THE APOLLO-BELVIDERE.' NEWDIGATE PRIZE POEM, WRITTEN DURING THE AUTHOR'S UNIVERSITY COURSE. Heard ye the arrow hurtle in the sky? Proud of his might, yet scornful of the slain, Yonth blooms immortal in his beardless face, A god in strength, with more than godlike grace; All, all divine-no struggling muscle glows, Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows, But animate with deity alone, In deathless glory lives the breathing stone. Bright kindling with a conqueror's stern delight, Firm fixed his tread, yet light, as when on high And the cold marble leaped to life a god; Yet on that form, in wild, delirious trance, The Apollo is in the act of watching the arrow with which he slew the serpent Python. * Agasias of Ephesus. I watched thee lessening, lessening to the sight, Still faint and fainter winnowing The sunshine with thy dwindling wingA speck, a movement in the ruffled light, Till thou wert melted in the sky, An undistinguished part of bright infinity. Meet emblem of that lightsome spirit thou! Hath mingled, and become pure light, pure joy, pure love. THE LOVE OF GOD. TWO SONNETS. I. Love Thee!-O Thou, the world's eternal Sire! Time, space, height, depth, O God! are full of And sun-eyed seraphs tremble and admire. Love Thee!-but Thou art girt with vengeful fire, II. Love Thee!-oh, clad in human lowliness, -In whom each heart its mortal kindred knows— Our flesh, our form, our tears, our pains, our woes,A fellow-wanderer o'er earth's wilderness! Love Thee! whose every word but breathes to bless! Through Thee, from long-sealed lips, glad language flows; The blind their eyes, that laugh with light, unclose; Lydia Huntly Sigourney. AMERICAN. Mrs. Sigourney (1791-1865) was a native of Norwich, Conn. She was a most prolific writer of prose and verse, but excelled rather in the former. She filled a large space in American literature, and her writings all have a salutary moral tendency. Her maiden name was Lydia Howard Huntly. AUGUST 11: THE BLESSED RAIN. "Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, whereby thou didst confirm thine inheritance when it was weary.”—Psalm lxviii. 9. I marked at morn the thirsty earth, By lingering drought oppressed, Like sick man in his fever heat, With parching brow and breast; The voice of heavenly showers that said, The pale and suffocating plants That bowed themselves to die And the daisy on the plain, The herds that o'er the wasted fields To find their verdant pasture brown, The farmer sees his crisping corn, Whose tassels swept the ground, Uplift once more a stately head, With hopeful beauty crowned; While the idly lingering water-wheel, Where the miller ground his grain, Turns gayly round, with a dashing sound, At the touch of the blesséd rain. Lord, if our drooping souls too long Should close their upward wing, And the adhesive dust of earth All darkly round them cling,— Then farewell to Kelvin Grove, bonnie lassie, O! And adieu to all I love, bonnie lassie, O! To the river winding clear, To the fragrant-scented brere, Even to thee, of all most dear, bonnie lassie, O! When upon a foreign shore, bonnie lassie, O! Should I fall 'mid battle's roar, bounie lassie, O! Then, Helen, shouldst thou hear Of thy lover on his bier, To his memory shed a tear, bonnie lassie, O! William H. Timrod. AMERICAN. William, the father of the more distinguished Henry Timrod, was born on a plantation not far from Charleston, S. C., in 1792. He was of German descent. While yet a boy, he chose the trade of a bookbinder, and became a skilled mechanic, but afterward held an honorable position in the Charleston Custom-house. He had rare conversational abilities, and was well versed in English belles-lettres. In the Nullification Controversy of 1832-1833, he espoused the cause of the Union with intrepid zeal. In 1836 he went to St. Augustine as the captain of a militia company, to repel the attacks of Indians. In this expedition he contracted disease from exposure, and died in 1838. TO HARRY. Harry, my little blue-eyed boy, I love to hear thee playing near; There's music in thy shouts of joy To a fond father's ear. I love to see the lines of mirth For, gazing on thee, do I sigh That these most happy hours will flee, And thy full share of misery Must fall in life on thee! There is no lasting grief below, My Harry, that flows not from guilt: Thou canst not read my meaning now,In after-times thou wilt. Thou'lt read it when the church-yard clay They'll tell thee this terrestrial ball, My boy! the verdure-crowned hills, God is no tyrant, who would spread Yet teach the hungering child to dread No! all can do his creatures good He scatters round with hand profuseThe only precept understood, "Enjoy, but not abuse!" Percy Bysshe Shelley. Unsurpassed in genius among England's lyric poets, Shelley, the son of a baronet, was born at his father's seat, Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, August 4th, 1792. When ten years of age, he was put to a public school-Sion House-where he was harshly treated both by teachers and school-fellows. At Eton his sensitive spirit was again outraged by ill-usage under the fagging system then tolerated. Hence he early conceived a bitter hatred for all forms of oppression, and resistance to established authority grew almost to a principle. In the exquisite introduction to his "Revolt of Islam," addressed to his second wife, he refers to these early influences. At Oxford, Shelley studied hard, but irregularly, and spent much of his leisure in chemical experiments. In conjunction with a fellow-collegian, Mr. Hogg, he composed a small treatise, "The Necessity of Atheism;" and the result was that both the heterodox students were, in 1811, expelled from college. "At the age of seventeen," says Mrs. Shelley, “fragile in health and frame, of the purest habits in morals, full of devoted generosity and universal kindness, resolved, at every personal sacrifice, to do right, burning with a desire for affection and sympathy, he was treated as a reprobate, cast forth as a criminal." At eighteen he produced his atheistical poem of "Queen Mab," abounding in passages of great beauty, and showing a wonderfully precocious intellect. At nineteen he made an imprudent marriage, for which he was cast off by his family. After the birth of two children, he was separated from his wife, and went abroad. Shortly after his return to England in 1816, his wife committed suicide, which subjected Shelley to much obloquy and misrepresentation. He contracted a second marriage with the daughter of Godwin, author of "Caleb Williams," and in 1818 quitted England, never to return. Besides "Queen Mab," Shelley had written "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude," remarkable for beauty and picturesqueness of diction and boldness of imagination; also, "The Revolt of Islam." In 1819 appeared his tragedy of "The Cenci," full of passion and power. In Italy he renewed his acquaintance with Byron, who thought Shelley's philosophy "too spiritual and romantic." In 1821 Shelley wrote his noble poem of "Adonais" on the death of Keats. The next year-1822-was the last of Shelley's own life. He had ended his lament for Keats with a foreboding "What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" Indeed, there is something startlingly prophetic of the very incidents of his own death in the concluding lines of this extraordinary poem: "The soft sky smiles; the low wind whispers near. Tis Adonais calls; oh, hasten thither! No more let life divide what death can join together." "My spirit's bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng, I am borne darkly, fearfully afar; While, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the eternal are." The very character of the tempest in which Shelley went down in his sail-boat seems to be here prefigured. Shelley's favorite amusement had been boating and sailing; and, while returning one day-July 8th, 1822from Leghorn-whither he had gone to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy-the boat in which he sailed, accompanied by Mr. Williams and a single seaman, went down in the Bay of Spezia, in a sudden thunder-storm, and all perished. A volume of Keats's poetry was found open in Shelley's coat-pocket when his body was washed ashore. In accordance with his own desire, the body, when recovered, was burnt on the beach, and the ashes were interred at Rome. Whatever his speculative beliefs may have been, Shelley, in pursuing the ideals he did, showed that he was no atheist at heart. That he believed intuitively and intensely in a conscious immortality, is evident from one of his letters to Godwin, and from many passages in his poems. His belief in absolute goodness must have led him logically, at last, to belief in a Supreme Spirit of good; but the early despotism he had encountered and striven against for the free opinions of his youth probably had its effect in biassing his will against his own intuitional convictions. That he would eventually have emerged into a state of mind far different from that of his immature years, is more than probable. "Poetry," he says, "redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." That thought could hardly have been uttered by one logically or emotionally an atheist. Indeed, his is an atheism that may be subjected to endless confutation from his own best utterances. One of his recent biographers (Mr. J. A. Symonds) says of him: "He composed with all his faculties, mental, emotional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a whiteheat of intense fervor, striving to attain the truest and most passionate investiture for the thoughts which had inflamed his ever quick imagination. The result is that his finest work has more the stamp of something natural and elemental-the wind, the sea, the depth of air-than of a mere artistic product." The accuracy of this description is strikingly manifest in "Adonais." There is a tradition that no publisher would accept this poem, and he was at last obliged to publish it at his own expense in the old Italian city of Pisa. The other day a stray single copy of this first edition of the "Adonais" was sold for $50. THE CLOUD. I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, I bear light shades for the leaves when laid From my wings are shaken the dews that waken When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, I wield the flail of the lashing hail, I sift the snow on the mountains below, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls by fits; Over earth and ocean with gentle motion Lured by the love of the genii that move And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, |