scholarly tastes and poetic gifts. He spent five years abroad, chiefly in
Italy, where his studies in Italian literature afterwards led to a work
on Torquato Tasso. It was on the occasion of this trip abroad that he
wrote _A Farewell to America_, which breathes a noble spirit of
patriotism:--

"Farewell, my more than fatherland!
Home of my heart and friends, adieu!
Lingering beside some foreign strand,
How oft shall I remember you!
How often, o'er the waters blue,
Send back a sigh to those I leave,
The loving and beloved few,
Who grieve for me,--for whom I grieve!"

On his return to America, he settled in New Orleans, where he became a
professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of a
volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy
lyric, _My Life is like the Summer Rose_, that, more than all the rest,
has given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary
to quote a stanza of a poem so well known?

"My life is like the summer rose,
That opens to the morning sky,
But, ere the shades of evening close,
Is scattered on the ground--to die!
Yet on the rose's humble bed
The sweetest dews of night are shed,
As if she wept the waste to see--
But none shall weep a tear for me!"