where with fountains that circulated like streams of life among the flowers. Not a charm was here wanting that the fancy of a poet or prophet in their warmest pictures of Elysium have ever yet dreamed or promised. Vistas opening into scenes of indistinct grandeur-streams shining out at intervals in their shadowy course-and labyrinths of flowers, leading by mysterious windings to green spacious glades full of splendour and repose. Over all this, too, there fell a light from some unseen source, resembling nothing that illumines our upper world, a sort of golden moonlight, mingling the warm radiance of day with the calm and melancholy lustre of night. "My days now rolled on in a perfect dream of happiness. Every hour of the morning was welcomed as bringing nearer and nearer the blest time of sunset, when the hermit and Alethe never failed. to visit my now charmed cave, where her smile left, at each parting, a light that lasted till her return. Then, our rambles together by starlight over the mountain; our pause from time to time to contemplate the wonders of the bright heaven above us; our repose by the cistern of the rock; and our silent listening, through hours that seemed minutes, to the holy eloquence of our teacher; all, all was happiness of the most heartfelt kind, and such as even the doubts, the cold lingering doubts that still hung like a mist around my heart, could neither cloud nor chill. "As soon as the moonlight nights returned, we used to venture into the desert, and those sands which had lately looked so desolate in my eyes, now assumed even a cheerful and smiling aspect. To the light, innocent heart of Alethe, everything was a source of enjoyment-for her, even the desert had its jewels and its flowers; and sometimes her delight was to search among the sands for those beautiful pebbles of jasper that abound in them; sometimes her eyes would sparkle with pleasure on finding, perhaps, a stunted marigold, or one of those bitter scarlet flowers that lend their dry mockery of ornament to the desert. In all these pursuits and pleasures the good hermit took a share, mingling occasionally with them the reflections of a benevolent piety that lent its own cheerful hue to all the works of creation, and saw the consoling truth, God is love,' written legibly everywhere." MOORE ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830. In September, 1830, a meeting was held in Home's Hotel, Dublin, to congratulate the people of France on the overthrow of Charles X. Men of all parties assembled to do honour to the cause of freedom-O'Connell, then in Derrynane, wrote a powerful letter to the secretaries in approbation of the object of the meeting. Shiel delivered a very beautiful speech-we cannot, however, make room for O'Connell's letter or Shiel's address, indeed they do not come within the proper scope of this volume, but we must present the brilliant speech delivered on that occasion by the "Bard of Erin," whose appearance at the meeting was hailed with delight. Moore, having been called for from all parts of the meeting, rose, and was received with the most enthusiastic cheers, which were continued for several minutes. As soon as silence could be procured, he said: "That he felt considerable embarrassment in addressing them. The very favour with which they received him was, in itself, an embarrassment, as making him feel how much more responsibility was imposed upon him by such kindness, and while it inspired him with a wish to prove himself worthy of such a reception and such an audience, at the same time deprived him of the power. So rarely, too, had it fallen to his lot to address such a numerous assembly, that hardly could he recognize the sound of his own voice in the effort he now made to be heard by them-unlike those gentlemen around him, who had been taught oratory in its most inspiriting school-unlike his friend Mr. Shiel, whose voice had become familiar with its own echoes in that noblest of oratory's themes—the assertion of religious freedom; whose eloquence he had long, at a distance, regarded with melancholy admiration, looking upon it, he owned, as almost as vain and fruitless a waste of power as that of the young Demosthenes on the seashore, practising to the winds and waves. Manfully, however, and gloriously had he persevered, till at length the triumph at once of oratory and freedom was complete till words performed the office of swords, and the chains broke from around him as he spoke. To come forward in the presence of men thus practised, and thus triumphant, was, he felt, a presumption in which nothing but the cause he himself now spoke upon could justify him. Luckily, however, he came not now to speak to them of chains and wrongs. He came not now to address them, as he might once indignantly have done, on their own servitude, but on the freedom of others -on the grand movement of national self-redress which the world had just witnessed, and in which it is surely not too much to say that the spirit of freedom has shone out in a fairer and more perfect form than even in the brightest of those advents with which she has but too rarely blessed mankind. Nor is it France alone that profits by this splendid lesson; it ought to be useful, and with the blessing of heaven, will be useful in every quarter of the civilized world, where there are rulers to be taught the bounds of power, or subjects to learn the limits of obedience (cheers). Serious as was the warning given to monarchs by the first revolution of that country, and awful as was the process of purification-by blood and fire, it is true, but still purification-in which that great people was seen ridding itself, by one mighty effort, of the political dross of ages-awful, as he repeated, and terrible as was that lesson to the abusers of power, its rudiments were still too deeply laid in long revenge, and the retribution, when it came, too bloody to be ever drawn into precedent, or indeed ever to occur again, but in those cases (now, he trusted, for ever precluded), where a nation has been so long brutalised by the endurance of slavery as to have been rendered almost unfit for the recovery of freedomwhere the moral eyes of a people are, as it were, put out by a long course of oppression, till, with all the blindness, as well as strength of the strong man in the Scripture, they, in the moment of revenge, bury both oppressor and oppressed in one common ruin (cheers). Momentous as, even in its excesses, was such a lesson, yet, applicable but in extreme cases, and too associated with scenes of blood and rapine to be ever willingly pointed to us as an example by the humane assertors of man's rights, its authority, even as a warning, was fast passing away. The friends of arbitrary power, interested in decrying every effort at resistance, held forth the practical consequences of that event as a bugbear against the adoption of its principle; while the timid lover of freedom, hopeless of being able to separate the spirit of his cause from its dregs, shrank back from the experiment as too hazardous, and almost preferred wanting the blessing altogether to paying so tremendous a price for it (applause). Of this state of feeling on both sides, those ever ready encroachers, the throned monarchs of the world, were not slow in taking advantage. Old abuses and pretensions began to steal out, one by one, from the lurking-holes to which they had been scared, and, as the poet says-[here there was an universal burst of acclamation, in the midst of which a dog barked loudly, and continued to do so after Mr. Moore had resumed. The learned gentleman, in allusion to the noise made by the affrighted animal, observed-I may say of this interruption-to borrow an old joke of Lord North's on a like occasion, that it is only the member for Bark-shire' (loud laughter)]. As the poet says, in describing the hour of twilight— 'To their high-built airy nests. |