FROM RODERICK, THE LAST OF THE GOTHS.

LANDING OF THE MOORISH ARMY IN SPAIN.1
A countless multitude they came ;

Syrian, Moor, Saracen,2 Greek renegade,
Persian, and Copt, and Tatar, in one bond
Of erring faith conjoined,.. strong in the youth
And heat of zeal, a dreadful brotherhood,

In whom all turbulent vices were let loose;
While conscience, with their impious creed accurst,
Drunk, as with wine, had sanctified to them
All bloody, all abominable things.

3

Thou, Calpe, sawest their coming: ancient Rock
Renowned, no longer now shalt thou be called,
From gods and heroes of the years of yore,
Kronos, or hundred-handed Briareus,
Bacchus, or Hercules; but doomed to bear
The name of thy new Conqueror, and thenceforth
To stand his everlasting monument.

Thou sawest the dark-blue waters flash before
Their ominous way, and whiten round their keels;
Their swarthy myriads darkening o'er thy sands.
There on the beach the misbelievers spread
Their banners, flaunting to the sun and breeze :
Fair shone the sun upon their proud array;

White turbans, glittering armour, shields engrailed
With gold, and scymitars of Syrian steel;
And gently did the breezes, as in sport,
Curl their long flags outrolling, and display
The blazoned scrolls of blasphemy.*

1 Count Julian, a Spanish noble, for an injury done him by the Gothic king Roderick, invited the Moors of the Caliphate from Africa to avenge him. The Gothic king was defeated at the fatal battle of Xeres in 713, and a great part of the country subjected for about eight centuries to the Mohammedan dominion. The last Moorish kingdom, Grenada, fell before the arms of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The incidents in Southey's poem turn on the tradition that the defeated Roderick survived the engagement.

2 The Arab Mohammedans; an epithet of the Arabians understood to imply plunderers. The Copts have been alleged to be the descendants of the ancient Egyp

tians.

3 Calpe (Gibraltar Rock) is said to be the same word, with a guttural aspiration, as Abyla or Alyba (Cape Serra), the Carthaginian name of the opposite African promontory, which itself is a Punic appellative for any high mountain, and contains the root of Alp-Anthon's Lempriere. Gibraltar, from Arab. Djibel, a hill, and Tarik, the name of the invading Moorish general, who landed there in 710.-See Gibbon, ch. li. The mythological tale of the rending of the capes by Hercules originated the name Pillars of Hercules. The classics do not seem to contain any associations of Kronos or Briareus with Calpe : Southey refers to the "Historia de Gibraltar, by Don Ignacio Lopez de Ayala."

4 Verses of the Koran were inscribed on the Mohammedan standards.

SCOTTISH MUSIC.

429

JOHN LEYDEN, M.D.
(1775-1811.)

LITERATURE has seldom to mourn more truly over genius early blighted by death than in the case of John Leyden. He was the son of humble parents, and born at Denholm, on the banks of the Teviot, in Roxburghshire, where a monument has been erected to his memory. His powerful talents, while he was yet young, amassed a singular amount of classical and oriental literature. He was destined for the church, but suddenly exchanged his profession for that of medicine, on a prospect of obtaining an appointment in the East. He proceeded to India, and acted in different capacities in various quarters of that country for several years, hiving up daily stores of oriental learning. He died of fever during the English expedition against Java in 1811.

"A distant and a deadly shore

Holds Leyden's cold remains."-Scott, "Lord of the Isles." Leyden's principal poem is "Scenes of Infancy;" he left also a number of ballads,1 sonnets, etc. He is an elegant and pleasing but not forcible writer.

SCOTTISH MUSIC, AN ODE.
TO IANTHE.2

AGAIN, sweet siren, breathe again
That deep, pathetic, powerful strain,
Whose melting tones of tender woe
Fall soft as evening's summer dew,
That bathes the pinks and harebells blue
Which in the vales of Teviot blow.

Such was the song that soothed to rest,
Far in the Green Isle3 of the west,

The Celtic Warrior's parted shade;
Such are the lonely sounds that sweep
O'er the blue bosom of the deep,

When shipwrecked mariners are laid.

Ah! sure as Hindu legends tell,*
When music's tones the bosom swell,
The scenes of former life return;
Ere, sunk beneath the morning star,
We left our parent climes afar,

Immured in mortal forms to mourn.

1 His knowledge of ancient traditions rendered him a valuable contributor to Scott's Border Minstrelsy.

2 Ianthe (Gr. ion-anthos), violet flower.

3 The Flathinnis, or Celtic paradise; innis (inch) is island.

4 "The effect of music is explained by the Hindus as recalling to our memory the airs of paradise, heard in a state of pre-existence." Some of Wordsworth's poetry is tinged with the same beautiful superstition.

Or if, as ancient sages ween,
Departed spirits, half unseen,

Can mingle with the mortal throng,
'Tis when from heart to heart we roll
The deep-toned music of the soul,
That warbles in our Scottish song.

I hear, I hear, with awful dread,
The plaintive music of the dead!

They leave the amber fields of day:
Soft as the cadence of the wave,

That murmurs round the mermaid's grave,
They mingle in the magic lay.

Sweet sounds! that oft have soothed to rest
The sorrows of my guileless breast,

And charm'd away mine infant tears:
Fond memory shall your strains repeat,
Like distant echoes, doubly sweet,

That in the wild the traveller hears.

And thus the exiled Scotian maid,
By fond alluring love betray'd

To visit Syria's date-crown'd shore,
In plaintive strains that soothed despair,
Did" Bothwell's banks that bloom so fair,"
And scenes of early youth, deplore.

Soft syren! whose enchanting strain
Floats wildly round my raptured brain,
I bid your pleasing haunts adieu !
Yet, fabling fancy oft shall lead
My footsteps to the silver Tweed,

Through scenes that I no more must view.

FROM SCENES OF INFANCY.-PART III.

SCOTLAND.

Land of my fathers!-though no mangrove here
O'er thy blue streams her flexile branches rear;

Nor scaly palm her finger'd scions shoot;

Nor luscious guava wave her yellow fruit ;

Nor golden apples glimmer from the tree ;

Land of dark heaths and mountains, thou art free!

1 Leyden alludes to a pretty story, from an old author, of an English gentleman hearing this strain warbled by a woman sitting at her door in Palestine. She was a Scottish woman, whose fortunes had made her the wife of a Turkish officer.-See author's quotation from "Verstegan's Restitution of Decayed Intelligence" (Antwerp, 1605).

OLD FAMILIAR FACES.

Untainted yet, thy stream, fair Teviot! runs,
With unatoned blood of Gambia's sons :
No drooping slave, with spirit bow'd to toil,
Grows, like the weed, self-rooted to the soil,
Nor cringing vassal on these pansied meads
Is bought and barter'd, as the flock he feeds.
Free as the lark that carols o'er his head,
At dawn the healthy ploughman leaves his bed,
Binds to the yoke his sturdy steers with care,
And, whistling loud, directs the mining share:
Free as his lord, the peasant treads the plain,
And heaps his harvest on the groaning wain ;
Proud of his laws, tenacious of his right,
And vain of Scotia's old unconquer'd might.

431

CHARLES LAMB.

(1775-1834.)

His

FEW men have been more beloved in their sphere of friends, and consequently more lamented in removal, than Charles Lamb. Full of quaint humour and practical kindliness of heart, and characterised by every attractive peculiarity of temperament and disposition, he was formed to be the pet of friendship. Born in comparatively humble circumstances, and educated in Christ Hospital, he was destined for the ecclesiastical profession; an impediment in his speech precluded this prospect, and his life was devoted to the desk of a clerk in the India House. affectionate care of his sister, to one of whose fits of insanity her mother had fallen a victim, forms the most beautiful trait in Lamb's character. He had the feelings rather than the formal accomplishments of a poet; and he had dived with true relish into the spirit and essence of the elder English writers. He was the dearest friend of his school-fellow, Coleridge, whose genius he almost idolised, and whose reputation in the criticism of early English literature he shares. Lamb's most popular works are his charming essays under the whimsical signature of Elia; his selections from the early dramatists; and the tales compiled by himself and his sister from Shakespeare's plays.

OLD FAMILIAR FACES.

I HAVE had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man; .
Like an ingrate I left my friend abruptly ;—
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood;
Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling,
So might we talk of the old familiar faces ;—

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

HESTER.

When maidens such as Hester die,
Their place we may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try
With vain endeavour.

A month or more hath she been dead;
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed
And her together.

A springy motion in her gait,
A rising step, did indicate
Of pride and joy no common rate
That flushed her spirit.

I know not by what name beside
I shall it call, if 'twas not pride;
It was a joy to that allied
She did inherit.

Her parents held the Quaker rule,
Which doth the human feeling cool;
But she was trained in nature's school:
Nature had blest her.

A waking eye, a prying mind,

A heart that stirs, is hard to bind :
A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind;
Ye could not Hester.