e sunbeam warms
With that ethereal gas, all through.
Which finds a vent at lips and eyes,
And lights up in a lover's sighs.
Fancy these young Venetian maids
Listening, at night, to serenades
From amorous lutes, where Music, such
As southern skies alone afford,
Echoes to every burning touch,
And thrills in each impassion'd chord.

All this imagine, and still more,--
For whither may not Fancy soar,
If Truth do not, alas! too soon,
Puncture her brilliant air-balloon--
But go not to the spot, I pray;
O do not, _do_ not, some fine day.
Order, like STERNE, your travelling breeches;--
All's lost, if once upon your way,
The passport of Lord ----
Is death to Fancy--like his speeches.

If you would save _some_ dreams of youth
From the torpedo touch of Truth,
Go not to VENICE--do not blight
Your early fancies with the sight
Of her true, real, dismal state--
Her mansions, foul and desolate,--
Her close canals, exhaling wide
Such fetid airs as--with those domes
Of silent grandeur, by their side,
Where step of life ne'er goes or comes,
And those black barges plying round
With melancholy, plashing sound,--
Seem like a city, where the Pest
Is holding her last visitation,
And all, ere long, will be at rest,
The dead, sure rest of desolation.

So look'd, at night-fall, oft to me
That ruin'd City of the Sea;
And, as the gloomy fancy grew
Still darker with night's darkening hue,
All round me seem'd by Death o'ercast,--
Each footstep in those halls the last;
And the dim boats, as slow they pass'd,
All burial-barks, with each its load
Of livid corpses, feebly row'd
By fading hands, to find a bed
In waters less choked up with dead.--_Metropolitan_.

* * * * *

ON THE DEATH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

_By the Author of "Eugene Aram."_

The blow is struck--the lyre is shattered--the music is hushed at
length. The greatest--the most various--the most commanding genius of
modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his renown which,
in all probability, a remote generation alone will furnish forth. It is
true that we have been long prepared for the event--it does not fall
upon us suddenly--leaf after leaf was stripped from that noble tree
before it was felled to the earth at last;--our sympathy in his decay
has softened us to the sorrow for his death. It is not now our inte