias renferme uno obscurité profonde, et n'a de soi-même nul sens raisonable. Le phébus n'est pas si obscur et a un brillant qui signifle ou semble signifler quelque chose, lo soleil y entre d'ordinaire et c'est ce qui a donné lieu en notre langue au nom de phébus, ce n'est pas que quelque fois le phébus ne devienne obscur jusqu'à n'être pas entendu, mais alors lo galimatias s' en joint, ce ne sont que brillans et ténèbres de tous cotés. BоNпом. Entretien d'Ariste et d'Eugène. "Seek not," she cried "oh gallant stranger, For hapless Adelgitha's love. Whose arm should now have set me free, For him who's dead or false to me."- It was indeed her own true knight. ZOE. This from the man who wrote "The Rainbow," the "Last Man," "Hohenlinden," "Lord Ullin's Daughter," "O'Connor's Child!" Oh! the corruptive influences of second-rate adulation. One wonders in what frame of mind he could have been, to sit down and write any thing in this strain. Perhaps it was penned after the excitement of some great effort, and so served the purpose of the blockheads whose society was a relief to Madame du Barry, "J'aimais à leur voir," said she, "car me reposait l'imagination." It needs no tax upon one's wits to write verses of that kind. Trepan me, and I could compose you portfolis of such stuff without a brain. MARGARET.-Claribel smiles. ZOE.-Don't you know, my dear Claribel, that the criticisms of an amateur are sharper than those written by the everpointed pencil, or sharpest steel pen of a critic by profession? Just as in speech and private correspondence, we say a thousand things more cutting than any we should choose to print and publish to a friend's disadvantage. In private life we are all of the family of Bludyer. We may not, indeed, cut up a three-volumed book, and take a dinner and pint of sherry out of it at a coffee-room, but we make ourselves agreeable guests at the expense of the victim we discuss, and amass conversational capital out of the weakness of our associates. Bludyer would go dinnerless if authors had no faults, and some of us would be unwelcome company enough but for our little talent in exposing the least foibles of a friend. But to prove to you the worth of my recipe-the facility of "doing" an incident into fluent rhymelet us each take a pen, and see how many of such things we can strike off this evening. MARGARET. On what subjects. ZOE.-On any; "The Fall of Wolfe," "The Death of Guatamozin"-any of the stock subjects to be found in every book of history, or amongst the "examples" in any grammar. (A pause of five minutes, during which the scratching of pens is heard.) ZOE. Upon the sward, beside a rill The life-blood from his wounded side When through the startled air a cry Of sudden triumph ran: "They run-our foemen run! was passed Along the struggling van. "Who run?" exclaimed the dying chief, "The French!" was the reply; "Once more on England's pennon lights The bird of Victory." "Then I die happy," cried the Brave, A glow of triumph tinged his check, MARGARET.-Mine is by no means so successful. I attempted a different style; the imitation of a Poetess guiltless of either "bosh" or :6 twaddle." She affects the rugged grief style of composition. My sympathies cannot follow her through such a "Vale of Misery." Indeed, I see no necessity for inviting me to the journey. But some women prefer walking abroad in storm and rain, when they had better be at home; forgetting what Archbishop Leighton has so beautifully said, That like the bees "when there is foul weather abroad we should be busy in the hive." CLARIBEL.-Your temperament, Margaret, disposes you to make yourself comfortable. Had you been here, you would have put up an umbrella to break the fury of the storm. Something in mitigation of the ills of life, always turns up for such as you. Oh! how and by what means may I contrive To bring the hour that calls thee back more near; How may I teach my drooping hope to live Until that blessed time-and thou art here? And thy dear thought an influence divine. MARGARET.-Nobody can appreciate the beauty of that poem more entirely than I, nor that of the other little gem, which a Christian Minerva might inscribe upon her ægis, and carrying it before her into the battle of life, keep herself unspotted from the world. Better trust all and be deceived, And weep that trust and that deceiving, Than doubt one heart which if believed Had blessed one's life with true believing. ZOE.-It is a question of taste, and not of appreciation. Margaret does not like to see grief bowing at the foot-lights, and will not throw her a bouquet. But see what I have done while you were talking. A DREAM OF THE INFINITE. Deep hidden in the clouds of circumstance, My captive spirit pined its strength away, Walting the coming of the glory ray, Wrapt in a fixed Immutability An awful deathliko trance Till the faint spirit tones came rushing by And actuated by its own Intensity Far out into the Dread Their mighty pinions spread, Crowned with the lightnings-and the unceasing roll Of the immeasurable in our track! Till whirling echoing back, Pealed the great spirit-minor o'er my head, Shone o'er the conquered soul! There! I maintain that that production is not one whit more incomprehensible than the song of the Morning Star to Lucifer in the "Drama of Exile." MARGARET (hesitatingly).-I do not defend the "Song of the Morning Star," nor many other things in the "Drama of Exile," but I think that there are admirable beauties in that poem, which should have kept it sacred from your satiric pen. The moment that the author's muse comes down from the shadowy into the human, leaving the "Desertness" and "spectral Dread," the poem becomes full of a beauty and pathos unequalled as I think by any other poem by a woman's pen. There is a passage in Adam's blessing to the Woman, which ought to be printed on broad-sheets, and scattered by colporteurs throughout the length and breadth of these United States, till a copy were in the hands of every individual tainted or taintable with the prevailing heresies on the position of woman. If woe by thee Had issue to the world, thou shalt go forth Some pang paid down for each new human life Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust beloved Too loyally some treason: feebleness And pressures of an alien tyranny ZOE. The tears are in our eyes, Margaret. I too propose to benefit my sex by a speech I shall have the questionable honor to deliver some day at Syracuse, "Fellowthe capital of the Amazons. women," I shall say, "did it ever chance to you to find yourselves singly or in pairs in the midst of a wide solitary field, surrounded by moderately excited cattle? and did you render a philosophical account to yourselves of the relief you experienced on seeing a small boy advancing towards you? Tell me, fellow-women, has not nature implanted in us a conscious sense of difference on some points-may I not say inferiority?" MARGARET.-Zoe, do you imagine that a woman, who has stood unmoved for hours on a platform before a raging assembly of the other sex, is to be daunted, as you or I would be, by a drove of cattle? CLARIBEL. You are more severe on them than Zoe is. She gave them credit for retaining some of the most natural feelings of womanhood. But I have heard that some of those who wish to create perfect equality between the sexes are very exigeantes in society, where they are great sticklers for the present code of Ladies' Rights, en attendant the redress of the Wrongs of Women. MARGARET. It seems to me that if you make the solution of the question to consist, as some do, in "ignoring the habitual discrimination of men and women as form ing separate classes, and, regarding all alike as simply persons-human beings," that the argument becomes in danger from both horns of a dilemma. Once place the sexes on all points on an equality as "simply persons-as human beings," and the Dynastic reasons of larger boncs destroy the equality at once, by creating the relation of protector and protected. ZOE (calching a moth, which has been fluttering about the light, and shaking him from her handkerchief into the open air).—If I never speak at Syracuse on Woman's Rights, at least I will aspire to the presidency of a society for the proper regulation of insect suicide. Gray millers shall not grill themselves at an expense of human feelings in our lights, and flies shall be restricted to the use of water, and not cream or milk, for purposes of felo de se. By the way, "to the great mind every thing becomes an incident." Is not that in Emerson? MARGARET.-I never found it in his works. CLARIBEL.-Margaret, you once owned a very capital imitation of transcendental versery. MARGARET.-Yes; in the days of the Dial. "Ecstasy the law of Nature." It contained all the catch words of the sect, and was written by a witty friend. Single, multiform creation! How shall our souls come full circle, Prone we cast ourselves on thee! CLARIBEL.-That is not more incomprehensible than the usual run of transcendental poetry. I remember a few lines of "The Sphynx," a poem much admired by the understanding few when it came out in the Dial. The journeying atoms Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive By their animate poles. MARGARET.-Transcendentalism is as a lamp gone out. It was a protest against Unitarianism, which in the preceding generation had been a protest against Puritanism. It cast a wide glare over New England, but the smoky flame died out as speedily as it had kindled, attesting at once the wide-spread feeling of a want, and the insufficiency of the new faith for its satisfaction. Transcendental poetry was never of much account. It was mere prose snipped into verse and metre, tagged with indifferent rhyme. CLARIBEL. I have been reading Margaret Fuller's Life, of late, and have been disappointed very much. Its defect is in its plan. It is like a "Long Thursday" London opera night, distracting one with acts from half a dozen operas. Margaret was eminently a progressive person. The interest of the first thirty-five years of her life consists almost entirely in the development of her character. Either of the three distinguished gentlemen, Clarke, Emerson, and Channing, who wrote the book, might have written her biography; but from the system pursued of a plurality of authors, it is entirely impossible to follow out her development. As soon as we fancy we have gained a certain insight into her character, the clew is broken off and another fastened on. MARGARET.-She died with Vanitas Vanitatum inscribed on all her labor, with no wish granted her on earth except that touching prayer for death with her husband and her child. And in the hour of shipwreck her pride of intellect-her habit of command, may have been fatal to herself and those she loved. She had not learned her woman's lesson of implicit obedience in time of danger, especially at sca. ignorant emigrant mother might, with a kiss of agony a prayer of trust, have. given up her baby into the hands of the good steward who pledged his life to save the boy, and have re-embraced her little one on the sand-hills of Fire Island; but nothing would induce Margaret to part from her husband and her child. An CLARIBEL.-It is a touching fact, that the only papers of any value which escaped the wreck, were the love letters that had passed between her and Ossoli. MARGARET.-Yes; and these records of a late but tender married love, and the marble form of her dead infant, seem like a mute plea for sisterhood and gentle judgment made by this woman, so beloved yet so calumniated, whose own mind, like a troubled sea, cast up mire, and dirt, and gold, and gems. "Walking through dry places, seeking rest, and finding none," might be the motto for her biography. The book, such as it is, is the saddest thing I ever read, not only from the circumstances of her life, which were of themselves sufficiently trying, but from her entire and constant disappointment in her own theories. She constantly ex |