blissful plain,' sit down to compete with each other who shall sing the best song in praise of his mistress, the one staking a lamb, the other a bowl of delicate workmanship; and Damon, another shepherd, is appointed umpire. Strephon then commences thus :

'INSPIRE me, PHOEBUS! in my DELIA's praise,

With WALLER's strains, or GRANVILLE's moving lays!

A milk-white bull shall at your altars stand,

Which threats a fight, and spurns the rising sand.'

The idea of an English peasant offering a sacrifice to Apollo, is too ludicrous. Daphnis answers in the same strain, and the contest continues for some time; till at last Damon exclaims:

'CEASE to contend; for, DAPHNIS, I decree

The bowl to STREPHON, and the lamb to thee.
Blest swains, whose nymphs in every grace excel!
Blest nymphs, whose swains those graces sing so well!'

In Pastoral II., Alexis, 'a shepherd boy,' is heard lamenting the pangs of hopeless love. From the similarity of the name, as well as from the first line of the poem, we suspect the boy-poet himself is here shadowed forth. It begins thus:

'A SHEPHERD's boy, he seeks no better name,
Led forth his flocks along the silver Thame,
Where dancing sunbeams on the waters played
And verdant alders formed a quivering shade.
Soft as he mourned the streams forgot to flow

There! that's enough! that's quite sufficient! mourned, the streams forgot to flow!'

'Soft as he

Lord Lyttleton, the courtly and accomplished Lord Lyttleton, wrote a Pastoral Poem, in four Eclogues, entitled The Progress of Love.' It is (it must be owned) a fine poem, and contains some beautiful descriptions; but it differs nothing in character from those already described, and is disfigured by similar incongruities. The hero thus describes his first meeting with the object of his affection:

'WHERE yonder lines conspire to form a shade,
These eyes first gazed upon the charming maid;
There she appeared, on that auspicious day,

When swains their sportive rites to BACCHUS pay.'

This would lead us to think that the scene lay in Thessaly or Arcadia, in ancient times; but on the next page Damon makes her a present of a Canary-bird, and the illusion is at once dispelled.

Shenstone was an English country gentleman, and as such, enjoyed opportunities of observing rural life which were denied to

For instance:

'ON a romantic mountain's airy head

(While browzing goats at ease around him fed,)
Anxious he lay;

The vale beneath a pleasing prospect yields
Of verdant meads and cultivated fields;
Through these a river rolls its winding flood,
Adorned with various tufts of rising wood;
Here half concealed in trees a cottage stands,
A castle there the opening plain commands,
Beyond, a town of glittering spires is crowned
And distant hills the wide horizon bound.'

the poets of the court and the city. Yet he does not seem to have improved them; for his Pastoral Poetry differs from that of the rest, only in its being chiefly written in the elegiac strain, and in his being himself the hero of his story,' his Delias, Celias, etc., etc., being his own mistresses, real or imagined.

It is marked by the same affected sensibility, the same artificial view of nature, the same vapid and uninteresting tameness. With all this, however, Shenstone is a delightful poet, and never failed to please when he chose to array his thoughts in the chaste language of genuine feeling, as in his Village School-mistress,' and his exquisite 'Ode on Rural Elegance.' Nothing can exceed the graceful beauty and unaffected elegance of the latter, from which, though foreign to our subject, we are tempted to make a short extract: SEARCH but the garden, or the wood,

Let yon admired carnation own

Not all was made for raiment, or for food,

Not all for needful use alone;

There, while the seeds of future blossoms dwell,

"T is colored for the sight, perfumed to please the smell.

Why knows the nightingale to sing?

Why flows the pine's nectareous juice?

Why shines with paint the linnet's wing?

For sustenance alone? for use?

For preservation? Every sphere

Shall make fair pleasure's rightful claim appear.

And sure there seem, of human-kind,

Some born to shun the solemn strife;

Some for amusive tasks designed,

To soothe the certain ills of life;

Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose,

New founts of bliss disclose,

Call forth refreshing shades, and decorate repose.'

Is not that beautiful, and just, and true? Instances might be multiplied to show the absurdity of the pastoral style, but

'What should you need of more?
Yea, or so many? What need one?'

But there was another species of pastoral poetry, which we must by no means pass over-namely, pastoral songs; the composition, not of real poets, but of that crowd of poetasters who always follow in their wake, and imitate their style, whatever it may be. O! the surpassing insipidity, the inexpressible inanity of those songs, which the fair ladies of the times of George the First and his successor were wont to trill forth, to the accompaniment of the jingling spinet or twanging arch-lute. Here is a fair specimen :

'SAY, have you seen my ARABEL,

The Caledonian maid?

Or heard the youths of Scotia tell
Where ARABEL is strayed?

The damsel is of angel mien,

With sad and downcast eyes;

The shepherds call her Sorrow's Queen,
So pensively she sighis.'

Another of these dulcet ditties treats of a shepherd who retired to a lone vale, and there 'sung his loves, evening and morn :'

HE sung with so sweet and enchanting a sound,
That sylvans and fairies unseen danced around.'

We could instance others, but by this time the reader is tired, and

So are we.

The sickly glare which had so long lighted the literary world began at length to fade away, and the bright beams of truth and nature once more broke forth with glorious effulgence; and that period commenced, which, for want of a better name, we have styled the Natural; at the head of which stands Cowper, the sweet poet of feeling and religious truth, and Burns, the bard of Nature's own creation. The advent of this era, (which, with a few intermissions, has continued to our own day,) was like the resumption by the human frame of its natural and healthful action, after a long course of powerful and enervating stimulants, to which the vitiated taste and artificial literature of the former ages might not unaptly be compared.

Of the pastoral poetry of the Greeks and Romans we will not presume to speak; with the pastoral poetry of Italy and Germany we are not acquainted; but from the English pastoral poetry of the eighteenth century, O, Apollo! O, Minerva ! O, all ye patrons of good taste and common sense, protect us!

ΙΟΤΑ.

BIRDS OF PASSAGE.

TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH OF

TEGNER: BY H. W. ELLSWORTH,

ESC.

I.

WHEN glares the hot sun on the Nile's parched shore,

And the crisped palm-tree scatters its cool shade no more,
Like an army assembling we hurry us forth,

Seeking out our sweet home-land, the NORTH, the bright NORTH!

II.

Then afar down beneath us lies stretched like a grave
The green smiling earth and the blue crested wave,
Where the storms of each day their wild pastime renew,
As we glide swift above them through Heaven's clear blue.

III.

There lies a bright mead near a high mountain's crest,
Where we halt our tired legion, and build the soft nest;
Where we watch the dear young from white egg bursting forth,
'Neath the mid-summer's sun, that ne'er sets in the North.

IV.

Through the vales there comes peering no rude hunter's glance,
Where the golden-winged Elves meet each Eve in the dance;
Where the green-mantled wood-nymph walks out in the light,
And the mountain Troll hammers his gold through the night.*

But when on the hill-top stands Vindsvale's son,†
And shakes from his cold wing the light snow-flake down,
When the frost-berry, ripened, drops red to the mouth,
And the timid hare whitens,‡ then seek we the SOUTH!

VI.

There find we the green fields, the sun-lighted path,
And the shade that the palm-tree in mid-winter hath;
There rest we awhile, with each weary wing furled,
As we sigh and long after our dear Northern world.

* ALLUDING to ancient Scandinavian traditions.

The Storm or Winter-bird.

Throughout Sweden this animal begins to change its color late in the Fall, and becomes perfectly white during Winter.

A VOYAGE UP THE RIVER AMAZON, including a Residence at Para. By WILLIAM H. EDWARDS. In one volume. pp. 256. New-York: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

THIS work, we cannot help thinking, must have been suggested by the foretaste of a volume, descriptive of many kindred scenes embraced in this, (and adverted to as from a forth-coming publication, under a title almost precisely similar to the one which heads this notice,) which appeared in three successive numbers of this Magazine, a few months since. The volume from which those extracts were made, and which were widely copied throughout the Union, has been carefully prepared for the press, and has received the commendations of those whose critical judgments are as unquestioned as their literary reputations are exalted. We hope before long to announce its publication; and in the meantime, we invite attention to the little work before us, being well assured that its records of adventure will increase the public anxiety to hear more of a region so untravelled, through the medium of a more elaborate and complete work, from the faithful pen of one whose avocations while in that country, and longer sojourn there, gave him superior advantages in the acquisition of entertaining matériel. It is not a matter of surprise to our author alone, that those who live upon the excitement of seeing and telling some new thing, have so seldom betaken themselves to our southern continent. Promising indeed to lovers of the marvellous is that land, where the highest of earth's mountains seek her brightest skies, as though their tall peaks sought a nearer acquaintance with the most glorious of stars; where the mightiest of rivers roll majestically through primeval forests of boundless extent, concealing, yet bringing forth the most beautiful and varied forms of animal and vegetable existence; where Peruvian gold has tempted, and Amazonian women have repulsed, the unprincipled adventurer; and where Jesuit missionaries, and luckless traders, have fallen victims to cannibal Indians, and epicurean anacondas. With a curiosity excited by such wonders, and heightened by the graphic illustrations in school geographies, where men riding rebellious alligators form a fore-ground to tigers bounding over tall canes, and huge snakes embrace whole boats' crews in their ample folds; the writer of the volume under notice visited Northern Brazil, and ascended the Amazon to a higher point, he believes, than any American had ever before gone. As an amusement, and by way of compensation to himself for the absence of some of the monsters which did not meet his curious eye, he collected as many specimens in different departments of Natural History as were in his power, at the same time chronicling the result of his observations. As a lover of Nature, he claims to have sought her in some of her most secret hiding-places, and from these comparatively unexplored retreats to have brought the little which she deigned to reveal to him.'