his cold hand, unasking Want relieve,
Or wake the lyre to every rapturous sound?
How sad for other's woe this breast would heave!
How light this heart for other's transport bound!

"Beats not the bell again?--Heavens, do I wake?
Why heave my sighs, why gush my tears anew?
Unreal forms my trembling doubts mistake,
And frantic sorrow fears the vision true.

"Dreams to Eliza bend thy airy flight,
Go, tell my charmer all my tender fears,
How love's fond woes alarm the silent night,
And steep my pillow in unpitied tears."

Unwilling as I am to extend this memoir, I must give Miss Seward's
criticism on the foregoing.

"The second verse of this charming elegy affords an instance of Dr.
Darwin's too exclusive devotion to distinct picture in poetry; that it
sometimes betrayed him into bringing objects so precisely to the eye as
to lose in such precision their power of striking forcibly on the heart.
The pathos in the second verse is much injured by the words 'mimic
lace,' which allude to the perforated borders on the shroud. The
expression is too minute for the solemnity of the subject. Certainly it
cannot be natural for a shocked and agitated mind to observe, or to
describe with such petty accuracy. Besides, the allusion is not
sufficiently obvious. The reader pauses to consider what the poet means
by 'mimic lace.' Such pauses deaden sensation and break the course of
attention. A friend of the doctor's pleaded greatly that the line might
run thus:--

"On her wan brow the _shadowy crape_ was tied;"

but the alteration was rejected. Inattention to the rules of grammar in
the first verse was also pointed out to him at the same time. The dream
is addressed:

"Dread dream, that clasped my aching head,"

but nothing is said to it, and therefore the sense is left unfinished,
while the elegy proceeds to give a picture of the lifeless beauty. The
same friend suggested a change which would have remedied the defect.
Thus:--

"Dread _was the dream_ that in the midnight air
Clasped with its dusky wing my aching head,
While to" &c., &c.

"Hence not only the grammatic error would have been done away, but the
grating sound produced by the near alliteration of the harsh _dr_ in
'_dr_ead _dr_eam' removed, by placing those words at a greater distance
from each other.

"This alteration was, for the same reason, rejected. The doctor would
not spare the w