shades of all the worthies of Rome pass in review before him,-he traverses the Circus, the Colliseum, the Pantheon, and St. Peter's,-pauses to moralize over the mausoleum of Cecilia Metella, and abandens himself to a dream of love in the grove of Egeria:-He catches the dying knell of the ill-fated princess Charlotte,murmurs a dirge to her memory,-addresses an invocation to the ocean, and bids farewell to the pilgrim' and the poem.

That scenes of such interest as the vagrant imagination of the noble author has rambled over, in this discursive canto, should have elicited some beautiful sentiments from a mind like his, is not extraordinary, we only wonder that the religio loci had not filled him with a more powerful inspiration. Those who look for an intenser flame in every scintillation of his lordship's genius, will be disappointed in the concluding canto of Childe Harold. Not only is it more equable, but less vivid than its forerunners;-it contains more faults, and fewer felicitous passages to atone for them. When we shut the volume, we in vain endeavour to recollect those "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," which illuminate his lordship's earlier productions, and which so indelibly impress themselves on our memories. Yet his lordship terms this the most thoughtful and comprehensive' of his compositions. That he has bestowed unusual labour upon it, is very possible, and it certainly exhibits evidences of profound meditation, his pains, however, have not polished it, and his speculations have led him to no satisfactory result. But we will not longer detain our readers from the poem, which though it may fall short of that eminence which the author has heretofore reached, still towers to a height, to which few bards of the present age are daring enough to aspire.

After indulging, in pensive mood, a retrospect of the departed greatness of Venice, the poet thus pursues his melancholy musings.

I lov'd her from my boyhood-she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart,
Rising like water-columns from the sea,
Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
And Otway, Rateliff, Schiller, Shakespeare's

art,*

Had stamp'd her image in me, and even so, Although I found her thus, we did not part, Perchance even dearer in her day of wo, Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.

Venice Preserved; Mysteries of Udolpho; the Ghost-seer, or Armenian; the Merchant of Venice; Othello.

"But from their nature will the tannen grow
Loftiest on loftiest and least shelter'd rocks,
Rooted in barrenness, where nought below
Of soil supports them 'gainst the Alpine shocks
Of eddying storms; yet springs the trunk, and
mocks

The howling tempest, till its height and frame
Are worthy of the mountains from whose blocks
Of bleak, gray, granite, into life it came,
And grew a giant tree;-the mind may grow the

same.

"Existence may be borne, and the deep root
Of life and sufferance make its firm abode
In bare and desolated bosoms: mute
The camel labours with the heaviest load,
And the wolf dies in silence,--not bestow'd
In vain should such example be; if they,
Things of ignoble or of savage mood,
Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay
May temper it to bear, it is but for a day.

"All suffering doth destroy, or is destroy'd,
Even by the sufferer; and, in each event
Ends:--Some, with hope replenish'd and re-
buoy'd,

Return to whence they came--with like intent, And weave their web again; some, bow'd and bent

Waxgray and ghastly, withering ere their time, And perish with the reed on which they leant; Some seek devotion, toil, war, good or crime, According as their souls were form'd to sink or climb;

"But ever and anon of griefs subdued

There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,
Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued;
And slight withal may be the things which bring
Back on their heart the weight which it would
fling

Aside for ever: it may be a sound-

A tone of music,-summer's eve-or spring, A flower-the wind-the ocean-which shall wound,

Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound;

Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind,
But feel the shock renew'd, nor can efface
The blight and blackening which it leaves be-
hind,

Which out of things familiar, undesign'd,
When least we deem of such, calls up to view
The speetres whom no exorcism can bind,
The cold-the changed--perchance the dead
The mourn'd, the loved, the lost too many
--anew,
yet how few !!!

The following description of an Italian evening, conveys, all that description can convey, of that to which all description is inadequate.

"The moon is up, and yet it is not night-
Sunset divides the sky with her-a sea
Of glory streams along the Alpine height
Of blue Friuli's mountains; Heaven is free
From clouds, but of all colours seem to be
Melted to one vast Iris of the West,
Where the Day joins the past Eternity;
While, on the other hand, meek Dian's crest
Floats through the azure air-an island of the
blest!

"A single star is at her side, and reigns
With her o'er half the lovely heaven; but still
Yon sunny sea heaves brightly, and remains
Roll'd o'er the peak of the far Rhætian hill,
As Day and Night contending were, until
Nature reclaim'd her order :-gently flows
The deep-dyed Brenta, where their hues instil
The odorous purple of a new-born rose,
Which streams upon her stream, and glass'd
within it glows,

"Fill'd with the face of heaven, which, from
afar,

Comes down upon the waters; all its hues,
From the rich sunset to the rising star,
Their magical variety diffuse:

And now they change; a paler shadow strews
Its mantle o'er the mountains; parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
With a new colour as it gasps away,

The last still loveliest, till-'tis gone-and all is
gray."

We quote the four following stanzas, principally for the sake of the last.

"What from this barren being do we reap?
Our senses narrow, and our reason frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which loves the
deep,

And all things weigh'd in custom's falsest scale;
Opinion and omnipotence,-whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too
bright,

And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth
have too much light.

"Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered be, And Freedom find no champion and no child Such as Columbia saw arise when she Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled? Or must such minds be nourished in the wild, Deep in the unpruned forest, 'midst the roar Of cataracts, where nursing Nature smiled On infant Washington? Has Earth no more Such seeds within her breast, or Europe no such shore ?"

The desolation of the heart is strongly pictured in the subjoined stanzas, of which the fifth is peculiarly expressive.

"Alas! our young affections run to waste,
Or water but the desert; whence arise
But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste,
Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes,
Flowers whose wild odours breathe but agonies,
And trees whose gums are poison; such the
plants

Which spring beneath her steps as Passion flies
O'er the world's wilderness, and vainly pants
For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.

ven,

Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquench'd soul-parch'd-wea-
ried-wrung-and riven.

"Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, And fevers into false creation:-where, Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?

In him alone. Can Nature show so fair!
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
The unreach'd Paradise of our despair,
Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom
again?

merly disgusted us, recur in this poem. His lordship's strain is, as ever,—

"I seek no sympathies, nor need! The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted-they have torn me,-and I bleed; I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed."

If his lordship has such a disdain for sympathy, we wish he would seek some other solace, or, at least, cease to repine. By his own showing, he has, indeed, little claim to commisseration, and since he is not even disposed to allow any one to medicate his wounds, it is a ridiculous and offensive ostentation to display them. His lordship confesses that his afflictions are

the fruits of his own folly;-the natural
remedy would seem to be a change of
conduct. If he have not resolution to re-
form, nor yet hardihood to persevere in
a course which he condemns, his case is
a hopeless one.

"To be weak, is to be miserable,
Doing or suffering."

We intended to point out some of his lordship's numerous violations both of syntax and prosody, but to any reader, who has a competent knowledge of the language, it will be easy to detect them. Blemishes are the more to be regretted, in proportion to the richness of the mantle which they tarnish. E.

ART. 9. ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS.
Burying Places in Cities.
MESSRS. EDITORS,

T is universally acknowledged that we

gress of scientific improvement, and of whatever may meliorate the condition of mankind, is certainly great. Yet, in some respects, we are inferior to those generations who lived in what are called the dark ages. In the present age of civilization and progressive improvement, when religion and science exert their benign influence over a vast portion of the habitable globe, we still tolerate prejudices and customs of which we must be divested, before we can presume to say that we are truly enlightened.

In most eastern countries it was customary to bury the dead at some distance from any lown. This practice obtained among the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, &c. Among the primitive Christians, burying in cities was not allowed for the first three hundred years, nor in churches for many ages after. Many of the American tribes and nations whom we generally characterize as savage and ignorant, never permit a corpse to moulder away in or very near their villages and towns. But in regard to this wise regulation, the civilized inhabitants of our cities stand in the back ground. In this very populous and crowded city-this enlightened city of New-York, you meet with burying places and cemeteries in the most central and populous parts!-Daily, in this warm season, you are annoyed by the opening of vaults on the very verge of the footways, where thousands of passengers are forced to witness dead bodies in every stage of putrescence, and to in

hale the noxious effluvia that escape from the gloomy charnel-houses. In other instances, dead men's bones are sacrilegiousroom

deceased, which are deposited within a few feet from the surface of the ground. Here they undergo decomposition, and the putrid exhalations are continually contaminating the atmosphere to the great annoyance and injury of the living.

Customs so pernicious and inexcusable, should not be tolerated. It must however be acknowledged, that various religious communities in New-York leave their burying places in the city undisturbed, and bury their dead" without the city." There they can point out the very spot where rest the remains of dear departed friends. There, free from the city's din, we can indulge in those pious reflections which the melancholy place suggests. There, in solemn silence, we can meditate on "the way of all the earth." And, whilst with tears of affection unseen, we bedew the drooping flowrets on the sepulchral hillock, we look with the eye of Christian faith to that "building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."

"Hark! how the sacred calm, that breathes
around,

In still small accents whisp'ring from the ground,
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease,
A grateful earnest of eternal peace."
R. N. K.

For the American Monthly Magazine. MESSRS. EDITORS,

The following errors in the Nautical Almanacs for 1815, '16, '17, '18 and ’19,