LITERATURE.
Here is a banquet-table of delights,
A sumptuous feast of true ambrosial food;
Here is a journey among goodly sights,
In choice society or solitude;
Here is a treasury of gems and gold—
Of purest gold and gems of brightest sheen;
Here is a landscape gloriously unroll'd,
Of heights sublime and pleasant vales between.
Here is the realm of Thought, diverse and wide,
To Genius and her sovereign sons assign'd;
The universal church, o'er which preside
The heaven-anointed hierarchy of mind
And spirit; the imperishable pride
And testament and promise of mankind.
A LIBRARY.
As one, who, from an antechamber dim,
Is ushered suddenly to his surprise
Before a gathering of the great and wise,
Feels for the moment all his senses swim,
Then looks around him like a veteran grim
When peerless armies pass before his eyes,
Or Michael when he marshals in the skies
The embattled legions of the cherubim;
So shall the scholar pause within this door
With startled reverence, and proudly stand,
And feel that though the ages' flags are furled
By Time's rude breath, their spoils are here in store,
The riches of the race are at his hand,
And well-nigh all the glory of the world.
ON CHARLES LAMB'S SONNET, "WORK."