Come, with thy petrifying art, Till Death arrests, with kind though gelid palm, Impatient of the pangs I felt, To Heaven I raised my aching heart and view— Less flattering was her smile, I closed my dazzled eye, I felt her wipe my tears, She laid her soft reviving hand My bosom heaved to meet And hail, in reason's spite, the lovely, lovely cheat! My eye, suffused with gentle tears, I ope,— "Leave me,” I said, "O leave me, treacherous Hope!" With smiles and pity in her glistening eye, She fann'd me with her wings, but did not fly. 66 Mortal," she said, "of vapour and of earth, "Ere man the paths of Error trod, "But, when Pandora fabled Eve Mix'd with the thousand varying ills ""Twas then Hope own'd a mortal birth, And Faith, with fix'd, enraptured air,- My wings, which make thy cheek turn pale, When bliss destructive thou wouldst clasp; Through seas of sorrows, to its goal, Fair Happiness, which yet, unveil'd, man never saw. She draws all hearts, by Heaven's unerring law, Even as the precious amber draws the trembling straw. Oh! justly, mortal, hast thou said, Then is the palm to Virtue given, "On me, then, bend thy tearful eye; No. XLIX. PAGE 399. Extracts from A Pilgrimage to Balcarres.'-CHAMBERS' EDINBURGH JOURNAL. "The merit of the ballad of Auld Robin Gray' has been acknowledged by learned and unlearned, high and low. Sir Walter Scott speaks of it as 'that real pastoral which is worth all the dialogues which Corydon and Phillis have had together, from the days of Theocritus downwards.' Mr. Hazlitt says-The effect of reading this old ballad is as if all our hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of the heart, and we felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair! The irksomeness of the situations, the sense of painful dependence, is excessive; and yet the sentiment of deep-rooted, patient affection triumphs over all, and is the only impression that remains. To these testimonies add the tears of the multitudes who have heard it warbled in succession by a Billington, a Stephens, and a Wilson, and it will appear that hardly any composition of the last hundred years has been more entirely successful than this. "I had long desired to make a pilgrimage to the scene of the birth and early years of the authoress of Auld Robin Gray,' and an opportunity at length occurred about the close of last August. A brilliant morning-alas! only too brilliant, as it proved-saw me making my way by a provincial coach, through a somewhat out-of-the-way part of Fife, towards the ancient house of Balcarres, near which I was set down early in the forenoon. It was gratifying to find the place worthy of a poet, not to speak of an ancient and noble family. Seated on the southern slope of the county, about three miles from the sea, it commands a view of magnificent extent and beauty, including nearly the whole expanse of the Firth of Forth and the opposite Lothians. Among the objects which the eye takes in by a short sweep are the 'sea-rock immense' of the Bass, the distant Lammermuir hills, and lofty, smoke-canopied Edinburgh, the long terraces of which, though above twenty miles off, can here be seen gleaming like an illumination under the reflection of the evening sun. The house was formerly a plain old mansion, with no merit but its position in the midst of a park full of old wood; but of late years it has been altered and decorated, the principal part of the interior being, however, left in its original state. Two hundred yards to the east is Balcarres Craig,' or Crag, a high rock worth all that twenty Browns could do for any place in conferring romantic beauty, and on the top of which a small tower with a flag-staff has been erected. From this crag the view is even more magnificent than from the house. Such is Balcarres, once the seat of the line of Earls taking their title from it, of one of whom our authoress was a daughter, but now belonging by purchase to a younger branch of the family, while the main line is settled at Haigh Hall, in Lancashire. I could have sauntered half a day with pleasure among the woods and cliffs, but was soon admonished by a heavy shower to seek the interior of the mansion. "The kind intervention of a friend of the proprietor enabled me, in his own absence, to see all that was to be seen there under the auspices of the servants. I shall not, however, detain the reader with Colonel Lindsay's handsome new drawing-room and library, though from the window of the latter there is one of the most beautiful peeps of landscape-disclosing Kilconquhar church and lake-which I have ever anywhere seen. The dining-room is metal more attractive, for it is old, and characteristic of old times, even to the furniture. It is, however, chiefly curious for a ceiling of decorative stuccowork in compartments, presenting in the centre the arms of James I. of Great Britain-and thus indicating its age as between 1603 and 1625—while, in others, the busts of four heroes of antiquity appear in high relief, mailed and helmeted, with their names inscribed thus-DAVID REX-HECTOR TRO.JOSVE DUX-ALEXAND. REX. How often has the company of this banquethall been changed, excepting these ancient gentlemen only! How often has the authoress of' Robin Gray' sat under them! Familiar must they have been to the eyes of all her predecessors, back to the very first Lord Balcarres, so created at the coronation of King Charles in Holyrood. And there they still are, likely to look down on many future scions of the gentle-natured race of Balcarres, who, in their turn, must pass away, leaving still these eternal guests sole-remaining. I was most earnest, as may be supposed, in my inquiries for the chambers which the tradition of the house connected more particularly with Lady Anne, and was led to a long winding or (as we call it in Scotland) turnpike stair, which ascends from the original, but now superseded entrancehall, and gives access to all the older portion of the mansion. Two flights of this stair conduct us to a floor in which there is a moderate-sized bed-room, usually called Oliver Cromwell's Room, from his having once occupied it, and which now appears remarkable only for the great thickness of wall disclosed by the opening of its single window. This, according to the best accounts, was the apartment of the authoress of Robin Gray,' but probably only was so when she revisited the house in later life, during the proprietorship of her brother; for in one of her letters she speaks of having had a more elevated retreat in her younger days-in the same staircase, however-being thus lodged appropriately for an intellectual labourer— 'Where Contemplation roosted near the sky.' "Having seen all that was pointed out to observation within doors, I was next led to the wood-screened ruins of a chapel near the house, which the family use as a place of interment. A deep gloom and silence rest on this building, the walls of which are nearly clothed all over with ivy, while two or three narrow lanceolated window-spaces seem formed expressly as haunts for melancholy night-birds. In the interior, the sod shews a few heaps, betokening funerals of no remote date, and in particular two which lie along in one line, and are of more notableness than the rest. A plain stone informs us that the upper grave contains the remains of Mrs. Anne Murray Keith, in whom some readers will be prepared to recognise the Mrs. Bethune Baliol of Scott, though that fancy portraiture fails, I am assured, to realise the singular intelligence, spirit, and grace of the old lady's character. Mrs. Keith and the dowager Countess of Balcarres (mother of Lady Anne), being the children of twin-sisters, lived together for many years in the greatest harmony, calling each other playfully husband and wife. Time saw them at length deposited together in this spot, having died within little more than two years of each other, both at an advanced age. The grave of Anne Keith certainly adds about six feet of classic ground to the already hallowed precincts of Balcarres. It is only to be lamented-though I am perhaps too much of an enthusiast on such points that Lady Anne was not placed for her last repose in a scene associated with the history of her beautiful ballad." No. L.-PAGE 403. Analysis of Alfred' and Edward the Black Prince,' dramas by Sir Coutts Lindsay, Bart. Each of these dramas is in three Acts,-I commence with the first published, Alfred.' Alice, a village-maiden of Taunton, in Somersetshire, is beloved by Godwin, but prefers Ulf, although secretly and without return of her affection. Ulf is a rough gallant forester, Godwin of a more timid and retiring character. The villagers are attacked during their evening pastime by a party of Danes, under Ubbo, a rude chieftain, who carries off Alice,-her Christian heroism during the scenes that follow proves the remote but providential means of the conversion of the invaders. Godwin escapes to the woods to seek help from Alfred, but Ulf, offering resistance, is wounded and left senseless on the green; he is carried off by the Elves, who propose paying him as their substitute for the seven-yearly "tine of hell," due on the approaching Hallowe'en, the day after the morrow; the Fairy-queen, however, determining to |