She writes from her heart, and is one with nature in all her moods.

"The poet's lyre, to fix his fame,
Should be the poet's heart;
Affection lights a brighter flame
Than ever blaz'd by art."

The life of Aurora shows the training to which she had subjected herself in view of her art. It is worth our study. She was of a Tuscan mother, the heroine of the poem, but of an English father. At the age of four years, her mother died in Florence, and left her in the hands of her father and the nurse Apunta. She tenderly refers to this scene in her past life of helplessness, and ever after laments the loss of a mother's care and love.

"My mother was a Florentine,

Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old; my life,

A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp.
Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life,
The mother's rapture slew her.”

She felt, after this, a mother-want, and went bleating through the world, as a lamb shut out, at night, from the fold. Her father, kind, good man, did all he could to reconcile her" to the new order," but, like all fathers, failed, not from the want of will, but power.

The mother of Aurora was first seen by her father, when a trail of chanting priests and girls were passing along the streets to the cathedral; when

"A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,

And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,
Transfiguring him to music."

We doubt whether a more striking figure than this can be found, as expressive of a face of beauty and of brightness;

and the sudden and transforming effect it produced upon the beholder. It lives in the memory, and transfixes both the sight and the seer at once and for ever. We feel "the silent clangour" of "brain and heart" as this bright cymbal, in the sun, flashes on our face. After her death, Aurora, her father, and Apunta left Florence, and sojourned among the mountains of Pelago

"God's silence on the outside of the house,

And we, who did not speak too loud, within.”

The effect of the picture of her mother, taken after she was dead, upon the mind of Aurora, is touchingly and truthfully exhibited. It carries us back to childhood, when all things are strange and new, and phantasies flit through the heart and brain, which are too evanescent and shadowy to be distinctly remembered, and which only a few can ever recall:

"I, a little child, would crouch

For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,
And gaze across them, half in terror, half
In adoration, at the picture there-

That swan-like, supernatural life,

Just sailing upward from the red, stiff silk
Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power

To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds;
For hours I sate and stared."

For years, that picture took all shapes and forms; from every object she saw, and all the books she read; some, strange and fantastic, others dull and vague, or beautiful and sweet; and finally fixed itself on the dead mother, without sigh or smile, in her grave at Florence.

Her father died when she was ripening into girlhoodjust thirteen-and left her in the world to grope her way along its tortuous paths. She woke up as from a dream, as one does after the fever fit is over, not able to gather up the threads of life, so strangely broken, so inextricably tangled. Just two lines we quote, for their singular strength and sublimity, with reference to death-the death of her father:

"Life, struck sharp on death,

Makes awful lightning."

Many such short, Shaksperian sentences may be found in this work, which will pass into the common speech, as they never can be forgotten. We deem this to be one of the triumphs of poetry. It fulfils its office in those words

which linger in the memory, and enter into the life of all this busy, bustling world-of duty and enjoyment, of grief and love. It does more for us than kings or senators, than philosophy or art-than a hundred battles, which give birth to empires or level them in the dust. Those sentences which we learned at school, or at our fathers' hearth-stone, or which were floating on the genial air and caught up by every breath of wind, are the waifs, belonging to the king, which all his subjects share in the seed-truths, which make our golden harvests in after life. Every language possesses them; and a nation owes its stability more to their presence and power, than to all its laws or institutions. Shakspeare abounds with them, and also Milton; you find them in Bunyan's Pilgrim; in Gray's Elegy; in Cowper's Task; in Longfellow's and T. Buchanan Read's poems. They partake of the nature of the parable and the fable; of the familiar sayings-the maxims of Solon, or the greater of Solomon. They are the crown-jewels of a kingdom, distributed, not in parts, but in whole, to all the subjects-each having all, without trenching on the rights and privileges of otherslike the blue sky, and the common earth, and the great seas. They are loop-holes, through which we look into the unseen and the eternal. They contain in them the wealth of an empire, as they give it all its wealth. Their power lies in the harmony unconsciously felt by all men, and by deeper minds continually recognized, in the resemblances of the natural and the spiritual-the conventional and the real. They are witnesses for the truth amidst the lies and storms of this most unintelligible world. They are the true types of all the antitypes which lie in our pathway-not chosen arbitrarily from the dead forms which everywhere appear, but, being one with nature, they harmonize with it, and per

mit us

"To see into the life of things."

There are some minds, so dull and stupid, so earthly and sensuous, that all poetry to them is as unsightly as dead seed in the fructifying soil, forgetful that from these the beautiful forms of life are eliminated-both the graceful flower and the thick corn; and for this it is sown. They are but the prophecy of the future. To the one, but seed in a state of decay; to the other, the oleander and the violet-and the harvests of every autumn.

To those who shrink from con

templating a higher-world order than that which lies around them, all this is illusive, if not mummery; to them, earth casts no shadow-nor the sun. Images of the beautiful and the sublime waylay them never in the dusty road of life. To them, as to Peter Bell,

"A primrose by a river's brow,

A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

But Nature is a loving mother. She would tell us all she knows, if we had ears to listen; but she will do it in her own way and time. The fewest willingly listen to her voice. The poets are her chosen children, on whom she lavishes her richest love-the Benjamins of the family of Rachel, having the lordly dish. They learn as much from her silence as from her utterances. Her "dark sayings" to them leave large inferences. Latent affinities, remote allusions, enigmatical forms of speech, are the thyme from her skirts, scenting all the air, or voices which

"Thrill inly with consenting fellowship

To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves

Outside of Time."

Aurora, at the age of thirteen, was sent, by the dying wish of her father, to England, to a maiden aunt-his sister -to be cared for and educated. Her feelings, on leaving her Tuscan home, are most graphically described:

"A stranger, with authority, not right

(I thought not), who commanded, caught me up
From old Apunta's neck; how, with a shriek,

She let me go; while I, with ears too full

Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word,

In all a child's astonishment at grief,

Stared at the wharfage, where she stood and moaned-
My poor Apunta, where she stood and moaned !''

She reached England:

Oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold on me."

The train swept on through the tessellated fields of her father's island. "The skies, themselves, looked low and positive"-not like her Italy-" God's celestial crystals!" She wondered if this could be the land of Shakspeare.

"Not a hill or stone

With heart to strike a radiant color up,
Or active outline, on the indifferent air!"

She describes the first appearance of her aunt-surely, not a proper person to entrust this wild flower from the Tuscan groves with; but, perhaps, the best a dying father had on earth; she, at least, was his sister:

"She stood straight and calm,

Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight,
As if for taming accidental thoughts

From possible pulses;

A close, mild mouth, a little soured about

The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,
Or, peradventure, niggardly half truths."

Aurora, then, was somewhat of a phrenologist, and took note of these defective organs; but she understood them better on a nearer acquaintance. Children are good physiognomists, at least, and read the heart in the eyes and nose and lips-more, certainly, in the atmosphere, which surrounds those with whom they come in contact:

"Her aunt had lived

A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,

Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.

Dear heavens, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries!"

So thought, doubtless, this maiden aunt; and, it is no wonder, if she did not understand this oriole of the "thickets," scarcely fledged, and now, for the first time, brought to her cage. What cared she for her "clear water" and "fresh seed"-she, who had drunk from the clear spring, and eaten of all the berries of her native woods!

Aurora threw her passionate arms around the neck of her aunt, and would have clung there through life, but for the want of that warm love, in return, which, alone, can make it

"She loved my father, and would love me too,

As long as I deserved it."

In truth, her father had married a Tuscan girl, and had not only, in her judgment,

"His sister, of the household precedence."

For this she never could forgive her, and so she hated her,

"Till hate, so nourished, did exceed, at last,

The love from which it grew, in strength and hate."