In the noon and the afternoon of life, we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter, who said of love "All other pleasures are not worth its pains;" pands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another, it still more gives him to himself. He is a new and when the day was not long enough, keener purposes, and a religious solemnity man, with new perceptions, new and but the night too must be consumed in of character and aims. He does not keen recollections; when the head boiled longer appertain to his family and society. all night on the pillow with the generous He is somewhat. He is a person. He deed it resolved on; when the moonlight is a soul. And here let us examine a was a pleasing fever, and the stars were little nearer the nature of that influence letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the which is thus potent over the human air was coined into song; when all busiyouth. Let us approach and admire ness seemed an importance, and all the men and women running to and fro in the Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, beauty, welcome as the sun, streets mere pictures. The passion re-wherever it please to shine, which pleases makes the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. Almost the notes The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the are articulate. forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers, have grown intelligent; and almost he fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathises. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men : "Fountain-heads and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves; Moonlight walks, when all the fowls Are safely housed, save bats and owls; A midnight bell, a passing groan, These are the sounds we feed upon." Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and sighs; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquises; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily, in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets his foot. The causes that have sharpened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances. The like force has the passion over all his nature. It ex Wonderful is its charm. refer it to organisation. numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony the high progressive idealizing instinct, these predominate later, and ever the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intelligence,-of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and the leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting truth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled. "Her pure and eloquent blood Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love that society knows and has, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattain-between the soul and the circumstance, able sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, a true faerie land; to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot get at beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have found not, and shall not find." The same fact may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful, when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor inquires, "whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence. But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics, and geography, and history. But by the necessity of our constitution, things are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighbourhood, size, Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought.' Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more than Juliet,-than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star; the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion that now delights me? They try and weigh their affection, and, adding up all costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with the Eternal Power, in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus effected, and which adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness, and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving for a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behaviour of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue: and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and re-appear, and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to extort all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the whole strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman: "The person love does to us fit, Like manna has the taste of all in it." was discharge in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew them together,- those once-sacred features, that magical play of charms, deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart, from year to year, is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims, with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society, forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature, and intellect, and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium. Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeketh virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or The world rolls: the circumstances vary every hour. All the angels that in-persons. habit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once-flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other, without complaint, to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to But in health the mind is presently seen again,—its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite character, and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose anything by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever. —Essays. LIVY, ON THE QUALIFICATIONS OF A GOOD HISTORIAN. WHEN you and I read Livy together (if you do remember), after some reasoning we concluded both what was in our opinion to be looked for at his hand, that would well and advisedly write a history. First point was, to write nothing false; next, to be bold to say any truth whereby is avoided two great faults-flattery and hatred. For which two points, Cæsar is read to his great praise; and Jovius the Italian to his just reproach. Then to mark diligently the causes, counsels, acts, and issues, in all great attempts and in causes, what is just or unjust; in counsels, what is purposed wisely or rashly; in acts, what is done courageously or faintly; and of every issue, to note some general lesson of wisdom and wariness for like matters in time to come, wherein Polybius in Greek, and Philip Comines in French, have done the duties of wise and worthy writers. Diligence also must be used in keeping truly the order of time, and describing lively both the site of places and nature of persons, not only for the outward shape of the body, but also for the inward disposition of the mind, as Thucydides doth in many places very trimly; and Homer everywhere, and that always most excellently; which observation is chiefly to be marked in him. And our Chaucer doth the same, very praiseworthily: mark him well, and confer him with any other that writeth in our time in their proudest tongue, whosoever list. The style must be always plain and open; yet some time higher and lower, as matters do rise and fall. For if proper and natural words, in well-joined sentences, do lively express the matter, be it troublesome, quiet, angry, or pleasant, a man shall think not to be reading, but present in doing of the same. And herein Livy of all other in any tongue, by mine opinion, carrieth away the praise.—Letter to John Astley, on the Affairs of Germany. IN PRAISE OF POETRY. Now therein (that is to say, the power of at once teaching and enticing to do well)-now therein, of all sciencesI speak still of human and according to human conceit-is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it. Nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of grapes, that, full of that taste, you may long to pass further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness; but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimneycorner; and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue, even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things, by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste. For even those hard-hearted evil men, who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, and therefore despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, and feel not the inward reason they stand upon, yet will be content to be delighted; which is all the good fellow poet seems to promise; and so steal to see the form of goodness-which, seen, they cannot but love ere themselves be aware, as if they had taken a medicine of cherries. By these, therefore, examples and reasons, I think it may be manifest that the poet, with that same hand of delight, doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth. And so a conclusion not unfitly ensues, that as virtue is the most excellent resting-place for all worldly learning to make an end of, so poetry, being the most familiar to teach it, and most princely to move towards it, in the most excellent work is the most excellent workman. Since, then, poetry is of all human learning the most ancient, and of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other learnings have taken their beginnings ;— Since it is so universal that no learned nation doth despise it, no barbarous nation is without it ;-Since both Roman and Greek gave such divine names unto it, the one of prophesying, the other of making; and that, indeed, that name of making is fit for it, considering that whereas all other arts retain themselves within their subject, and receive, as it were, their being from it, the poet, only, bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of the matter, but maketh matter for a conceit; Since, neither his description nor end containing any evil, the thing described cannot be evil;-Since his effects be so good as to teach goodness, and delight the learners of it;-Since therein (namely, in moral doctrine, the chief of all knowledge) he doth not only far pass the historian, but, for instructing, is well nigh comparable to the philosopher, and for moving, leaveth him behind;-Since the Holy Scripture (wherein there is no uncleanness) hath whole parts in it poetical, and that even our Saviour Christ vouchsafed to use the flowers of it ;-Since all its kinds are not only in their united forms, but in their severed dissections fully commendable :-I think—(and I think I think rightly)—the laurel crown appointed for triumphant captains, doth worthily, of all other learnings, honour the poet's triumph.-Defence of Poetry. [ABRAHAM COWLEY. 1618-1667.] OF POETRY AND POETS. IT is, I confess, but seldom seen that the poet dies before the man; for when we once fall in love with that bewitching art, we do not use to court it as a mistress, but marry it as a wife, and take it for better or worse, as an inseparable companion of our whole life. But as the marriages of infants do but rarely prosper, so no man ought to wonder at the diminution or decay of my affection to poesy, to which I had contracted myself so much under age, and so much to my own prejudice, in regard to those more profitable matches which I might have made among the richer sciences. As for the portion which this brings of fame, it is an estate (if it be any, for men are not oftener deceived in their hopes of widows than in their opinion exegi monumentum are perennius) that hardly ever comes in whilst we are living to enjoy it, but is a fantastical kind of reversion to our own selves. Neither ought any man to envy poets this posthumous and imaginary happiness, since they find commonly so little in present, that it may be truly applied to them which St. Paul speaks of the first Christians,-" If their reward be in this life, they are of all men the most miserable. And if in quiet and flourishing times they meet with so small encouragement, what are they to expect in rough and troubled ones? If wit be such a plant that it scarce receives heat enough to preserve it alive even in the summer of our cold climate, how can it choose but wither in a long and sharp winter? A |