are the monster serpents that he seeks to crush beneath his relentless heel, and to fling forth from the dwellings of men. In delineating the consequences of crime, Ebenezer Elliott has few equals for masterly command of language. Byron never recorded the agonies of sin and passion with more awful vigor, nor the woes of parting spirits with more absorbing pathos. In the Exile, where two lovers meet in America—in the days when our settlements there were called the plantations, and they were penal colonies,—the woman as a convict, and that through her lover's errors and desertion, nothing can be more vividly sketched than the mental sufferings of both parties, or finer than the scene where the unhappy woman dies in her lover's arms on a night of awful tempest.
"Then with clasped hands, and fervent hearts dismayed,
That she might live for him, both mutely prayed.
But o'er their silence burst the heavy blast;
And, wrapped in darkness, the sky-torrent passed,
And down the giants of the forest dashed;
And pale as day the night with lightning flashed;
And through awed heaven, a peal that might have been
The funeral dirge of suns and systems crashed.
More dread, more near, the bright-blue blaze was seen,