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38       MARGARETTA V. FAUGERES.

Or as the hireling waits the scanty sum,
By the hard hand of painful labour won;
So waits my spirit with anxiety,
Death's calm approach from woe to set me free;
For oh! my days are spent in vanity,
And nights of sorrow are appointed me!

I love not life, it is a burden grown;
Distress and Care have claimed me for their own,
And pale Disease, with unrelenting hand,
Sports with my sighs and casts them to the wind.
In vain doth night return to bless these eyes,
Signing I say, Oh! when shall I arise?
When will the night be gone? Convulsed with pain,
I raise my eyes to heaven for aid in vain;
My heart grows faint, and tossing to and fro
I waste the lonely hours in sullen woe.
Or if indeed my eyes should chance to close——
And weary nature gain a slight repose,
Then am I scared with terrifying dreams,
Wild shrieks I hear, and melancholy screams;
While hideous shapes crowd on my troubled sight,
Adding new terrors to the gloom of night.

Oh! I'm forlorn, in bitterness of soul
My cries burst forth, like floods my sorrows roll!
Forgot, abandoned, destitute, alone,
No pitying ear inhales the heart-wrung groan;
No friendly converse my sad spirit cheers,
No feeling breast receives my bitter tears;
Gone is each comfort,——hope itself is fled,——
O that I rested with the quiet dead!
No glimpse of good mine eyes again shall see,
"Let me alone——my days are vanity!"

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PHILLIS WHEATLEY.       39

ON A PAINTER.

When Laura appeared, poor Apelles complain'd
That his sight was bedimm'd, and his optics much pain'd;
So his pallet and pencil the artist resign'd,
Lest the blaze of her beauty should make him quite blind.
But when fair Anne enter'd, the prospect was changed,
The paints and the brushes in order were ranged;
The artist resumed his employment again,
Forgetful of labour, and blindness, and pain;
And the strokes were so lively that all were assured
What the brunette had injured the fair one had cured.
Let the candid decide which the chaplet should wear,
The charms which destroy, or the charms which repair.


PHILLIS WHEATLEY

May be regarded as a literary curiosity. She made so great a sensation in her time, that we must not omit a notice of her in our history of American female poetry; although the specimens we give of her talents may not be considered so wonderful as the sensation they caused. Phillis was stolen from Africa, at seven or eight years of age, carried to America, and sold in 1761, to John Wheatley, a rich merchant in Boston. She was so much loved by his family, for her amiable, modest manners, her exquisite sensibility, and "extraordinary talents," that she was not only released from the labours usually devolving on slaves, but entirely free also from the cares of the household. The literary characters of the day paid her much attention, supplied her with books, and encouraged with warm approbation all her intellectual efforts; while the best society of Boston received her as an equal. She was not only devoted to reading, and diligent in the study of the scriptures, but she made rapid proficiency in all learning; understood Latin, and commenced a translation, which was said to be very creditably done, of one of Ovid's tales. In 1772, when only nineteen, she published a volume of Poems on various subjects, moral and reli-

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