POPULAR

POETIC PEARLS.

Poesy.

HERE breathes no being but has some pretense To that fine instinct called poetic sense. The rudest savage roaming through the wild; The simplest rustic bending o'er his child; The infant listening to the warbling bird; The mother smiling at its half-formed word; The boy uncaged, who tracks the fields at large; The girl turned matron to her babe-like charge; The freeman casting with unpurchased hand The vote that shakes the turrets of the land; The slave, who, slumbering on his rusted chain, Dreams of the palm-trees on his burning plain; The hot-cheeked reveler tossing down the wine, To join the chorus "Auld lang syne;" The gentle maid whose azure eye grows dim, While heaven is listening to her evening hymn;

The jeweled beauty, when her steps draw near
The circling dance and dazzling chandelier;
E'en trembling age, when spring's renewing air
Waves the thin ringlets of his silvered hair,-
All, all are glowing with the inward flame,
Whose wider halo wreathes the poet's name,
While, unembalmed, the silent dreamer dies,
His memory passing with his smiles and sighs.
If glorious visions, born for all mankind,
The bright auroras of our twilight mind;
If fancies, varying as the shapes that lie
Stained on the windows of the sunset sky;
If hopes, that beckon with delusive gleams,
Till the eye dances in the void of dreams;
If passions, following with the winds that urge
Earth's wildest wanderer to her farthest verge,-
If these on all some transient hours bestow
Of rapture tingling with its heroic glow,
Then all are poets; and if earth had rolled
Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told,
Each moaning billow of her shoreless wave
Would wail its requiem o'er a poet's grave.