The following exquisite lyric is among the passages with which these judgments are sustained: 

  “If thou wilt ease thine heart
  Of love and all its smart,
      Then sleep, dear, sleep;
  And not a sorrow
    Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
      Lie still and deep
    Sad soul, until like sea-wave washes
  The rim o’ the sun to-morrow,
      In eastern sky.

  But wilt thou cure thine heart
  Of love and all its smart,
      Then die, dear, die;
  ’Tis deeper, sweeter,
    Than on a rose bank to lie dreaming
      With folded eye;
    And then alone, amid the beaming
  Of love’s stars, thou’lt meet her
      In eastern sky.”

* * * * *

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED.

Praed, it has always seemed to us, was the cleverest writer in his way that has ever contributed to the English periodicals.  His fugitive lyrics and arabesque romances, half sardonic and half sentimental, published with Hookham Frere’s “Whistlecraft” and Macaulay’s Roundhead Ballads, in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, and after the suspension of that work, for the most part in the annual souvenirs, are altogether unequaled in the class of compositions described as vers de societie.—­Who that has read “School and School Fellows”, “Palinodia”, “The Vicar”, “Josephine”, and a score of other pieces in the same vein, does not desire to possess all the author has left us, in a suitable edition?  It has been frequently stated in the English journals that such a collection was to be published, under the direction of Praed’s widow, but we have yet only the volume prepared by a lover of the poet some years ago for the Langleys, in this city.  In the “Memoirs of Eminent Etonians,” just printed by Mr. Edward Creasy, we have several waifs of Praed’s that we believe will be new to all our readers.  Here is a characteristic political rhyme: 

VERSES

On seeing the speaker asleep in his chair in one of the debates of the first reformed Parliament.

  Sleep, Mr. Speaker, ’tis surely fair
  If you mayn’t in your bed, that you should in your chair. 
  Louder and longer now they grow,
  Tory and Radical, Aye and Noe;
  Talking by night and talking by day. 
  Sleep, Mr. Speaker, sleep while you may!

  Sleep, Mr. Speaker; slumber lies
  Light and brief on a Speaker’s eyes,
  Fielden or Finn in a minute or two
  Some disorderly thing will do;
  Riot will chase repose away
  Sleep, Mr. Speaker, sleep while you may!

  Sleep, Mr. Speaker.  Sweet to men
  Is the sleep that cometh but now and then,
  Sweet to the weary, sweet to the ill,
  Sweet to the children that work in the mill. 
  You have more need of repose than they—­
  Sleep, Mr. Speaker, sleep while you may!