"Stand back, bewildering politics!
I've placed my fences round;
Pass on, with all your party tricks,
Nor tread my holy ground.
Stand back—I'm weary of your talk,
Your squabbles, and your hate:
You cannot enter in this walk—
I've closed my garden gate.
"Stand back, ye thoughts of trade and pelf!
I have a refuge here;
I wish to commune with myself—
My mind is out of gear.
These bowers are sacred to the page
Of philosophic lore;
Within these bounds no envies rage—
I've shut my garden door.
"Stand back, Frivolity and Show.
It is a day of Spring;
I want to see my roses blow,
And hear the blackbird sing.
I wish to prune my apple-trees,
And nail my peaches straight;
Keep to the causeway, if you please—
I've shut my garden gate.
"I have no room for such as you,
My house is somewhat small:
Let Love come here, and Friendships true
I'll give them welcome all;
They will not scorn my household stuff,
Or criticize my store.
Pass on—the world is wide enough—
I've shut my garden door.
"Stand back, ye Pomps! and let me wear
The liberty I feel.
I have a coat at elbows bare—
I love its dishabille.
Within these precincts let me rove,
With Nature, free from state;
There is no tinsel in the grove—
I've shut my garden gate.
"What boots continual glare and strife?
I cannot always climb;
I would not struggle all my life—
I need a breathing time.
Pass on—I've sanctified these grounds
To friendship, love, and lore:
Ye cannot come within the bounds—
I've shut the garden door."
Poetical Composition.—If metre and melody be worth anything at all, let them be polished to perfection; let an author "keep his piece nine years," or ninety and nine, till he has made it as musical as he can—at least, as musical as his other performances. Not that we counsel dilatory and piecemeal composition. The thought must be struck off in the passion of the moment; the sword-blade must go red-hot to the anvil, and be forged in a few seconds: true; but after the forging, long and weary polishing and grinding must follow, before your sword-blade will cut. And melody is what makes poetry cut; what gives it its life, its power, its magic influence, on the hearts of men. It must ring in their ears; it must have music in itself; it must appeal to the senses as well as to the feelings, the imagination, the intellect: then, when it seizes at once on the whole man, on body, soul, and spirit, will it "swell in the heart, and kindle in the eyes," and constrain him, he knows not why, to believe and to obey.—Fraser, for June.
Poetry of the Last Age and the Present.—A writer in the last number of Fraser's Magazine says well that, "there is in periodicals and elsewhere, a vast amount of really poetic imagery, of true and tender feeling, and cultivated ingenuity, scattered up and down in the form of verse. We have no new great poets, but very many small ones—layers, as it were, and seedlings from the lofty geniuses of the last generation, showing in every line the influence of Scott, Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, and their compeers, seeing often farther than their masters saw, but dwarfs on giants' shoulders. Not that we complain of this. Elizabethan ages must be followed by Caroline ones; and our second Elizabethan galaxy is past; Tennyson alone survives, in solitary greatness, a connecting link between the poetry of the past and that of the future. In poetry, and in many other things, ours is a Caroline age; greater than the first one, as every modern cycle in a God-taught world, will be nobler, richer, wiser than its ancient analogue; but still a merely Caroline age—an age of pedantries and imbecilities, of effete rulers, side by side with great nether powers, as yet unaccredited, anarchic, unconscious of their own laws and destinies—an age of formalisms and Pharisaisms, of parties embittered by the sense of their own decrepitude—an age of small men, destined to be the fathers of great ones. And in harmony with this, we have a poetic school of Herberts and Vaughans, Withers and Daniels, to be followed hereafter, it may be, by a Milton, of whom as yet the age has given no sign."
Death-bed Superstitions.—The practice of opening doors and boxes when a person dies is founded on the idea that the minister of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it against some closed door, (which alone would serve the purpose,) crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement on casual occasion of such door or lid. An open or swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had to try some other locality. The friends of the departed were at least assured that they were not made the unconscious instruments of torturing the departed in their daily occupations. The superstition prevails in the north as well as in the west of England; and a similar one exists in the south of Spain, where I have seen it practiced. Among the Jews at Gibraltar there is also a strange custom when a death occurs in a house; and this consists in pouring away all the water contained in any vessel, the superstition being that the angel of death may have washed his sword therein.
Old authors notice the training of camels to move in measured time by placing the animal on gradually heated plates, and at the same time sounding a musical instrument.