Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine – Volume 53, No. 332, June, 1843

The rustling leaves do their white hearts affray.
They regret the pleasures of their forsaken home,
… the kingcup decked mees,
The spreading flocks of sheep of lily white,
The tender applings and embodied trees,
The parker's grange, far spreading to the sight,
The gentle kine, the bullocks strong in fight,
The garden whiten'd with the comfrey plant,
The flowers Saint Mary shooting with the light—
…
The far-seen groves around the hermit's cell,
The merry fiddle dinning up the dell,
The joyous dancing in the hostry court—
But now,
high song and every joy farewell,
Farewell the very shade of fair disport."

In the second Eclogue, a good son invokes blessings on his father, who is gone with the crusaders to Palestine. He describes with much animation the voyage, the landing in Syria, the warring Saracens, King Richard of lion's heart, and anticipates victory and the return to England.

"Thus Nigel said, when from the azure sea
The swollen sail did dance before his eyne.
Swift as the wish he to the beach did fly,
And found his father stepping from the brine.
Sprites of the blest, the pious Nigel said,
Pour out your pleasance on my father's head!"

The third Eclogue, if divested of certain exuberances—for Chatterton was precocious in every thing, and many of his fancies want the Bowdler pruning-knife—might be seasonably transferred to some of the penny publications for the benefit of Mr Frost's disciples. A poor man and woman, on their way to the parson's hayfield, complain to each other of their hard lot in being obliged to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. "Why," asks the woman, "should I be more obligated to work than the fine Dame Agnes? What is she more than me? The man, unable to solve so knotty a point, says he doesn't see how he himself is not as good as a lord's son, but he will ask Sir Roger the parson, whom he consults accordingly.

"Man.—

By your priestship now say unto me,
Sir Godfrey the knight, who liveth hard by,
Why should he than me
Be more great
In honour, knighthood, and estate?

"Sir Roger.—

If thou hast ease, the shadow of content,
Believe the truth, none happier is than thee.
Thou workest well; can that a trouble be?
Sloth more would jade thee than the roughest day.
Could'st thou the secret minds of others see,
Thou would'st full soon see truth in what I say.
But let me hear thy way of life, and then
Hear thou from me the lives of richer men.

"Man.—

I rise with the sun,
Like him to drive the wain,
And, ere my work is done,
I sing a song or twain.
I follow the plough-tail
With a bottle of ale.
On every saint's day
With the minstrel I'm seen,
All footing away
With the maids on the green.
But oh, I wish to be more great,
In honour, station, and estate!

"Sir Roger.—

Hast thou not seen a tree upon a hill,
Whose ample boughs stretch wide around to sight?
When angry tempests do the heavens fill,
It shaketh drear, in dole and much affright:
While the small flower in lowly graces deck'd
Standeth unhurt, untroubled by the storm.
The picture such of life. The man of might
Is tempest-chafed, his woe great as his form;
Thyself, a floweret of small account,
Would harder feel the wind as higher thou didst mount."

Sir Roger's moral is trite enough, yet it seems to have escaped the consideration of our Chartists and Socialists.

Elinour the nut-brown, and Juga the fair, are two pining maidens, who, seated on the banks of the Redbourne, a river near St Alban's, are each bemoaning their lovers, gone to fight in that neighbourhood for the Rose of York. Presently, racked with suspense, they hasten nearer to the scene of action.

"Like twain of clouds that hold the stormy rain,
They moved gently o'er the dewy meads
To where Saint Alban's holy shrines remain.
There did they find that both their knights were slain.
Distraught they wander'd to swoln Redbourne's side,
Yell'd there their deadly knell, sank in the waves, and died."

The verses to Lydgate consist of ten lines of no merit at all, and supposed to be sent to him by Rowley, with the Ode to Ella, which has a movement that recalls Collins, a lyrical artist perhaps unexcelled in our language, and in whose manner Chatterton so obviously and frequently composes, that the fact alone might have settled the Rowley question, though we are not aware that it was ever particularly insisted on in the controversy.

"Oh Thou, or what remains of Thee,
Ella! the darling of futurity,
Let this my song bold as thy courage be,
As everlasting to posterity—

"When Dacia's sons, with hair of blood-red hue,
Like kingcups glittering with the morning dew,
Arranged in drear array,
Upon the fatal day,
Spread far and wide on Watchet's shore,
Then didst thou furious stand,
And by thy valiant hand