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With stainless touch, as chaste as when thy praise
Was sung by Virgin-choirs in festal lays;
And through dark trials still dost thou explore
Thy way for increase punctual as of yore,
When teeming Matrons-yielding to rude faith
In mysteries of birth and life and death
And painful struggle and deliverance - prayed
Of thee to visit them with lenient aid.

What though the rites be swept away, the fanes
Extinct that echoed to the votive strains;
Yet thy mild aspect does not, cannot, cease
Love to promote and purity and peace;
And Fancy, unreproved, even yet may trace
Faint types of suffering in thy beamless face.

Then, silent Monitress! let us - not blind
To worlds unthought of till the searching mind
Of Science laid them open to mankind —
Told, also, how the voiceless heavens declare
God's glory; and acknowledging thy share
In that blest charge; let us - without offence
To aught of highest, holiest influence —
Receive whatever good 't is given thee to dispense.
May sage and simple, catching with one eye
The moral intimations of the sky,

Learn from thy course, where'er their own be taken,
"To look on tempests, and be never shaken ";
To keep with faithful step the appointed way
Eclipsing or eclipsed, by night or day,
And from example of thy monthly range
Gently to brook decline and fatal change;
Meek, patient, steadfast, and with loftier scope,
Than thy revival yields, for gladsome hope!

CHARACTER OF WATT.

BY LORD JEFFREY.

NDEPENDENTLY of his great attainments in mechan

his glinary, and in many respects

a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information, had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodizing power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in con versation with him had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting, such was the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity,

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