e at the opening
of a violet as at the shutting of a rose. But our list of the living is
too extended; and we will speak of some of the departed.

Interspersed with the emanations of our existing bards, we have,
occasionally, those precious _morceaux_ which have been bequeathed us by
the illustrious dead. Trifles, yet how esteemed! Remembrances of Byron,
with his fiery impetuosity, spurning the trammels of worldly sorrow;
and prescribing death as a _panacea_ for his lamentable despair; yet
subduing us with refined regrets, as he was wont, in his changing mood,

"To sun himself in heaven's pure day."

Shelley, misanthropically commencing with the turbulence of the chainless
sea: a spirit matured to madness by the overawing and supernatural terrors
of German romance: as he asserts himself to be, in his lamentation for the
author of Endymion, one who

"Had gaz'd on Nature's naked loveliness,
Acteon-like, until _he fled away_."

John Keates, forsaking the land of his fame, and prematurely resigning his
"quiet breath," on that spot

"Where dwelt the muses at their natal hour;"

leaving to the less sensitive reviewers to prove, whether he had been
"led astray by the light from heaven, or by his own clouded and
tempestuous genius:"

"That fire within so fiercely burned
That whence it came it soon returned."

Maturin, though corrupted and enervated by the follies and dissipation
of the anti-poetic city, becoming, in his lucid intervals, "himself
again," in the composition of a splendid dramaticle.--Henry Neele, the
"martyr-student," inviting us to share in the intense admiration of
intellect; forcibly demonstrating "that song is but the eloquence of
truth"--but of him no more!

"The churchyard bears an added stone;
The fireside shows a vacant chair."

Yet, however splendid the galaxy of literary stars may be, which illumine
our Annuals, they owe no little of their lustre to _the engravings_.
It fortuitously happens that we have not "a connoisseuring eye," or
we should swell this paper beyond the limits prescribed by editorial
complaisance, in the pages of "THE MIRROR." We are not ignorant, however,
of the incomparable advancement which the science of engraving has made in
the lapse of the last ten years; or how far it has left behind those mere
scratches of the graver which lit up our young admiration when a boy.
Two of these we will be impertinent enough to criticise, in spite of