Tagus, Douro, leaping shouted Haught Iberia's stately regions, But 'twas not alone the spirit, Known so wide on shore and see, Not the blood which we inherit, Could alone the nations free. 'Twas the bright unwavering Reason, Thus with blood was Ebro darken'd, Storm'd Pyrene's cliffs of snow, Till their Paris, while it harken'd, Felt each coming step a blow. Graves would tell, with triumph gladden'd, How the lord of nations, madden'd, Still amid the whirl of terror, Smooth and strong as moves the sun, Clear from passion, sure from error, Sway'd the soul of Wellington. Him no huge adventurous raving, Him no storm of pride or wrath, Him no sordid hunger's craving, Turn'd aside from duty's path. Him 'mid warfare's dread commotion, Might the weak for safety trust; Him his patriot life's devotion Teaches all to name-the Just. He with simple mild sedateness All an empire's honours bears, Yet they leave his own pure greatness More than all the robes it wears. Round the mountain pine of ages Summer flowers may creep and twine, Till the strife that winter wages Cuts them down, but not the pine. Friend of Peace, of Truth, and Order, True to all, to all benignant, Bold against the rage of all, Well can he with voice indignant, Public fraud and crime appal. As a mole by seas assaulted, Breasts at once and calms the waves, So 'mid those from right revolted, He subdues the souls he braves. Britain, fair and stainless mother Of the Bold, the Just the Wife, Seldom hast thou known another, Brighten thus thy fostering skies! While so much is praised untruly, Scarce his fame can struggle forth; Years to come shall reverence duly All the Man's unboastful worth. ARCHEUS. From Blackwood's Magazine. SONG OF A RETURNED EXILE. BY B. SIMMONS. SWEET Corrin!* how softly the evening light goes, Not one: as I wind the sheer fastness through, From whose tints I once pictured the pinions of hope; Still the hamlet gleams white-still the church yews are weeping, Where the sleep of the peaceful my fathers are sleeping; The vane tells, as usual, its fib from the mill, *The picturesque mountain of Corrin, (properly Cairn-thierna, i. e. the Thane or Lord's cairn,) is the termination of a long range of hills which encloses a valley of the Blackwater and Funcheon, (the Avonduff and Fanshin of Spenser,) in the county of Cork, and forms a striking feature of scenery, remarkable for pastoral beauty and romance. 3. My own pleasant River, bloom-skirted, behold, Scarcely breaking, Glen-coorah, thy glorious re- By the Park's lovely pathways it lingers and shines, And the lips of the lily seem wooing its stay Like a bird in the branches, an arbour I made, 6. But thy summit, far Corrin, is fading in grey, And the laugh of the young, as they loiter about, taste, And like others to wander life's desolate waste- Where the blue eye of Eve often closed o'er the And find the sole blessing I seek for-REPOSE !* Cook. 4. Wild haunt of the Harper!* I stand by thy spring, moon That then plough'd, like a pinnace, the purple of Is white on Glen-duff, and all blooms as unchanged As if one were not filed, who imparted a soul 5. Thou long-vanish'd Angel! whose faithfulness threw O'er my gloomy existence one glorified hue! And the blackbird by Douglass is hushing its hymn, Dost thou still think, with pity and peace on thy Of him who, toil-harass'd and time-shaken now, While the last light of day, like his hopes, has departed, On the turf thou hast hallow'd sinks down wearyhearted, And calls on thy name, and the night-breeze that sighs Through the boughs that once blest thee is all that replies? From Blackwood's Magazine. THE DREAM OF MOHAMMED THE SECOND. THE empire of the Ottomans is the most extraordinary instance in history of an empire raised by the sword, governed by the perpetual effusion of blood, despising all civilisation, corrupted by the grossest excesses of private life, disordered in every function of government, constantly exposed to the greatest military powers of Europe, yet advancing from conquest to conquest for three centuries without a check, (from 1299 to 1566,) and retaining its vast possesIsions unimpaired for three centuries more. The first approach of the Turks to Europe was at the close of the thirteenth century, when Othman, the son of a Turcoman chieftain in the service of Aladin, Sultan of Iconium, on the memorable 27th of July 1299, made a descent on the rich territory of Nicomedia. The Asiatic dominions of the Greek Emperors were lost in a struggle of two centuries, when Mohammed the Second assaulted Constantinople, on the 29th of May 1453. The body of the last emperor was found buried under a heap of slain, and Constantinople became the capital of a new faith, diate successors wasted the blood, but exercised the a new people, and a new sovereignty. His immeCaucasus, and Persia. But the nobler prize lay to valour of their troops, in expeditions to Armenia, the the west. All solid sovereignty belongs to the hardy frames and the regular opulence of Europe. Soliman the First, named the Magnificent, and if a conqueror can deserve the name, deserving it by the vastness of his designs and the splendour of his successes, threw himself upon Hungary. Combining the unusual tactique of an army and fleet, in itself an his time, he at once overran the dominions of the evidence of the superiority of his genius to that of Hungarian king, and assaulted Rhodes, held by the famous Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and regarded as the bulwark of Christendom. By the re luctant aid of the Venetians, Rhodes was stormed, tardily awakened vigilance of England, Austria, and after a desperate siege. Soliman marched to the France. conquest of Austria at the head of 200,000 men-an But the day of Turkish independence is at an end. army which no European potentate, in the rudeness She may live by the protection of the great states, and distractions of the age, could hope to oppose. but without it she cannot live. She is now a throne On its way, it trampled down the army of Hungary, under tutelage; and remarkable as have been the which had the madness to meet it; and marching instances of European recovery from national misover the bodies of 20,000 men, with their monarch, fortune, there is nothing in the doctrines of Islamism, on the field, converted the kingdom into a Turkish or the habits of the Asiatic, to administer that energy province, and invested Vienna. The strength of the by which alone nations can stand on their feet again, ramparts and the approach of winter alone saved the after having been once flung on the ground. The Austrian capital from following the fate of the Hun- grave of her despotism has been dug, but neither garian, But while all Christendom trembled at the Russian nor Egyptian must be suffered to lay the sight of the horse-tails, Soliman died-living and body of the last of the Sultans there. dying, the greatest conqueror since Charlemagne. But with him the empire had reached its fated height. Thenceforth it was to descend. The seraglio has been the ruin of Turkey. The secresy of its There is a tradition, that on the night of the capture bloody transactions-its habitual separation of the of Constantinople, the conqueror saw in his sleep, sovereign from the people-its desperate dissolute-like the Babylonish king, a vision, unfolding the ness-and the sullen ignorance, brute vengeance, and fates of his dynasty. helpless effeminacy, which must be nurtured within such walls, extinguished all the rude virtues of the barbarian. Soliman, a hero and a legislator, always exposing his life in the field, or holding in his own hand the helm of his vast empire, reigned almost half a century. The reigns of his successors have been proverbial for their brevity. The janizaries became the true disposers of the throne. From the time of Mustapha the First-whom they strangled for his effeminacy, and Achmet, whom they placed on the throne and then strangled for his usurpation-the janizaries were the recognised makers and executioners of the sultans. The first decisive recoil of the Ottoman power was in 1683, when Sobieski, at the head of the Polish army, forced the Vizier Kara Mustafa to raise the siege of Vienna, on the 12th of September. But a power more formidable than even Austria now began to threaten the Porte on the feeblest part of its frontier. Peter the Great, breaking the treaty of Carlowitz, invaded Moldavia in 1711. But, though forced to make an ignominious convention for his escape, the Russian never forgot the hope of conquest, and has since never abandoned the opportunity. The nineteenth century commenced in an aggravation of those horrors which had become characteristic of the Turkish throne. Selim the Sultan dethroned and strangled; Mustapha the Usurper dethroned and strangled; Bairactar, the famous Vizier, in the attempt to avenge the death of Selim, blown up by his own hand, and thousands of his adherents slaughtered by the janizaries; the accession of Mahmoud, the late Sultan, signalized by the total massacre of the janizaries in Constantinople, and the extinction of their order throughout the empire ;-all less resembling the transactions of an established government, than the last desperate convulsions of a suicidal empire. Yet some extraordinary influence seems, for the last century, to have saved her from hourly ruin. Her time has clearly not come yet; and political prophecy has been once more put to shame. Turkey, inutilated of the two horns of her crescent, Greece and Egypt, still retains the solid centre of her possessions; and when all human probability looked for her immediate dissolution, by the advance of Russia on one side and Egypt on the other, she has found a sudden protection in the 1 SULTAUN, Sultaun!* Thou art lord of the world! At thy footstool is hurl'd. The East kneels before thee- Of the mother that bore thee! Hark, hark to the shouts Of the hordes as they lie That blaze to the sky. With the gore of the storm, High hour in the palace! There sits at the board, At the hypocrite's whine- Now the banquet is ended; The cannon's last roar On the Bosphorus' shore. * The Turkish pronunciation of the word. |