Her mansions, foul and desolate,--
Her close canals, exhaling wide
Such fetid airs as--with those domes
Of silent grandeur, by their side,
Where step of life ne'er goes or comes,
And those black barges plying round
With melancholy, plashing sound,--
Seem like a city, where the Pest
Is holding her last visitation,
And all, ere long, will be at rest,
The dead, sure rest of desolation.

So look'd, at night-fall, oft to me
That ruin'd City of the Sea;
And, as the gloomy fancy grew
Still darker with night's darkening hue,
All round me seem'd by Death o'ercast,--
Each footstep in those halls the last;
And the dim boats, as slow they pass'd,
All burial-barks, with each its load
Of livid corpses, feebly row'd
By fading hands, to find a bed
In waters less choked up with dead.--_Metropolitan_.


* * * * *


ON THE DEATH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.