came to hand,
produced great quantities of manuscripts, which were destroyed almost as
soon as written. The idea of publishing them does not seem to have
presented itself to his mind. Either his life must have been devoid of
every form of intellectual sympathy, or there was some external
impediment formidable enough to keep down that ambition which always
co-exists with the creative power.

In the year 1843 he married, and in 1853 emigrated to Canada, and
settled in Montreal. Even here his literary labor was at first performed
in secrecy; he was nearly forty years old before a line from his pen
appeared in type. He found employment in a machine-shop, and it was only
very gradually--probably after much doubt and hesitation--that he came
to the determination to subject his private creations to the ordeal of
print. His first venture was a poem in blank verse, the title of which
we have been unable to ascertain. A few copies were printed anonymously
and distributed among personal friends. It was a premature birth, which
never knew a moment's life, and the father of it would now be the last
person to attempt a resuscitation.

Soon afterwards appeared--also anonymously--a little pamphlet,
containing fifty "so-called" sonnets. They are, in reality, fragmentary
poems of fourteen lines each, bound to no metre or order of rhyme. In
spite of occasional crudities of expression, the ideas are always poetic
and elevated, and there are many vigorous couplets and quatrains. They
do not, however, furnish any evidence of sustained power, and the
reader, who should peruse them as the only productions of the author,
would be far from inferring the latter's possession of that lofty epical
utterance which he exhibits in "Saul" and "Jephthah's Daughter."

We cannot learn that this second attempt to obtain a hearing was
successful, so far as any public notice of the pamphlet is concerned;
but it seems, at least, to have procured for Mr. Heavysege the first
private recognition of his poetic abilities which he had ever received,
and thereby given him courage for a more ambitious venture. "Saul," as
an epical subject, must have haunted his mind for years. The greater
portion of it, indeed, had been written before he had become familiar
with the idea of publication; and even after the completion of the work,
we can imagine the sacrifices which must have delayed its appearance in
print. For a hard-working mechanic, in straitened circumstances, c