"Lo, Winter comes to rule th' inverted year!"

So do we,

"Sullen and sad, with all his rising train— Vapours, and clouds, and storms!"

So are we. The great author of the "Seasons" says, that Winter and his train

"Exalt the soul to solemn thought, And heavenly musing!"

So do we. And, "lest aught less great should stamp us mortal," here we conclude the comparison, dashed off in few lines by the hand of a great master, and ask, Is not North, Winter? Thus, listener after our own heart! thou feelest that we are imaged aright in all our attributes neither by Spring, nor Summer, nor Autumn, nor Winter; but that the character of Christopher is shadowed forth and reflected by the Entire Year.



A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON.

Poetry, one might imagine, must be full of Snow-scenes. If so, they have almost all dissolved—melted away from our memory—as the transiencies in nature do which they coldly pictured. Thomson's "Winter," of course, we do not include in our obliviousness—and from Cowper's "Task" we might quote many a most picturesque Snow-piece. But have frost and snow been done full justice to by them or any other of our poets? They have been well spoken of by two—Southey and Coleridge—of whose most poetical compositions respectively, "Thalaba" and the "Ancient Mariner," in some future volume we may dissert. Thomson's genius does not so often delight us by exquisite minute touches in the description of nature as that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great scale, and to dash objects off sweepingly by bold strokes—such, indeed, as have almost always distinguished the mighty masters of the lyre and the rainbow. Cowper sets nature before your eyes—Thomson before your imagination. Which do you prefer? Both. Be assured that both poets had pored night and day upon her—in all her aspects—and that she had revealed herself fully to both. But they, in their religion, elected different modes of worship—and both were worthy of the mighty mother. In one mood of mind we love Cowper best, in another Thomson. Sometimes the Seasons are almost a Task—and sometimes the Task is out of Season. There is delightful distinctness in all the pictures of the Bard of Olney—glorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of the Bard of Ednam. Cowper paints trees—Thomson woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous lines, rivers from source to sea, like the mighty Burrampooter—Cowper, in many no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend of a stream, or awakens our fancy to the murmur of some single waterfall. But a truce to antithesis—a deceptive style of criticism—and see how Thomson sings of Snow. Why, in the following lines, as well as Christopher North in his Soliloquy on the Seasons—

"The cherish'd fields Put on their winter-robe of purest white. 'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts Along the mazy current."

Nothing can be more vivid. 'Tis of the nature of an ocular spectrum.

Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet "brown," where all that is motionless is white—

"The foodless wilds Pour forth their brown inhabitants."

That one word proves the poet. Does it not?

The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by memory—a critic you may always trust to—is admirable; except in one or two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic, and where he seems to us to have overshot his mark, and to have ceased to be perfectly natural. Thus—

"Drooping, the ox Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil."

The image of the ox is as good as possible. We see him, and could paint him in oils. But, to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the fruit of all his toils"—to which we freely acknowledge the worthy animal was well entitled—sounds, as it is here expressed, rather fantastical. Call it doubtful—for Jemmy was never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment. Again—

"The bleating kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, With looks of dumb despair."

The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepherd agreed with us—one night at Ambrose's—that the third was not quite right. Sheep, he agreed with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what immediately succeeds—

"Then, sad dispersed, Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

For, as they disperse, they do look very sad—and no doubt are so; but had they been in despair, they would not so readily, and constantly, and uniformly, and successfully, have taken to the digging, but whole flocks had perished.

You will not, we are confident, be angry with us for quoting a few lines that occur soon after, and which are a noble example of the sweeping style of description which, we said above, characterises the genius of this sublime poet:—

"From the bellowing east, In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wing Sweeps up the burden of whole wintry plains At one wide waft, and o'er the hapless flocks, Hid in the hollow of two neighbouring hills, The billowy tempest whelms; till, upward urged, The valley to a shining mountain swells, Tipp'd with a wreath high-curling in the sky."

Well might the Bard, with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast. "Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind was up—

"Far off its coming groan'd,"

and the poet was inspired. Had he not been so, he had not cried, "Baffle the raging year;" and if you be not so, you will think it a most absurd expression.

Did you ever see water beginning to change itself into ice? Yes. Then try to describe the sight. Success in that trial will prove you a poet. People do not prove themselves poets only by writing long poems. A line—two words—may show that they are the Muse's sons. How exquisitely does Burns picture to our eyes moonlight water undergoing an ice-change!

"The chilly frost beneath the silver beam, Crept, gently crusting o'er the glittering stream!"

Thomson does it with an almost finer spirit of perception—or conception—or memory—or whatever else you choose to call it; for our part, we call it genius—

"An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool Breathes a blue film, and in its mid career Arrests the bickering stream."

And afterwards, having frozen the entire stream into a "crystal pavement," how strongly doth he conclude thus—

"The whole imprison'd river growls below."

Here, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the most part, in tranquil images—for his life was passed amidst tranquil nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power. Cowper says—

"On the flood, Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight Lies undissolved, while silently beneath, And unperceived, the current steals away."

How many thousand times the lines we are now going to quote have been quoted, nobody can tell; but we quote them once more for the purpose of asking you, if you think that any one poet of this age could have written them—could have chilled one's very blood with such intense feeling of cold! Not one.

"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught, And to the stony deep his idle ship Immediate seal'd, he with his hapless crew, Each full exerted at his several task, Froze into statues; to the cordage glued The sailor, and the pilot to the helm!"

The oftener—the more we read the "Winter"—especially the last two or three hundred lines—the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter" immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of his fame. But such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and were all committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to him at the time to be poetry—though sometimes it was but "false glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages, without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his inspirations. He luxuriates—he revels—he wantons—at once with an imaginative and a sensuous delight in nature. Besides, he was but young; and his great work was his first. He had not philosophised his poetical language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of profoundest study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study, while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertinism of the diction and versification of the "Seasons"—above all, in the closing strains of the "Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and wonder seldom breathed upon us—glorious poem, on the whole, as it is—from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"

All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school, know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and Pyrenees,

"Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave! Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c.

The first fifteen lines are equal to anything in the whole range of English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here they are:—

"The godlike face of man avails him nought! Even beauty, force divine! at whose bright glance The generous lion stands in soften'd gaze, Now bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey. But if, apprised of the severe attack, The country be shut up, lured by the scent, On churchyard drear (inhuman to relate!) The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig The shrouded body from the grave; o'er which, Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye—they think us ugly customers—and sometimes stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in an awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so, then

"The godlike face of man avails him nought,"

is, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about "beauty, force divine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood, merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr Watts's "Souvenir." 'Tis all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past without eating her—but simply because, an hour or two before, he had dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his stomach. Still the notion is a popular one, and how exquisitely has Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the attendant lion of

"Heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb!"

But Thomson, so far from making poetry of it in this passage, has vulgarised and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of terror and pity. Famished wolves howking up the dead is a dreadful image—but "inhuman to relate," is not an expression heavily laden with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel, unnatural introduction of ideas purely superstitious, at the close, is revolting, and miserably mars the terrible truth.

"Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost? Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, which they had good reason to be, why were not they off? We have frequently read of their wandering far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our pocket-copy of the "Seasons"—and to draw a few keelavine strokes over the rest of the passage—beginning with "man's godlike face."

Go read, then, the opening of "Winter," and acknowledge that, of all climates and all countries, there are none within any of the zones of the earth that will bear a moment's comparison with those of Scotland. Forget the people if you can, and think only of the region. The lovely Lowlands undulating away into the glorious Highlands—the spirit of sublimity and the spirit of beauty one and the same, as it blends them in indissoluble union. Bury us alive in the dungeon's gloom—incommunicable with the light of day as the grave—it could not seal our eyes to the sight of Scotland. We should see it still by rising or by setting suns. Whatever blessed scene we chose to call on would become an instant apparition. Nor in that thick-ribbed vault would our eyes be deaf to her rivers and her seas. We should say our prayers to their music, and to the voice of the thunder on a hundred hills. We stand now in no need of senses. They are waxing dim—but our spirit may continue to brighten long as the light of love is allowed to dwell therein, thence proceeding over nature like a victorious morn.

There are many beautiful passages in the poets about RAIN; but who ever sang its advent so passionately as in these strains?—

"The effusive south Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent. At first a dusky wreath they seem to rise, Scarce staining ether; but by swift degrees, In heaps on heaps, the doubling vapour sails Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep Sits on th' horizon round a settled gloom: Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed, Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind, And full of every hope and every joy, The wish of nature. Gradual sinks the breeze Into a perfect calm, that not a breath Is heard to quiver through the closing woods, Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves Of aspen tall. Th' uncurling floods diffused In glassy breadth, seem through delusive lapse Forgetful of their course. 'Tis silence all And pleasing expectation. Herds and flocks Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye The falling verdure!"

All that follows is, you know, as good—better it cannot be—till we come to the close, the perfection of poetry, and then sally out into the shower, and join the hymn of earth to heaven—

"The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard By such as wander through the forest walks, Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves. But who can hold the shade, while heaven descends In universal bounty, shedding herbs, And fruits, and flowers, on Nature's ample lap? Swift Fancy fired anticipates their growth; And, while the milky nutriment distils, Beholds the kindling country colour round."

Thomson, they say, was too fond of epithets. Not he, indeed. Strike out one of the many there—and your sconce shall feel the crutch. A poet less conversant with nature would have feared to say, "sits on the horizon round a settled gloom," or rather, he would not have seen or thought it was a settled gloom; and, therefore, he could not have said—

——"But lovely, gentle, kind, And full of every hope and every joy, The wish of Nature."

Leigh Hunt—most vivid of poets, and most cordial of critics—somewhere finely speaks of a ghastly line in a poem of Keats'—

"Riding to Florence with the murder'd man;"

that is, the man about to be murdered—imagination conceiving as one, doom and death. Equally great are the words—

"Herds and flocks Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye The falling verdure."

The verdure is seen in the shower—to be the very shower—by the poet at least—perhaps by the cattle, in their thirsty hunger forgetful of the brown ground, and swallowing the dropping herbage. The birds had not been so sorely distressed by the drought as the beasts, and therefore the poet speaks of them, not as relieved from misery, but as visited with gladness—

"Hush'd in short suspense, The plumy people streak their wings with oil, To throw the lucid moisture trickling off, And wait th' approaching sign, to strike, at once, Into the general choir."

Then, and not till then, the humane poet bethinks him of the insensate earth—insensate not; for beast and bird being satisfied, and lowing and singing in their gratitude, so do the places of their habitation yearn for the blessing—

"E'en mountains, vales, And forests, seem impatient, to demand The promised sweetness."

The religious Poet then speaks for his kind—and says devoutly—

"Man superior walks Amid the glad creation, musing praise, And looking lively gratitude."

In that mood he is justified to feast his fancy with images of the beauty as well as the bounty of nature; and genius in one line has concentrated them all—

"Beholds the kindling country colour round."

'Tis "an a' day's rain"—and "the well-showered earth is deep-enriched with vegetable life." And what kind of an evening? We have seen many such—and every succeeding one more beautiful, more glorious to our eyes than another—because of these words in which the beauty and the glory of one and all are enshrined—

"Till, in the western sky, the downward sun Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam. The rapid radiance, instantaneous, strikes Th' illumined mountain, through the forest streams, Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist, Far smoking o'er th' interminable plain, In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems. Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around. Full swell the woods; their every music wakes, Mix'd in wild concert with the warbling brooks Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills, And hollow lows responsive from the vales, Whence, blending all, the sweeten'd zephyr springs. Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud, Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds In fair proportion, running from the red To where the violet fades into the sky."

How do you like our recitation of that surpassing strain? Every shade of feeling should have its shade of sound—every pause its silence. But these must all come and go, untaught, unbidden, from the fulness of the heart. Then indeed, and not till then, can words be said to be set to music—to a celestial sing-song.

The mighty Minstrel recited old Ballads with a warlike march of sound that made one's heart leap, while his usually sweet smile was drawn in, and disappeared among the glooms that sternly gathered about his lowering brows, and gave his whole aspect a most heroic character. Rude verses, that from ordinary lips would have been almost meaningless, from his came inspired with passion. Sir Philip Sidney, who said that "Chevy Chase" roused him like the sound of a trumpet, had he heard Sir Walter Scott recite it, would have gone distracted. Yet the "best judges" said he murdered his own poetry—we say about as much as Homer. Wordsworth recites his own Poetry (catch him reciting any other) magnificently—while his eyes seem blind to all outward objects, like those of a somnambulist. Coleridge was the sweetest of sing-songers—and his silver voice "warbled melody." Next to theirs, we believe our own recitation of Poetry to be the most impressive heard in modern times, though we cannot deny that the leathern-eared have pronounced it detestable, and the long-eared ludicrous; their delight being in what is called Elocution, as it is taught by player-folk.

O friendly reader of these our Recreations! thou needst not to be told—yet in love let us tell thee—that there are a thousand ways of dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse the sentiment by a single touch—by a ray of light no thicker, nor one thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you may splash it in as with a gorgeous cloud-stain stolen from sunset; or you may bathe it in with a shred of the rainbow. Perhaps the highest power of all possessed by the sons of song, is to breathe it in with the breath, to let it slip in with the light of the common day!

Then some poets there are, who show you a scene all of a sudden, by means of a few magical words—just as if you opened your eyes at their bidding—and in place of a blank, a world. Others, again, as good and as great, create their world gradually before your eyes, for the delight of your soul, that loves to gaze on the growing glory; but delight is lost in wonder, and you know that they, too, are warlocks. Some heap image upon image, piles of imagery on piles of imagery, as if they were ransacking and robbing, and red-reavering earth, sea, and sky; yet all things there are consentaneous with one grand design, which, when consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give you but fragments—but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we shall live for ever.

Thus—and in other wondrous ways—the great poets are the great painters, and so are they the great musicians. But how they are so, some other time may we tell; suffice it now to say, that as we listen to the mighty masters—"sole or responsive to each other's voice"—

"Now, 'tis like all instruments, Now like a lonely lute; And now 'tis like an angel's song That bids the heavens be mute!"

Why will so many myriads of men and women, denied by nature "the vision and the faculty divine," persist in the delusion that they are poetising, while they are but versifying "this bright and breathing world?" They see truly not even the outward objects of sight. But of all the rare affinities and relationships in Nature, visible or audible to Fine-ear-and-Far-eye the Poet, not a whisper—not a glimpse have they ever heard or seen, any more than had they been born deaf-blind.

They paint a landscape, but nothing "prates of their whereabouts," while they were sitting on a tripod, with their paper on their knees, drawing—their breath. For, in the front ground is a castle, against which, if you offer to stir a step, you infallibly break your head, unless providentially stopped by that extraordinary vegetable-looking substance, perhaps a tree, growing bolt upright out of an intermediate stone, that has wedged itself in long after there had ceased to be even standing-room in that strange theatre of nature. But down from "the swelling instep of a mountain's foot," that has protruded itself through a wood, while the body of the mountain prudently remains in the extreme distance, descends on you, ere you have recovered from your unexpected encounter with the old Roman cement, an unconscionable cataract. There stands a deer or goat, or rather some beast with horns, "strictly anonymous," placed for effect, contrary to all cause, in a place where it seems as uncertain how he got in as it is certain that he never can get out till he becomes a hippogriff.

The true poet, again, has such potent eyes, that when he lets down the lids, he sees just as well, perhaps better than when they were up; for in that deep, earnest, inward gaze, the fluctuating sea of scenery subsides into a settled calm, where all is harmony as well as beauty—order as well as peace. What though he have been fated, through youth and manhood, to dwell in city smoke? His childhood—his boyhood—were overhung with trees, and through its heart went the murmur of waters. Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, is filled with images up to the brim, Imagination's treasury. Genius, growing, and grown up to maturity, is still a prodigal. But he draws on the Bank of Youth. His bills, whether at a short or long date, are never dishonoured; nay, made payable at sight, they are as good as gold. Nor cares that Bank for a run, made even in a panic, for besides bars and billets, and wedges and blocks of gold, there are, unappreciable beyond the riches which against a time of trouble

"The Sultaun hides in his ancestral tombs,"

jewels and diamonds sufficient

"To ransom great kings from captivity."

We sometimes think that the power of painting Nature to the life, whether in her real or ideal beauty (both belong to life,) is seldom evolved to its utmost, until the mind possessing it is withdrawn in the body from all rural environment. It has not been so with Wordsworth, but it was so with Milton. The descriptive poetry in "Comus" is indeed rich as rich may be, but certainly not so great, perhaps not so beautiful, as that in "Paradise Lost."

It would seem to be so with all of us, small as well as great; and were we—Christopher North—to compose a poem on Loch Skene, two thousand feet or so above the level of the sea, and some miles from a house, we should desire to do so in a metropolitan cellar. Desire springs from separation. The spirit seeks to unite itself to the beauty it loves, the grandeur it admires, the sublimity it almost fears; and all these being o'er the hills and far away, or on the hills cloud-hidden, why it—the spirit—makes itself wings—or rather wings grow up of themselves in its passion, and naturewards it flies like a dove or an eagle. People looking at us believe us present, but they never were so far mistaken in their lives; for in the Seamew are we sailing with the tide through the moonshine on Loch Etive—or hanging o'er that gulf of peril on the bosom of Skyroura.

We are sitting now in a dusky den—with our eyes shut—but we see the whole Highlands. Our Highland Mountains are of the best possible magnitude—ranging between two and four thousand feet high—and then in what multitudes! The more familiar you become with them, the mightier they appear—and you feel that it is all sheer folly to seek to dwindle or dwarf them, by comparing them as they rise before your eyes with your imagination of Mont Blanc and those eternal glaciers. If you can bring them under your command, you are indeed a sovereign—and have a noble set of subjects. In some weather they are of any height you choose to put them—say thirty thousand feet—in other states of the atmosphere you think you could walk over their summits and down into the region beyond in an hour. Try. We have seen Cruachan, during a whole black day, swollen into such enormous bulk, that Loch Awe looked like but a sullen river at his base, her woods bushes, and Kilchurn no bigger than a cottage. The whole visible scene was but he and his shadow. They seemed to make the day black, rather than the day to make them so—and at nightfall he took wider and loftier possession of the sky—the clouds congregated round without hiding his summit, on which seemed to twinkle, like earth-lighted fires, a few uncertain stars. Rain drives you into a shieling—and you sit there for an hour or two in eloquent confabulation with the herdsman, your English against his Gaelic. Out of the door you creep—and gaze in astonishment on a new world. The mist is slowly rolling up and away in long lines of clouds, preserving, perhaps, a beautiful regularity on their ascension and evanescence, and between them

"Tier above tier, a wooded theatre Of stateliest view,"

or cliff galleries with strange stone-images sitting up aloft; and yet your eyes have not reached the summits, nor will they reach them, till all that vapoury ten-mile-long mass dissolve, or be scattered, and then you start to see them, as if therein had been but their bases, THE MOUNTAINS, with here and there a peak illumined, reposing in the blue serene that smiles as if all the while it had been above reach of the storm.

The power of Egoism accompanies us into solitude; nay, is even more life-pervading there than in the hum of men. There the stocks and stones are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we may have left at home our fiddle—more potent we in our actuality than the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher! Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding silent the cataract on the cliff—the thunder on the sky. The sea beholds us on the shore—and his one huge frown transformed into a multitudinous smile, he turns flowing affections towards us along the golden sands—and in a fluctuating hindrance of lovely foam-wreaths envelopes our feet!

To return to Thomson. Wordsworth labours to prove, in one of his "postliminious prefaces," that the true spirit of "The Seasons," till long after their publication, was neither felt nor understood. In the conduct of his argument he does not shine. That the poem was at once admired he is forced to admit; but then, according to him, the admiration was false and hollow—it was regarded but with that wonder which is the "natural product of ignorance." After having observed that, excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature, he proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"—and then, without ever once dreaming of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if he had succeeded in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their failure to establish the point he is hammering at, he all at once says, with the most astounding assumption, "having shown that much of what his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment—how is the rest to be accounted for?" "Having shown"!!! Why, he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in supposing that his mere ipse dixit will be taken by the whole world as proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. "Strange to think of an enthusiast," he says (alluding to the passage in Pope's translation of the "Iliad"), "as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity!" We are no enthusiasts—we are far too old for that folly; but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and as good eyes, too, as Mr Wordsworth, and we often have recited—and hope often will recite them again—Pope's exquisite lines, not only without any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most devout belief that, with some little vagueness perhaps, and repetition, and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the description is most beautiful. But grant it miserable—grant all Mr Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered—and what then? Though descriptive poetry did not flourish during the period between "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons," nevertheless, did not mankind enjoy the use of their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those oculists and aurists, the poets? Were all the shepherds and agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very like a whale! Causes there were why poetry flowed during that era in another channel than that of the description of natural scenery; and if it flowed too little in that channel then—which is true—equally is it true that it flows now in it too much—especially among the poets of the Lake School, to the neglect, not of sentiments and affections—for there they excel—but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and tumult—of which the interest is profound and eternal—of all the great affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is there in this world for imagining, with Mr Wordsworth, that men had forgotten both the heavens and the earth. They had not—nor was the wonder with which they must have regarded the great shows of nature, the "natural product of ignorance," then, any more than it is now, or ever was during a civilised age. If we be right in saying so—then neither could the admiration which "The Seasons," on the first appearance of that glorious poem, excited, be said, with any truth, to have been but a "wonder, the natural product of ignorance."

Mr Wordsworth having thus signally failed in his attempt to show that "much of what Thomson's biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment," let us accompany him in his equally futile efforts to show "how the rest is to be accounted for." He attempts to do so after this fashion: "Thomson was fortunate in the very title of his poem, which seemed to bring it home to the prepared sympathies of every one; in the next place, notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind which would be most likely to strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of 'The Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."

Thomson, in one sense, was fortunate in the title of his poem. But a great poet like Wordsworth might—nay, ought to have chosen another word—or have given of that word a loftier explanation, when applied to Thomson's choice of the Seasons for the subject of his immortal poem. Genius made that choice—not fortune. The "Seasons" are not merely the "title" of his poem—they are his poem, and his poem is the Seasons. But how, pray, can Thomson be said to have been fortunate in the title or the subject either of his poem, in the sense that Mr Wordsworth means? Why, according to him, people knew little, and cared less, about the Seasons. "The art of seeing had in some measure been learned!" That he allows—but that was all—and that all is but little—and surely far from being enough to have disposed people in general to listen to the strains of a poet who painted nature in all her moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either most unfortunate in the title of his poem, or there was not with the many that indifference to, and ignorance of natural scenery, on which Mr Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather whole, of his preceding argument.

The title, Mr Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to the prepared sympathies of every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more popular than he supposed it to be—and Heaven be praised, for the honour of the age, it was and is so!—never had they been written, nor had he here and elsewhere laboured to prove that in proportion as poetry is bad, or rather as it is no poetry at all, is it, has been, and always will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer. That Thomson, in "The Seasons," sometimes writes a vicious style, may be true; but it is not true that he often does so. His style has its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate—especially to dunces. But its virtue is divine; and that divine virtue, even in this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely than earthly vice—be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions—is a creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the great author of "The Excursion."

That many did—do—and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in "The Seasons"—won by their false glitter or commonplace sentimentalism, is no doubt true: but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantuamakers and man-milliners, and "the rest," peruse the Rhapsody on Love—one passage of which we ventured to be facetious on in our Soliloquy on the Seasons—and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the "Winter," the first published of "The Seasons;" during which, Thomson had not the barbarity to plunge any young lady naked into the cold bath, nor the ignorance to represent, during such cold weather, any young lady turning her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and the vehemence of her whole enamoured deportment. The time never was—nor could have been—when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem. Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people admired most in the poem what they least understood; for the Rhapsody on Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem much mystery in Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is it not melancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr Wordsworth, earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful. Thomson had not the philosophical genius of Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and its generous feelings overflow all his poem. These are not the most poetical parts of "The Seasons," certainly, where such effusions prevail; but still, so far from being either vicious or worthless, they have often a virtue and a worth that must be felt by all the children of men. There is something not very credible in the situation of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example, and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr Wordsworth say—in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first (and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale is still read by all simple minds) the most popular—that that story is a bad one? It is a very beautiful one.

Mr Wordsworth, in all his argumentation, is so blinded by his determination to see everything in but one light, and that a most mistaken one, that he is insensible to the conclusion to which it all leads, or rather, which is involved in it. Why, according to him, even now, when people have not only learned the "art of seeing"—a blessing for which they can never be too thankful—but when descriptive poetry has long flourished far beyond its palmiest state in any other era of our literature, still are we poor common mortals who admire "The Seasons," just as deaf and blind now, or nearly so, to their real merits—allowed to be transcendent—as our unhappy forefathers were when that poem first appeared, "a glorious apparition." The Rhapsody on Love, and Damon and Musidora, are still, according to him, its chief attraction—its false ornaments—and its sentimental commonplaces—such as those, we presume, on the benefits of early rising, and,

"Oh! little think the gay licentious proud!"

What a nest of ninnies must people in general be in Mr Wordsworth's eyes! And is "The Excursion" not to be placed by the side of "Paradise Lost," till the Millennium?

Such is the reasoning (!) of one of the first of our English poets, against not only the people of Britain, but mankind. One other sentence there is which we had forgotten—but now remember—which is to help us to distinguish, in the case of the reception "The Seasons" met with, between "wonder and legitimate admiration!" "The subject of the work is the changes produced in the appearances of nature by the revolution of the year; and, undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged himself to treat his subject as became a poet!" How original and profound! Thomson redeemed his pledge; and that great pawnbroker, the public, returned to him his poem at the end of a year and a day. Now, what is the "mighty stream of tendency" of that remark? Were the public, or the people, or the world, gulled by this unheard-of pledge of Thomson, to regard his work with that "wonder which is the natural product of ignorance!" If they were so in his case, why not in every other? All poets pledge themselves to be poetical, but too many of them are wretchedly prosaic—die and are buried, or what is worse, protract a miserable existence, in spite of their sentimental commonplaces, false ornaments, and a vicious style. But Thomson, in spite of all these, leapt at once into a glorious life, and a still more glorious immortality.

There is no mystery in the matter. Thomson—a great poet—poured his genius over a subject of universal interest; and "The Seasons" from that hour to this—then, now, and for ever—have been, are, and will be loved, and admired by all the world. All over Scotland "The Seasons" is a household book. Let the taste and feeling shown by the Collectors of Elegant Extracts be poor as possible; yet Thomson's countrymen, high and low, rich and poor, have all along not only gloried in his illustrious fame, but have made a very manual of his great work. It lies in many thousand cottages. We have ourselves seen it in the shepherd's shieling, and in the woodsman's bower—small, yellow-leaved, tatter'd, mean, miserable, calf-skin-bound, smoked, stinking copies—let us not fear to utter the word, ugly but true—yet perused, pored, and pondered over by those humble dwellers, by the winter ingle or on the summer brae, perhaps with as enlightened—certainly with as imagination-overmastering a delight as ever enchained the spirits of the high-born and highly-taught to their splendid copies lying on richly-carved tables, and bound in crimson silk or velvet, in which the genius of painting strives to embody that of poetry, and the printer's art to lend its beauty to the very shape of the words in which the bard's immortal spirit is enshrined. "The art of seeing" has flourished for many centuries in Scotland. Men, women, and children, all look up to her loveful blue or wrathful black skies, with a weather-wisdom that keeps growing from the cradle to the grave. Say not that 'tis alone

"The poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind!"

In Scriptural language, loftier even than that, the same imagery is applied to the sights seen by the true believer. Who is it "that maketh the clouds His chariot?" The Scottish peasantry—Highland and Lowland—look much and often on nature thus; and they live in the heart of the knowledge and of the religion of nature. Therefore do they love Thomson as an inspired bard—only a little lower than the Prophets. In like manner have the people of Scotland—from time immemorial—enjoyed the use of their ears. Even persons somewhat hard of hearing, are not deaf to her waterfalls. In the sublime invocation to Winter, which we have quoted—we hear Thomson recording his own worship of nature in his boyish days, when he roamed among the hills of his father's parish, far away from the manse. In those strange and stormy delights did not thousands of thousands of the Scottish boyhood familiarly live among the mists and snows? Of all that number he alone had the genius to "here eternise on earth" his joy—but many millions have had souls to join religiously in the hymns he chanted. Yea, his native land, with one mighty voice, has for upwards of a century responded,

"These, as they change, Almighty Father, these Are but the varied God!"



THE SNOWBALL BICKER OF PEDMOUNT.

Beautiful as Snow yet is to our eyes, even through our spectacles, how grey it looks beside that which used to come with the long winters that glorified the earth in our youth, till the white lustre was more delightful even than the green—and we prayed that the fine fleecy flakes might never cease falling waveringly from the veil of the sky! No sooner comes the winter now, than it is away again to one of the Poles. Then, it was a year in itself—a whole life. We remember slides a quarter of a mile long, on level meadows; and some not less steep, down the sides of hills that to us were mountains. No boy can slide on one leg now—not a single shoe seems to have sparables. The florid style of skating shows that that fine art is degenerating; and we look in vain for the grand simplicity of the masters that spread-eagled in the age of its perfection. A change has come over the spirit of the curler's dream. They seem to our ears indeed to have "quat their roaring play." The cry of "swoop-swoop" is heard still—but a faint, feeble, and unimpassioned cry, compared with that which used, on the Mearns Brother-Loch, to make the welkin ring, and for a moment to startle the moon and stars—those in the sky, as well as those below the ice—till again the tumult subsided—and all the host of heaven above and beneath became serene as a world of dreams. Is it not even so, Shepherd? What is a rink now on a pond in Duddingston policy, to the rinks that rang and roared of old on the Loch o' the Lowes, when every stone circled in a halo of spray, seemed instinct with spirit to obey, along all its flight, the voice of him that launched it on its unerring aim, and sometimes, in spite of his awkward skillessness, when the fate of the game hung on his own single crank, went cannonading through all obstacles, till it fell asleep, like a beauty as it was, just as it kissed the Tee!

Again we see—again we sit in the Snow-house, built by us boys out of a drift in the minister's glebe, a drift—judging by the steeple, which was sixty—about twenty feet high—and purer than any marble. The roof was all strewed with diamonds, which frost saved from the sun. The porch of the palace was pillared—and the character of the building outside was, without any servile imitation—for we worked in the glow of original genius, and none of us had then ever seen itself or its picture—wonderfully like the Parthenon. Entering, you found yourself in a superb hall, lighted up—not with gas, for up to that era gas had not been used except in Pandemonium—but with a vast multitude of farthing candles, each in a turnip stuck into the wall—while a chandelier of frozen snow-branches pendent from the roof set that presence-chamber in a blaze. On a throne at the upper end sat young Christopher North—then the king of boys, as now of men—and proud were his subjects to do him homage. In niches all around the sidewalls were couches covered with hare, rabbit, foumart, and fox's skins—furnished by these animals slain by us in the woods and among the rocks of that sylvan and moorland parish—the regal Torus alone being spread with the dun-deer's hide from Lochiel Forest in Lochaber. Then old airs were sung—in sweet single voice—or in full chorus that startled the wandering night traveller on his way to the lone Kings-well; and then in the intermediate hush, old tales were told "of goblin, ghost, or fairy," or of Wallace Wight at the Barns of Ayr or the Brig o' Stirling—or, a glorious outlaw, harbouring in caves among the Cartlane Craigs—or of Robert Bruce the Deliverer, on his shelty cleaving in twain the skull of Bohun the English knight, on his thundering war-steed, armed cap-a-pie, while the King of Scotland had nothing on his unconquered head but his plain golden crown. Tales of the Snow-house! Had we but the genius to recall you to life in undying song!

Nor was our frozen hall at times uncheered by the smiles of beauty. With those smiles was heard the harmless love-whisper, and the harmless kiss of love; for the cottages poured forth their little lasses in flower-like bands, nor did their parents fear to trust them in the fairy frozen palace, where Christopher was king. Sometimes the old people themselves came to see the wonders of the lamp, and on a snow-table stood a huge bowl—not of snow—steaming with nectar that made Hyems smile as he hung his beard over the fragrant vapour. Nay, the minister himself—with his mother and sister—was with us in our fantastic festivities, and gave to the architecture of our palace his wondering praise. Then Andrew Lyndsey, the blind Paisley musician, a Latin scholar, who knew where Cremona stood, struck up on his famous fiddle jig or strathspey—and the swept floor, in a moment, was alive with a confused flight of foursome reels, each begun and ended with kisses, and maddened by many a whoop and yell—so like savages were we in our glee, dancing at the marriage of some island king!

Countless years have fled since that Snow-palace melted away—and of all who danced there, how many are now alive! Pshaw! as many probably as then danced anywhere else. It would never do to live for ever—let us then live well and wisely; and when death comes—from that sleep how blessed to awake! in a region where is no frost—no snow—but the sun of eternal life.

Mercy on us! what a hubbub!—Can the harriers be hunting in such a snowfall as this, and is poor pussy in view before the whole murderous pack, opening in full cry on her haunches? Why—Imagination, thou art an ass, and thy long ears at all times greedy of deception! 'Tis but a country Schoolhouse pouring forth its long-imprisoned stream of life as in a sudden sunny thaw, the Mad Master flying in the van of his helter-skelter scholars, and the whole yelling mass precipitated, many of them headlong, among the snow. Well do we know the fire-eyed Poet pedagogue, who, more outrageous than Apollo, has "ravished all the Nine." Ode, elegy, epic, tragedy, or farce—all come alike to him; and of all the bards we have ever known—and the sum total cannot be under a thousand—he alone, judging from the cock and the squint of his eye, labours under the blessing or the curse—we wot not whilk it be—of perpetual inspiration. A rare eye, too, is his at the setting of a springe for woodcocks, or tracking a maukin on the snow. Not a daredevil in the school that durst follow the indentations of his toes and fingers up the wall of the old castle, to the holes just below the battlements, to thrust his arm up to the elbows harrying the starlings' nests. The corbies ken the shape of his shoulders, as craftily he threads the wood; and let them build their domicile as high as the swinging twigs will bear its weight, agile as squirrel, and as foumart ferocious, up speels, by the height undizzied, the dreadless Dominie; and should there be fledged or puddock-haired young ones among the wool, whirling with guttural cawings down a hundred feet descent, on the hard rooty ground floor from which springs pine, oak, or ash, driven out is the life, with a squelsh and a squash, from the worthless carrion. At swimming we should not boggle to back him for the trifle of a cool hundred against the best survivor among those water-serpents, Mr Turner, Dr Bedale, Lieutenant Ekenhead, Lord Byron, Leander, and Ourselves—while, with the steel shiners on his soles, into what a set of ninnies in their ring would he not reduce the Edinburgh Skating Club?

Saw ye ever a Snowball Bicker? Never! Then look there with all the eyes in your head—only beware of a bash on the bridge of your nose, a bash that shall dye the snow with your virgin blood. The Poet-pedagogue, alias the Mad Dominie, with Bob Howie as his Second in Command, has chosen the Six stoutest striplings for his troop, and, at the head of that Sacred Band, offers battle to Us at the head of the whole School. Nor does that formidable force decline the combat. War levels all foolish distinctions of scholarship. Booby is Dux now, and Dux Booby—and the obscure dunce is changed into an illustrious hero.

"The combat deepens—on, ye brave, Who rush to glory or the grave! Wave, Nitton, all thy banners wave, And charge with all thy schoolery!"

Down from the mount on which it had been drawn up in battle array, in solid square comes the School army, with shouts that might waken the dead, and inspire with the breath of life the nostrils of the great Snow-giant built up at the end of yonder avenue, and indurated by last night's frost. But there lies a fresh fall—and a better day for a bicker never rose flakily from the yellow East. Far out of distance, and prodigal of powder lying three feet deep on the flats, and heaped up in drifts to tree and chimney-top, the tirailleurs, flung out in front, commence the conflict by a shower of balls that, from the bosom of the yet untrodden snow between the two battles, makes spin like spray the shining surface. Then falling back on the main body, they find their places in the front rank, and the whole mottled mass, grey, blue, and scarlet, moves onwards o'er the whiteness, a moment ere they close,

"Calm as the breeze, but dreadful as the storm!"

"Let fly," cries a clear voice—and the snowball storm hurtles through the sky. Just then the valley-mouth blew sleety in the faces of the foe—their eyes, as if darkened with snuff or salt, blinked bat-like—and with erring aim flew their feckless return to that shower of frosty fire. Incessant is the silent cannonade of the resistless School—silent but when shouts proclaim the fall or flight of some doughty champion in the adverse legion.

See—see—the Sacred Band are broken! The cravens take ignominiously to flight—and the Mad Dominie and Bob Howie alone are left to bear the brunt of battle. A dreadful brotherhood! But the bashing balls are showered upon them right and left from scores of catapultic arms—and the day is going sore against them, though they fight less like men than devils. Hurra! the Dominie's down, and Bob staggers. "Guards, up and at them!" "A simultaneous charge of cocks, hens, and earocks!" No sooner said than done. Bob Howie is buried—and the whole School is trampling on its Master!

"Oh, for a blast of that dread horn, On Fontarabian echoes borne, That to King Charles did come, When Rowland brave and Olivier, And every paladin and peer, On Roncesvalles died!"

The smothered ban of Bob, and the stifled denunciations of the Dominie, have echoed o'er the hill, and,

"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,"

the runaways, shaking the snows of panic from their pows,

"Like dewdrops from the lion's mane,"

come rushing to the rescue. Two of the Six tremble and turn. The high heroic scorn of their former selves urges four to renew the charge, and the sound of their feet on the snow is like that of an earthquake. What bashes on bloody noses! What bungings-up of eyes! Of lips what slittings! Red is many a spittle! And as the coughing urchin groans, and claps his hand to his mouth, distained is the snowball that drops unlaunched at his feet. The School are broken—their hearts die within them—and—can we trust our blasted eyes?—the white livers show the white feather, and fly! O shame! O sorrow! O sin! they turn their backs and fly! Disgraced are the mothers that bore them—and "happy in my mind," wives and widows, "were ye that died," undoomed to hear the tidings of this wretched overthrow! Heavens and earth! sixty are flying before Six!—and half of sixty—oh! that we should record it!—are pretending to be dead!! Would indeed that the snow were their winding-sheet, so that it might but hide our dishonour!

Look, we beseech you, at the Mad Dominie! like Hector issuing from the gates of Troy, and driving back the Greeks to their ships; or rather—hear, spirit of Homer!—like some great, shaggy, outlandish wolf-dog, that hath swum ashore from some strange wreck, and, after a fortnight's famine on the bare sea-cliffs, been driven by the hunger that gnaws his stomach like a cancer, and the thirst-fever that can only be slaked in blood, to venture prowling for prey up the vale, till, snuffing the scent of a flock of sheep, after some grim tiger-like creeping on his belly, he springs at last, with huge long spangs, on the woolly people, with bull-like growlings quailing their poor harmless hearts, and then fast throttling them, one after another—till, as it might seem rather in wantonness of rage than in empty pangs, he lies down at last in the midst of all the murdered carcasses, licking the blood off his flews and paws—and then, looking and listening round with his red turbid eyes, and sharp-pointed ears savagely erect, conscious of crime and fearful of punishment, soon as he sees and hears that all the coast is clear and still, again gloatingly fastens his tusks behind the ears, and then eats into the kidneys of the fattest of the flock, till, sated with gore and tallow, he sneaks stealthily into the wood, and coiling himself up all his wiry length—now no longer lank, but swollen and knotted like that of a deer-devouring snake—he falls suddenly asleep, and re-banquets in a dream of murder.

That simile was conceived in the spirit of Dan Homer, but delivered in that of Kit North. No matter. Like two such wolf-dogs are now Bob Howie and the Mad Dominie—and the School like such silly sheep. Those other hell-dogs are leaping in the rear—and to the eyes of fear and flight each one of the Six seems more many-headed than Cerberus, while their mouths kindle the frosty air into fire, and thunder-bolts pursue the pell-mell of the panic.

Such and so imaginative is not only mental but corporeal fear. What though it be but a Snowball bicker! The air is darkened—no, brightened by the balls, as in many a curve they describe their airy flight—some hard as stones—some soft as slush—some blae and drippy in the cold-hot hand that launches them on the flying foe, and these are the teazers—some almost transparent in the cerulean sky, and broken ere they reach their aim, abortive "armamentaria coeli"—and some useless from the first, and felt, as they leave the palm, to be fozier than the foziest turnip, and unfit to bash a fly.

Far and wide, over hill, bank, and brae, are spread the flying School! Squads of us, at sore sixes and sevens, are making for the frozen woods. Alas! poor covert now in their naked leaflessness for the stricken deer! Twos and threes in miserable plight floundering in drift-wreaths! And here and there—woefullest sight of all—single boys distractedly ettling at the sanctuaries of distant houses—with their heads all the while insanely twisted back over their shoulders, and the glare of their eyes fixed frightfully on the swift-footed Mad Dominie, till souse over neck and ears, bubble and squeak, precipitated into traitorous pitfall, and in a moment evanished from this upper world!

Disturbed crows fly away a short distance and alight silent,—the magpies chatter pert even in alarm,—the lean kine, collected on the lown sides of braes, wonder at the rippet—their horns moving, but not their tails,—while the tempest-tamed bull—almost dull now as an ox—gives a short sullen growl as he feebly paws the snow.

But who is he—the tall slender boy—slender, but sinewy—a wiry chap—five feet eight on his stocking-soles—and on his stocking-soles he stands—for the snow has sucked his shoes from his feet—that plants himself like an oak sapling, rooted ankle-deep on a knoll, and there, a juvenile Jupiter Stator, with voice and arm arrests the Flight, and fiercely gesticulating vengeance on the insolent foe, recalls and rallies the shattered School, that he may re-lead them to victory? The phantom of a visionary dream! KIT NORTH HIMSELF—

"In life's morning march when his spirit was young."

And once on a day was that figure—ours! Then like a chamois-hunter of the Alps! Now, alas! like—

"But be hush'd, my dark spirit—for wisdom condemns, When the faint and the feeble deplore; Be strong as a rock of the ocean that stems A thousand wild waves on the shore. Through the perils of chance and the scowl of disdain, Let thy front be unalter'd, thy courage elate; Yea! even the name we have worshipp'd in vain Shall awake not a pang of remembrance again; To bear, is to conquer our fate!"

Half a century is annihilated as if it had never been: it is as if young Kit had become not old Kit—but were standing now as then front to front, with but a rood of trampled snow between them, before the Mad Dominie and Bob Howie—both the bravest of the brave in Snowball or Stone bicker—in street, lane, or muir fight—hand to hand, single-pitched with Black King Carey of the Gypsies—or in irregular high-road row—two to twelve—with a gang of Irish horse-coupers from the fair of Glasgow returning by Portpatrick to Donaghadee. 'Tis a strange thing so distinctly to see One's Self as he looked of yore—to lose one's present frail personal identity in that of the powerful past. Or rather to admire One's Self as he was, without consciousness of the mean vice of egotism, because of the pity almost bordering on contempt with which One regards One's Self as he is, shrivelled up into a sort of shrimp of a man—or blown out into a flounder.

The Snowball bicker owns an armistice—and Kit North—that is, we of the olden and the golden time—advance into the debatable ground between the two armies, with a frozen branch in our hand as a flag of truce. The Mad Dominie loved us, because then-a-days—bating and barring the cock and the squint of his eye—we were like himself a poet, and while a goose might continue standing on one leg, could have composed one jolly act of a tragedy, or book of an epic, while Bob—God bless him!—to guard us from scathe would have risked his life against a whole craal of tinkers. With open arms they come forward to receive us; but our blood is up—and we are jealous of the honour of the School, which has received a stain which must be wiped out in blood. From what mixed motives act boys and men in the deeds deemed most heroic, and worthy of the meed of everlasting fame! Even so is it now with us—when sternly eyeing the other Six, and then respectfully the Mad Dominie, we challenge—not at long bowls—but toe to toe, at the scratch on the snow, with the naked mawlies, the brawny boy with the red shock-head, the villain with the carrots, who, by moonlight nights,

"Round the stacks with the lasses at bogles to play,"

had dared to stand between us and the ladye of our love. Off fly our jackets and stocks—it is not a day for buff—and at it like bull-dogs. Twice before had we fought him—at our own option—over the bonnet; for 'twas a sturdy villain, and famous for the cross-buttock. But now, after the first close, in which we lose the fall—with straight right-handers we keep him at off-fighting—and that was a gush of blood from his smeller. "How do you like that, Ben?" Giving his head, with a mad rush, he makes a plunge with his heavy left—for he was ker-handed—at our stomach. But a dip of our right elbow caught the blow, to the loud admiration of Bob Howie—and even the Mad Dominie, the umpire, could not choose but smile. Like lightning, our left returns between the ogles—and Ben bites the snow. Three cheers from the School—and, lifted on the knee of his second, James Maxwell Wallace, since signalised at Waterloo, and now a knighted colonel of horse, "he grins horribly a ghastly smile," and is brought up staggering to the scratch. We know that we have him—and ask considerately, "what he means by winking?" And now we play around him,

"Just like unto a trundling mop, Or a wild-goose at play."

He is brought down now to our own weight—then nine stone jimp—his eyes are getting momently more and more pig-like—water-logged, like those of Queen Bleary, whose stone image lies in the echoing aisle of the old Abbey Church of Paisley—and bat-blind, he hits past our head and body, like an awkward hand at the flail, when drunk, thrashing corn. Another hit on the smeller, and a stinger on the throat-apple—and down he sinks like a poppy—deaf to the call of "time"—and victory smiles upon us from the bright blue skies. "Hurra—hurra—hurra! Christopher for ever!" and perched aloft, astride on the shoulders of Bob Howie—he, the Invincible, gallops with us all over the field, followed by the shouting School, exulting that Ben the Bully has at last met with an overthrow. We exact an oath that he will never again meddle with Meg Whitelaw—shake hands cordially, and

"Off to some other game we all together flew."

And so ended the famous Snowball Bicker of Pedmount, now immortalised in our Prose-Poem.

Some men, it is sarcastically said, are boys all life-long, and carry with them their puerility to the grave. 'Twould be well for the world were there in it more such men. By way of proving their manhood, we have heard grown-up people abuse their own boyhood—forgetting what our great Philosophical Poet—after Milton and Dryden—has told them, that

"The boy is father of the man,"

and thus libelling the author of their existence. A poor boy indeed must he have been, who submitted to misery when the sun was new in heaven. Did he hate or despise the flowers around his feet, congratulating him on being young like themselves? the stars, young always, though Heaven only knows how many million years old, every night sparkling in happiness which they manifestly wished him to share? Did he indeed in his heart believe that the moon, in spite of her shining midnight face, was made of green cheese? Not only are the foundations dug and laid in boyhood, of all the knowledge and the feelings of our prime, but the ground-flat too built, and often the second story of the entire superstructure, from the windows of which, the soul looking out, beholds nature in her state, and leaps down, unafraid of a fall on the green or white bosom of earth, to join with hymns the front of the procession. The soul afterwards perfects her palace—building up tier after tier of all imaginable orders of architecture—till the shadowy roof, gleaming with golden cupolas, like the cloud-region of the setting sun, set the heavens ablaze.

Gaze up on the highest idea—gaze down on the profoundest emotion—and you will know and feel in a moment that it is not a new birth. You become a devout believer in the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine of metempsychosis and reminiscence, and are awed by the mysterious consciousness of the thought "BEFORE!" Try then to fix its date, and back travels your soul, now groping its way in utter darkness, and now in darkness visible—now launching along lines of steady lustre, such as the moon throws on the broad bosoms of starry lakes—now dazzled by sudden contrast—

"Blind with excess of light!"

But back let it travel, as best or worst it may, through and amidst eras after eras of the wan or radiant past; yet never, except for some sweet instant of delusion, breaking dewdrop-like at a touch or a breath, during all that perilous pilgrimage—and perilous must it be, haunted by so many ghosts—never may it reach the shrine it seeks—the fountain from which first flowed that feeling whose origin seems to have been out of the world of time—dare we say—in eternity!



CHRISTMAS DREAMS.

How graciously provided are all the subdivisions of Time, diversifying the dream of human life! And why should moralists mourn over the mutability that gives the chief charm to all that passes so transitorily before our eyes!—leaving image upon image in the waters of memory, that can bear being stirred without being disturbed, and contain steadier and steadier reflections as they seem to repose on an unfathomable depth!—the years, the months, the weeks, the days, the nights, the hours, the minutes, the moments, each in itself a different living, and peopled, and haunted world. One life is a thousand lives, and each individual, as he fully renews the past, reappears in a thousand characters; yet all of them bearing a mysterious identity not to be misunderstood, and all of them, while every passion has been shifting and ceasing, and reascending into power, still under the dominion of the same Conscience, that feels and knows it is from God.

Who will complain of the shortness of human life, that can re-travel all the windings, and wanderings, and mazes that his feet have trodden since the farthest back hour at which memory pauses, baffled and blindfolded, as she vainly tries to penetrate and illumine the palpable, the impervious darkness that shrouds the few first years of our inscrutable being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we now remember it, the Time we first pulled the primroses on the sunny braes, wondering in our first blissful emotions of beauty at the leaves with a softness all their own—a yellowness nowhere else so vivid—"the bright consummate flower" so starlike to our awakened imagination among the lowly grass—lovely indeed to our admiring eyes as any one of all the stars that, in their turn, did seem themselves like flowers in the blue fields of heaven! Long, long, long ago, the time when we danced hand in hand with our golden-haired sister! Long, long, long ago, the day on which she died—the hour, so far more dismal than any hour that can now darken us on this earth, when her coffin descended slowly, slowly into the horrid clay, and we were borne death-like, and wishing to die, out of the churchyard, that, from that moment, we thought we could enter never more! What a multitudinous being must ours have been, when, before our boyhood was gone, we could have forgotten her buried face! or at the dream of it, dashed off a tear, and away, with a bounding heart, in the midst of a cloud of playmates, breaking into fragments on the hill-side, and hurrying round the shores of those wild moorland lochs, in vain hope to surprise the heron that slowly uplifted his blue bulk, and floated away, regardless of our shouts, to the old castle woods. It is all like a reminiscence of some other state of existence.

Then, after all the joys and sorrows of those few years, which we now call transitory, but which our BOYHOOD felt as if they would be endless—as if they would endure for ever—arose upon us the glorious dawning of another new life—YOUTH—with its insupportable sunshine, and its agitating storms. Transitory, too, we now know, and well deserving the same name of dream. But while it lasted, long, various, and agonising; as, unable to sustain the eyes that first revealed to us the light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to moon and stars, invocated in sacred oaths, hugged the very heavens to our heart. Yet life had not then nearly reached its meridian, journeying up the sunbright firmament. How long hung it there exulting, when "it flamed on the forehead of the noontide sky!" Let not the Time be computed by the lights and shadows of the years, but by the innumerable array of visionary thoughts, that kept deploying as if from one eternity into another—now in dark sullen masses, now in long array, brightened as if with spear-points and standards, and moving along through chasm, abyss, and forest, and over the summits of the highest mountains, to the sound of ethereal music, now warlike and tempestuous—now, as "from flutes and soft recorders" accompanying not paeans of victory but hymns of peace. That Life, too, seems, now that it is gone, to have been of a thousand years. Is it gone? Its skirts are yet hovering on the horizon. And is there yet another Life destined for us? That Life which men fear to face—Age, Old Age! Four dreams within a dream—and where to awake?

At dead of night—and it is now dead of night—how the heart quakes on a sudden at the silent resurrection of buried thoughts! Perhaps the sunshine of some one single Sabbath of more exceeding holiness comes first glimmering, and then brightening upon us, with the very same sanctity that filled all the air at the tolling of the kirk-bell, when all the parish was hushed, and the voice of streams heard more distinctly among the banks and braes. Then, all at once, a thunderstorm, that many years before, or many years after, drove us, when walking alone over the mountains, into a shieling, will seem to succeed; and we behold the same threatening aspect of the heavens that then quailed our beating hearts, and frowned down our eyelids before the lightning began to flash, and the black rain to deluge all the glens. No need now for any effort of thought. The images rise of themselves—independently of our volition—as if another being, studying the working of our minds, conjured up the phantasmagoria before us who are beholding it with love, wonder, and fear. Darkness and silence have a power of sorcery over the past; the soul has then, too, often restored to it feelings and thoughts that it had lost, and is made to know that nothing it once experiences ever perishes, but that all things spiritual possess a principle of immortal life.

Why linger on the shadowy wall some of those phantasmagoria—returning after they have disappeared—and reluctant to pass away into their former oblivion? Why shoot others athwart the gloom, quick as spectral figures seen hurrying among mountains during a great storm? Why do some glare and threaten—why others fade away with a melancholy smile? Why that one—a Figure all in white, and with white roses in her hair—come forward through the haze, beautifying into distincter form and face, till her pale beseeching hands almost touch our neck—and then, in a moment, it is as nothing?

But now the room is disenchanted—and feebly our lamp is glimmering, about to leave us to the light of the moon and stars. There it is trimmed again—and the sudden increase of lustre cheers the heart within us like a festal strain. And To-Morrow—To-Morrow is Merry Christmas; and when its night descends there will be mirth and music, and the light sound of the merry-twinkling feet within these now so melancholy walls—and sleep, now reigning over all the house save this one room, will be banished far over the sea—and morning will be reluctant to allow her light to break up the innocent orgies.

Were every Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration, painted according to nature—what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a sameness would pervade them all—but only that kind of sameness that pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon and some stars—a blue vault, with here a few braided, and there a few castellated, clouds? Yet no two nights ever bore more than a family resemblance to each other before the studious and instructed eye of him who has long communed with Nature, and is familiar with every smile and frown on her changeful, but not capricious, countenance. Even so with the Annual Festivals of the heart. Then our thoughts are the stars that illumine those skies—and on ourselves it depends whether they shall be black as Erebus, or brighter than Aurora.

"Thoughts! that like spirits trackless come and go"—

is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike; though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead—but only sleep; though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and we, wretched ingrates, let them lie for ever in oblivion! How passing sweet when of their own accord they arise to greet us in our solitude?—as a friend who, having sailed away to a foreign land in our youth, has been thought to have died many long years ago, may suddenly stand before us, with face still familiar and name reviving in a moment, and all that he once was to us brought from utter forgetfulness close upon our heart.

My Father's House! How it is ringing like a grove in spring, with the din of creatures happier, a thousand times happier, than all the birds on earth. It is the Christmas Holidays—Christmas Day itself—Christmas Night—and Joy in every bosom intensifies Love. Never before were we brothers and sisters so dear to one another—never before had our hearts so yearned towards the authors of our being—our blissful being! There they sit—silent in all that outcry—composed in all that disarray—still in all that tumult; yet, as one or other flying imp sweeps round the chair, a father's hand will playfully strive to catch a prisoner—a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered symar be felt almost as a reproof, and for a moment slacken the fairy-flight. One old game treads on the heels of another—twenty within the hour—and many a new game never heard of before nor since, struck out by the collision of kindred spirits in their glee, the transitory fancies of genius inventive through very delight. Then, all at once, there is a hush, profound as ever falls on some little plat within a forest when the moon drops behind the mountain, and the small green-robed People of Peace at once cease their pastime, and evanish. For She—the Silver-Tongued—is about to sing an old ballad, words and air alike hundreds of years old—and sing she doth, while tears begin to fall, with a voice too mournfully beautiful long to breathe below—and, ere another Christmas shall have come with the falling snows, doomed to be mute on earth—but to be hymning in Heaven.

Of that House—to our eyes the fairest of earthly dwellings—with its old ivied turrets, and orchard-garden bright alike with fruit and with flowers, not one stone remains. The very brook that washed its foundations has vanished along with them—and a crowd of other buildings, wholly without character, has long stood where here a single tree, and there a grove, did once render so lovely that small demesne; which, how could we, who thought it the very heart of Paradise, even for one moment have believed was one day to be blotted out of being, and we ourselves—then so linked in love that the band which bound us all together was, in its gentle pressure, felt not nor understood—to be scattered far and abroad, like so many leaves that after one wild parting rustle are separated by roaring wind-eddies, and brought together no more! The old Abbey—it still survives; and there, in that corner of the burial-ground, below that part of the wall which was least in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and nests—there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and Venerated—for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep—so seldom to have remembered!—And then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the floods we all wept together—at no long interval—on those pale and placid faces as they lay, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold, in their coffins.

We believe that there is genius in all childhood. But the creative joy that makes it great in its simplicity dies a natural death or is killed, and genius dies with it. In favoured spirits, neither few nor many, the joy and the might survive; for you must know that unless it be accompanied with imagination, memory is cold and lifeless. The forms it brings before us must be inspired with beauty—that is, with affection or passion. All minds, even the dullest, remember the days of their youth; but all cannot bring back the indescribable brightness of that blessed season. They who would know what they once were, must not merely recollect, but they must imagine, the hills and valleys—if any such there were—in which their childhood played, the torrents, the waterfalls, the lakes, the heather, the rocks, the heaven's imperial dome, the raven floating only a little lower than the eagle in the sky. To imagine what he then heard and saw, he must imagine his own nature. He must collect from many vanished hours the power of his untamed heart, and he must, perhaps, transfuse also something of his maturer mind into these dreams of his former being, thus linking the past with the present by a continuous chain, which, though often invisible, is never broken. So is it too with the calmer affections that have grown within the shelter of a roof. We do not merely remember, we imagine our father's house, the fireside, all his features then most living, now dead and buried; the very manner of his smile, every tone of his voice. We must combine with all the passionate and plastic power of imagination the spirit of a thousand happy hours into one moment; and we must invest with all that we ever felt to be venerable such an image as alone can satisfy our filial hearts. It is thus that imagination, which first aided the growth of all our holiest and happiest affections, can preserve them to us unimpaired—

"For she can give us back the dead, Even in the loveliest looks they wore."

Then came a New Series of Christmases, celebrated one year in this family, another year in that—none present but those whom Charles Lamb the Delightful calleth the "old familiar faces;" something in all features, and all tones of voice, and all manners, betokening origin from one root—relations all, happy, and with no reason either to be ashamed or proud of their neither high nor humble birth—their lot being cast within that pleasant realm, "the Golden Mean," where the dwellings are connecting-links between the hut and the hall—fair edifices resembling manse or mansion-house, according as the atmosphere expands or contracts their dimensions—in which Competence is next-door neighbour to Wealth, and both of them within the daily walk of Contentment.

Merry Christmases they were indeed—one Lady always presiding, with a figure that once had been the stateliest among the stately, but then somewhat bent, without being bowed down, beneath an easy weight of most venerable years. Sweet was her tremulous voice to all her grandchildren's ears. Nor did those solemn eyes, bedimmed into a pathetic beauty, in any degree restrain the glee that sparkled in orbs that had as yet shed not many tears, but tears of joy or pity. Dearly she loved all those mortal creatures whom she was soon about to leave; but she sat in sunshine even within the shadow of death; and the "voice that called her home" had so long been whispering in her ear, that its accents had become dear to her, and consolatory every word that was heard in the silence, as from another world.

Whether we were indeed all so witty as we thought ourselves—uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and "the rest," it might be presumptuous in us, who were considered by ourselves and a few others not the least amusing of the whole set, at this distance of time to decide—especially in the affirmative; but how the roof did ring with sally, pun, retort, and repartee! Ay, with pun—a species of impertinence for which we have therefore a kindness even to this day. Had incomparable Thomas Hood had the good fortune to have been born a cousin of ours, how with that fine fancy of his would he have shone at those Christmas festivals, eclipsing us all! Our family, through all its different branches, has ever been famous for bad voices, but good ears; and we think we hear ourselves—all those uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, and cousins—singing now! Easy is it to "warble melody" as to breathe air. But we hope harmony is the most difficult of all things to people in general, for to us it was impossible; and what attempts ours used to be at Seconds! Yet the most woeful failures were rapturously encored; and ere the night was done we spoke with most extraordinary voices indeed, every one hoarser than another, till at last, walking home with a fair cousin, there was nothing left for it but a tender glance of the eye—a tender pressure of the hand—for cousins are not altogether sisters, and although partaking of that dearest character, possess, it may be, some peculiar and appropriate charms of their own; as didst thou, Emily the "Wild-cap!"—That sobriquet all forgotten now—for now thou art a matron, nay a Grandam, and troubled with an elf fair and frolicsome as thou thyself wert of yore, when the gravest and wisest withstood not the witchery of thy dancings, thy singings, and thy showering smiles.

On rolled Suns and Seasons—the old died—the elderly became old—and the young, one after another, were wafted joyously away on the wings of hope, like birds almost as soon as they can fly ungratefully forsaking their nests and the groves in whose safe shadow they first essayed their pinions; or like pinnaces that, after having for a few days trimmed their snow-white sails in the land-locked bay, close to whose shores of silvery sand had grown the trees that furnished timber both for hull and mast, slip their tiny cables on some summer-day, and gathering every breeze that blows, go dancing over the waves in sunshine, and melt far off into the main. Or, haply, some were like fair young trees, transplanted during no favourable season, and never to take root in another soil, but soon leaf and branch to wither beneath the tropic sun, and die almost unheeded by those who knew not how beautiful they had been beneath the dews and mists of their own native climate.

Vain images! and therefore chosen by fancy not too painfully to touch the heart. For some hearts grow cold and forbidding with selfish cares—some, warm as ever in their own generous glow, were touched by the chill of Fortune's frowns, ever worst to bear when suddenly succeeding her smiles—some, to rid themselves of painful regrets, took refuge in forgetfulness, and closed their eyes to the past—duty banished some abroad, and duty imprisoned others at home—estrangements there were, at first unconscious and unintended, yet ere long, though causeless, complete—changes were wrought insensibly, invisibly, even in the innermost nature of those who being friends knew no guile, yet came thereby at last to be friends no more—unrequited love broke some bonds—requited love relaxed others—the death of one altered the conditions of many—and so—year after year—the Christmas Meeting was interrupted—deferred—till finally it ceased with one accord, unrenewed and unrenewable. For when Some Things cease for a time—that time turns out to be for ever.

Survivors of those happy circles! wherever ye be—should these imperfect remembrances of days of old chance, in some thoughtful pause of life's busy turmoil, for a moment to meet your eyes, let there be towards the inditer a few throbs of revived affection in your hearts—for his, though "absent long and distant far," has never been utterly forgetful of the loves and friendships that charmed his youth. To be parted in body is not to be estranged in spirit—and many a dream and many a vision, sacred to nature's best affections, may pass before the mind of one whose lips are silent. "Out of sight out of mind" is rather the expression of a doubt—of a fear—than of a belief or a conviction. The soul surely has eyes that can see the objects it loves, through all intervening darkness—and of those more especially dear it keeps within itself almost undimmed images, on which, when they know it not, think it not, believe it not, it often loves to gaze, as on relics imperishable as they are hallowed.

All hail! rising beautiful and magnificent through the mists of morning—ye Woods, Groves, Towers, and Temples, overshadowing that famous Stream beloved by all the Muses! Through this midnight hush—methinks we hear faint and far-off sacred music—

"Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise!"

How steeped now in the stillness of moonlight are all those pale, pillared Churches, Courts and Cloisters, Shrines and Altars, with here and there a Statue standing in the shade, or Monument sacred to the memory of the pious—the immortal dead. Some great clock is striking from one of many domes—from the majestic Tower of St Mary Magdalen—and in the deepened hush that follows the solemn sound, the mingling waters of the Cherwell and the Isis soften the severe silence of the holy night.

Remote from kindred, and from all the friendships that were the native growth of the fair fields where our boyhood and our youth had roamed and meditated and dreamed, those were indeed years of high and lofty mood which held us in converse with the shades of great Poets and Sages of old in Rhedicyna's hallowed groves, still, serene, and solemn, as that Attic Academe where divine Plato, with all Hybla on his lips, discoursed such excellent music that his life seemed to the imagination spiritualised—a dim reminiscence of some former state of being. How sank then the Christmas Service of that beautiful Liturgy into our hearts! Not faithless we to the simple worship that our forefathers had loved; but Conscience told us there was no apostasy in the feelings that rose within us when that deep organ began to blow, that choir of youthful voices so sweetly to join the diapason,—our eyes fixed all the while on that divine Picture over the Altar, of our Saviour

"Bearing his cross up rueful Calvary."

The City of Palaces disappears—and in the setting sunlight we behold mountains of soft crimson snow! The sun hath set, and even more beautiful are the bright-starred nights of winter, than summer in all its glories beneath the broad moons of June. Through the woods of Windermere, from cottage to cottage, by coppice-pathways winding up to dwellings among the hill-rocks where the birch-trees cease to grow—

"Nodding their heads, before us go, The merry minstrelsy."

They sing a salutation at every door, familiarly naming old and young by their Christian names; and the eyes that look upward from the vales to the hanging huts among the plats and cliffs, see the shadows of the dancers ever and anon crossing the light of the star-like window, and the merry music is heard like an echo dwelling in the sky. Across those humble thresholds often did we on Christmas-week nights of yore—wandering through our solitary sylvan haunts, under the branches of trees within whose hollow trunk the squirrel slept—venture in, unasked perhaps, but not unwelcome, and, in the kindly spirit of the season, did our best to merrify the Festival by tale or song. And now that we behold them not, are all those woods, and cliffs, and rivers, and tarns, and lakes, as beautiful as when they softened and brightened beneath our living eyes, half-creating, as they gazed, the very world they worshipped? And are all those hearths as bright as of yore, without the shadow of our figure? And the roofs, do they ring as mirthfully, though our voice be forgotten? We hang over Westmoreland, an unobserved—but observant star. Mountains, hills, rocks, knolls, vales, woods, groves, single trees, dwellings—all asleep! O Lakes! but ye are, indeed, by far too beautiful! O fortunate Isles! too fair for human habitation, fit abode for the Blest! It will not hide itself—it will not sink into the earth—it will rise; and risen, it will stand steady with its shadow in the overpowering moonlight, that ONE TREE! that ONE HOUSE!—and well might the sight of ye two together—were it harder—break our heart. But hard at all it is not—therefore it is but crushed.