And charging over falling enemies

With shouts of joy... How quiet is the night!
The trees are motionless; the cloudless blue
Sleeps in the firmament; the thoughtful moca,
With her attendant train of circling stars,
Seems to forget her journey through the heavens,
To gaze upon the beauties of the scene.
That scene how still! no truant breeze abroad
To mar its quietness. The very brook,
So wont to prattle like a merry child,

Now creeps with caution o'er its pebbled way,
As if afraid to violate the silence.

Handsomeness is the more animal excellence, beauty the more imaginative. A handsome Madonna I cannot conceive, and never saw a handsome Venus: but I have seen many a handsome country girl, and a few very handsome ladies.

There would not be half the difficulty in doing right, but for the frequent occurrence of cases where the lesser virtues are on the side of wrong.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.

Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.

There is an honest unwillingness to pass off another's observations for our own, which makes a man appear pedantic.

Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerint!...Immo vivant! provided they are worthy to live. So may we have the satisfaction of knowing,-what literary incentive can be greater?—that we too have been permitted to utter sacred words, and to think the thoughts of great minds.

The commentator guides and lights us to the altar erected by the author; but he himself must already have kindled his torch at the flame which burns upon it. And

what are Art and Science, if not a running commentary on Nature? what are poets and philosophers, but torchbearers leading us through the mazes and recesses of God's two majestic temples, the sensible and the spiritual world? Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read Nature. Eschylus and Aristotle, Shakspeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses. Do you not, since you have read Wordsworth, feel a fresh and more thoughtful delight, whenever you hear a cuckoo, whenever you see a daisy, whenever you play with a child? Have not Thucydides and Machiavel aided you in discovering the tides of feeling and the currents of passion by which events are borne along the ocean of time? Can you not discern something more in man, now that you look at him with eyes purged and unscaled by gazing upon Shakspeare and Dante? From these terrestrial and celestial globes we learn the configuration of the earth and the heavens.

But wheresoever good is done, good is received in return. The law of reciprocation is not confined to the physical system of things: in the career of benevolence and beneficence also every action is followed by a corresponding reaction. Intellectual light is not poured from a lantern, leaving the bearer in the shade: it supplies us with the power of beholding and contemplating the luminary it flows from. The more familiar we become with Nature, with the greater veneration and love do we return to the masters by whom we were initiated; and as they have taught us to understand Nature, Nature in turn teaches us to understand them.

"When I have been travelling in Italy (says a lively modern writer), how often have I exclaimed, How like a picture? I remember once, while watching a glorious sunset from the banks of the Arno, I caught myself saying, This is truly one of Claude's sunsets. Now when

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I again see one of my favorite Grosvenor Claudes, I shall probably exclaim, How natural! how like what I have seen so often on the Arno, or from the Monte Pincio!" Journal of an Ennuyée, p. 335.

The same thing must have happened to most lovers of landscape-painting. How often in the Netherlands does one see Cuyp's solid, oppressive sunshine! and Rubenses boundless, objectless plains, which no other painter would have deemed either worthy or susceptible of being transferred from Nature's Gallery to Art's! More than once, in mounting the hill of Fiesole to Landor's beautiful villa, have I stopt with my companion to gaze on that pure, living ether, in which Perugino is wont to enshrine his Virgins and Saints, and which till then I had imagined to be a heavenly vision specially vouchsafed to him, such as this world of cloud and mist could not parallel. Many a time too among the Sussex downs have I felt grateful to Copley Fielding for opening my eyes to see beauties and harmonies, which else might have been unheeded, and for breathing ideas into the prospect, whereby "the repose Of earth, sky, sea, and air was vivified."

Hence we may perceive, why what is called a taste for the picturesque never arises in a country, until it has reacht an advanced stage of intellectual culture: because an eye for the picturesque can only be formed by looking at pictures; that is, primarily. In this, as in other cases, by Art are we first led to fix our attention and reflexion more observantly on the beauties of Nature: although, when such attention and reflexion have once become general, they may be excited in such as have never seen a picture. When we are told therefore that the earliest passages to be found in any ancient author, which savour of what we should now call poetical description, are in the Epistles of Pliny, we must not infer from this that Pliny had a livelier and intenser love of Nature than any of the ancient poets. Supposing the remark to be correct, --and I will not stop to enquire how far it is so,—all it would prove is, that Pliny was, as we know him to have

been, what we used to call a virtuoso, a picture-fancier, and that people in his day were beginning to look at Nature in the mirror of Art. It is a mistake however to conclude that men are insensible to those beauties, which ⚫ they are not continually talking about and analysing,— that the love of Nature is a new feeling, because the taste for the Picturesque is a modern taste. When the mountaineer descends into the plain, he soon begins to pine with love for his native hills; and many have been known to fall sick, nay, even to die, of that love. Yet, had he never left them, you would never have heard him prate about them. When I was on the Lake of Zug, which lies bosomed among such grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories about Suwarrow's march through the neighbourhood, askt me, Is it true, that he came from ‹ country where there is not a mountain to be seen?—Yes I replied: you may go hundreds of miles without coming to one.- -That must be beautiful! he exclaimed : das muss schön seyn! His exclamation was prompted no doubt by the thought of the difficulties which the mountains about him opposed to traffic and agriculture; though even or his own score he erred, as Mammon is ever wont to dc grossly. For those mountains gave him the lake, and attracted the strangers, whereby he earned his livelihood. But it is a perverse habit of the Imagination, when there is no call for action, to dwell on "the ills we have,” without thinking of "the others which we know not of." This very man however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed for, even though they had been as flat as Burnet's Paradise, or the tabula rasa which Locke supposed to be the paradisiacal state of the human mind,— would probably have been seized with the homesickness which is so common among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and Norwegians, but which, I believe, is hardly found, except in the natives of a mountainous and beautiful country.

The noisiest streams are the shallowest. It is an old saying, but never out of season; least of all in an age, the

fit symbol of which would not be, like the Ephesian per sonification of Nature, multimamma, for it neither brings forth nor nourishes,--but multilingua. Your amateur will talk by the ell, or, if you wish it, by the mile, about the inexpressible charms of Nature: but I never heard that his love had caused him the slightest uneasiness.

It is only by the perception of some contrast, that we become conscious of our feelings. The feelings however may exist for centuries, without the consciousness; and still, when they are mighty, they will overpower Consciousness; when they are deep, it will be unable to fathom them. Love has indeed been called "loquacious as a vernal bird;" and with truth: but his loquacity comes on him mostly in the absence of his beloved. Here too the same illustration holds: the deep stream is not heard, until some obstacle opposes it. But can anybody, when floating down the Rhine, believe that the builders and dwellers in those castles, with which every rock is crested, were blind to all the beauties around them? it quite impossible that they should have felt almost as much as the sentimental tourist, who returns to his parlour in some metropolis, and puffs out the fumes of his admiration through his quill? Has the moon no existence independent of the halo about her? Or does the halo even flow from her? Is it not produced by the dimness and density of the atmosphere through which she has tc shine? Give me the love of the bird that broods over her own nest, rather than of one that lays her eggs in the nest of another, albeit she warble about parental affection as loudly as Rousseau or Lord Byron.

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Convents too. . how many of them are situate amid the sublimest and most beautiful scenery! I will only mention two, the great Chartreuse, and the monastery of the Camaldulans near Naples. The hacknied remark at such places is, O yes! the monks always knew how to pick out the eyes of the land, and to pounce upon its fatness. It is forgotten that, when the convents were