"The world of nature, on which but now I gazed with wonder and admiration, sinks before me. With all its LONGMAN, BROWN, AND CO., PATERNOSTER ROW: J. DEIGHTON, CAMBRIDGE. 1848. CRITICISMS. DEDICATED TO THE REV. J. WRIGHT, VICAR OF MALVERN, ETC., ETC. WITH THE HIGHEST SENTIMENTS OF RESPECT BY THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. THERE is a time when the soft, dreamlike glory of our being is to be foregone, and those scenes of exquisite beauty, and those hymns of mellowed sweetness which thrilled us in the world of intellectual loveliness, are to be forgotten in the renewed energies of the spirit, and the deeper feelings of the heart. And ere we pass these enchanting memories by, we cannot choose but linger for awhile over the names and histories of those whose divine harmonies have thus given a more significant meaning to the ever-blessing creation around. We have to thank poet and painter, architect and sculptor. We have oftentimes, indeed, thought we could discern the golden light of heaven radiating and beautifying their works; and sometimes, too, have caught notes of a higher import than they at first expressed. There has been a strange beauty, as if the fairest gleam had fallen from the better land. And they have taught us to look on nature as a precious thing; as the embodiment of the Divine idea; as the symbol of the Everlasting. loftiest speculations, and now sparkling and beaming with a world's regeneration. A spirit thanks them both-throbs out its fervid gratitude! The time of which we spoke is only in remembrance, and this volume is the only memento. We now have higher aims than the mere expression of literary sentiments; these trifling sweets we leave for conflict with the prince of darkness; there is now a sterner work to do. We have plucked a few flowers, sunbeamed, while on our way to the temple of the Holiest, and ever and anon has come a wish that they might be preserved. May the desire be realized! On those publications issued before our sixteenth year, we write "Plagiarism.' Would that it had been otherwise! HENRY ALFORD. We need not complain of halcyon songs and soothing canzonets: it is true that the spirit of the French Revolution threw much of its energy and reckless savageness into our literature, but it extinguished the sickly semblancy and sickly sentimentalism of a former age, which was worth all the contortions that have since been exhibited in some of our finest writers. The war-cry, the trumpet-blast, and the atheistic scoff that followed, deadened, indeed, for awhile the melody of gentler bards: but the tumult has nearly ceased; it is daily becoming faint and fainter; its echo is all that we hear; the whirlwind has passed, and once again the calm, Their names are gathered up in the follow-unruffled heavens are breathing down upon us ing volume, either by allusion or by direct criti- quietude and peace. cism. But there are two we would fain speak of here—the magnificent Trench, and the colossal Carlyle; one of whom reminds us of some gigantic river, now winding its course gently from its limpid spring through sunny meadows covered with the luxuriance of summer, and now sweeping in its more majestic course by the eternal bases of towering mountains, snow-diademed; now bearing its bosom to the boundless heavens, and reflecting in its roll of rushing waters the myriad stars, and now heaving, and swelling, and surging onwards to the desolate ocean; sometimes dark and dim with pines and firs, and sometimes bright with the light of the blue empyrean: the other, of some tremendous being struggling with mighty power, now standing amid thick darkness, and now beneath the sublime radiance of universal sunlight; now gazing on the soft witchery of an evening twilight, and now piercing into the blackest scenes of the French Revolution; now immersed in The nineteenth century was ushered in by a pellucid strain, so exquisitely soft, and so exquisitely tender, that it lingers yet in the woods and dells, in the happy homes and domestic retreats of England, as some angelic purifier of all that is nearest and dearest to the heart of man. Scarce had the sweet cadence of this delicious hymn fallen from the harp of the sainted Cowper, when another pæan to holy love breathed upwards to the Everlasting from the dark green sister-isle; and from the rugged and romantic Scotland came notes of peace, and Leyden chanted the simple glories of creation; and the Nottingham youth sang pleasantly of the past, and in a sublimer mood wrote the two last stanzas of the Christiad; then Grahame walked forth on the quiet Sabbath morning and taught us to love bird, bee, and butterfly, and the solemn service of our church, with its simple beauty and hallowed blessedness, and we were subdued and calmed; and even the stern B |