ath his shroud of snow,
And the cold pole-star only knows his grave.

'Alone, on some sharp cliff, I see him strain,
O'er the white waste, his keen, sagacious eye,
Or scan the signs of the snow-muffled sky,
In hope of quick deliverance--but in vain;
Then, faring to his icy tent again,
To cheer his mates with a familiar smile,
And talk of home and kinsfolk to beguile
Slow hours which freeze the blood and numb the brain.
Long let our hero's memory be enshrined
In all true British hearts! He calmly stood
In danger's foremost rank, nor looked behind.
He did his work, not with the fever'd blood
Of battle, but with hard-tried fortitude;
In peril dauntless, and in death resigned.

'Despond not, Britain! Should this sacred hold
Of freedom, still inviolate, be assailed,
The high, unblenching spirit which prevailed
In ancient days, is neither dead nor cold.
Men are still in thee of heroic mould--
Men whom thy grand old sea-kings would have hailed
As worthy peers, invulnerably mailed,
Because by Duty's sternest law controlled.
Thou yet wilt rise and send abroad thy voice
Among the nations battling for the right,
In the unrusted armour of thy youth;
And the oppressed shall hear it and rejoice:
For on thy side is the resistless might
Of Freedom, Justice, and Eternal Truth!'

This is surely genuine poetry both in form and matter; as just in its
thinking as it is vivid in its imagery and classic in its language.
The vein of strong sense which runs through all the poetry of Mr.
Burns, and imparts to it solidity and coherency, is, we think, not
less admirable than the poetry itself, and is, we are sure, quite as
little common. Let the reader mark how freely the thoughts arise in
the following very exquisite little piece, written in Madeira, and
suggested by the distant view of the neighbouring island of Porto
Santo, one of the first colonized by the Portuguese adventurers of the
fifteenth century. Columbus married a daughter of Bartolomeo
Perestrillo, the first governor of the island, and after his marriage
lived in it for some time with his father-in-law. And on this
foundation Mr. Burns founds his poem:--

PORTO SANTO, AS SEEN FROM THE NORTH OF MADEIRA.

'Glance northward through the haze, and mark
That shadowy island floating dark