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"In Severn's vale, a wan and moonstruck boy
Sought by the daisy's side a pensive joy;
Held converse with the sea-birds as they passed,
And strange and dire communion with the blast;
And read in sunbeams, and the starry sky,

The golden language of eternity.

Age saw him, and looked sad; the young men smiled;

And wondering maidens shunned his aspect wild.

But He-the ever kind, the ever wise,

Who sees through fate, with omnipresent eyes,

Hid from the mother, while she blessed her son,

The woes of genius and of Chatterton."-Ebenezer Elliott.

THE Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, is a beautiful church; some of the biographers of Chatterton have declared that it is the finest parish church in England. Mr. Britton has been almost as enamored of it as was Chatterton himself. He has written a complete history of it, and has for years zealously exerted himself to rouse the inhabitants of Bristol to have this ornament of their city put

into thorough repair by subscription, an object in which I am glad to find that he has finally succeeded, and that the perfect restoration, especially of the time-worn exterior, is already commenced under the superintendence of himself and Mr. Brayley.

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Beautiful exceedingly" is St. Mary of Redcliffe; and it is the triumph of this beauty that it has awoke the poet in the soul of one of its lovers, and a poet so extraordinary in the circumstances of his life, in the mere boyhood of his age, in the tragic nature of his death, and, above all, in the proud splendor of his genius; that his passion for this lovely structure, and the facts which have sprung out of it, have flung round St. Mary an everlasting interest, and made it one of the most brilliant monuments of national glory which stand on the bosom of our mother-land.

If it had turned out that the Rowley Poems produced to the public by Chatterton had been genuine, and that the fame of so great a poet as Thomas Rowley the priest had been buried for near four hundred years in the iron chest of William Canynge, it would have been a most extraordinary circumstance that it should have been a boy of fourteen who had discovered them; who had had the taste and discernment to pick them out from amid the ordinary documents of such a chest, of little interest except to parishioners; to transcribe them, to press them upon the attention of his townsmen and the literary public, and to have suffered insult, obloquy, and persecution on their account. Had he only raised that great public astonishment, inquiry, quarrel, and controversy among the learned and antiquarian of his time, and had been satisfactorily proved to be only the discoverer, introducer, and champion of the merit of these productions, it would have been one of the most remarkable occurrences in the whole history of literature, and the boy Chatterton would have still merited the happy epithet of "the marvelous boy." Had he been al lowed, on justly admitted grounds, to have taken only that VOL. I.-M

position which he claimed, that of the discoverer of the Rowley MSS., and the writer of his own acknowledged poems, the occurrence would have stood alone in the annals of letters, and Chatterton must have still remained one of the most extraordinary of precocious geniuses. The wit which sparkles through the whole series of his verses, from Sly Dick to his Journal and his Will; the bold satire, the daring independence of his thoughts, setting defiance to public opinion, even on the most solemn of all subjectsreligion; the indomitable pride, and bold adventure of the lad; these are facts, in connection with his great "discovery," supposing it to have been a real discovery, which must have raised the wonder of every one, and have given him a distinguished niche in the Walhalla of his country. The boy of sixteen, who could pen such a description as that of Whitfield in his Journal, beginning,

"In his wooden palace jumping,

Tearing, sweating, bawling, thumping,

Repent, repent, repent,

The mighty Whitfield cries,

Oblique lightning in his eyes"

the daring description of religion in his Defense; or who could make such a will as that which he drew up, when he for the first time proposed to himself suicide, must be pronounced a startling but most uncommon lad. The youth who, without friends or patrons in the great metropolis, could set out with a small fund borrowed at the rate of a guinea apiece from his acquaintances, to make his fortune and fame; and there, in the midst of the utter wreck of all his august visions and soaring hopes; in the depth of neglect, contempt, and the most grinding indigence, could issue satire after satire, and launch Juniuslike letters from the newspapers at the highest personages of the land, not sparing even the crowned head, can, however we might estimate such productions in an experienced adult, only be regarded with the most profound and un

mixed wonder. We may lament over the waywardness of his genius, but we must admit its unequivocal reality; and when its career is closed by self-violence, after appealing to Heaven from the abyss of its agony in stanzas such as the following, we know not whether most to marvel at the greatness of the phenomenon, or the dense stolidity of the age which did not perceive it, but suffered it to expire in horror, to the eternal disgrace of human nature and our country.

66 THE RESIGNATION.

O God, whose thunder shakes the sky,
Whose eye this atom globe surveys,
To thee, my only rock, I fly;

Thy mercy in thy justice praise.

The mystic mazes of thy will,
The shadows of celestial light,
Are past the power of human skill;
But what th' Eternal acts is right.
O teach me in the trying hour,

When anguish swells the dewy tear,
To still my sorrows, own thy power,
Thy goodness love, thy justice fear.
If in this bosom aught but Thee
Encroaching sought a boundless sway,
Omniscience could the danger see,

And Mercy look the cause away.

Then why, my soul, dost thou complain?
Why, drooping, seek the dark recess?
Shake off the melancholy chain,

For God created all to bless.

But ah! my breast is human still;
The rising sigh, the falling tear,
My languid vitals' feeble rill,

The sickness of my soul declare.
But yet, with fortitude resigned,

I thank the inflictor of the blow;
Forbid the sigh, compose my mind,
Nor let the gush of misery flow.

The gloomy mantle of the night,
Which on my sinking spirit steals,
Will vanish at the morning light

Which God, my East, my Sun, reveals."

But pride and despair triumphed over this deep feeling of trust in Divine goodness. These words were the rending cry of the dying giant; they were the mighty poetry of forlornest misery; and, independently of the poems of Thomas Rowley, stamped beyond dispute the high poetical renown of Thomas Chatterton. They showed that, notwithstanding the unworthy subjects on which necessity had forced him to attempt the waste of his sublime endowments, and had forced him in vain, for the soul of poesy within him had refused to come forth at the call of booksellers and political squabblers, there lay still in his bosom the great heart and the great mind of the first-rate poet.

But what were all these flashes and indications of the mens divinior to the broad and dazzling display of it in the Rowley poems themselves; those poems which would have crowned any grown man a king in the realms of intellectual reputation, which yet the towering pride of the boy"that damned, native, unconquerable pride" which he said "plunged him into distraction," that "nineteen twentieths of his composition," as he himself asserted it to be-flung determinedly from him? These poems, now admitted on all hands to be his own boyish compositions, and which, indeed, were thrust upon him as crimes by those of his cotemporaries who ought to have seen in them the proofs of a genius which should have been carefully and kindly cherished for the good of humanity and the honor of Englandthese are, indeed, more stately and beautiful than the fair pile of St. Mary, which had first awoke in his spirit the deathless love of poetry and antique romance. Ah! what a sad, beautiful, but heart-wringing romance is itself the story of Chatterton! His real history is this.

There was a little boy in Bristol, whose fathers, for many

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