On the other hand, the wildest rattling, as it is called, in which men of sense find entertainment, consists of nothing but a quick and original succession of ideas-a finding, as it were, of something in nothing-a rapid turning of the hearer's mind to some new face of thought and sparkling imagery. The man of shallow gravity, besides an uneasy half-consciousness that he has nothing of the sort about him, is too dull of perception to see the delicate links between one thought and another; and he takes that for a mere chaos of laughing jargon, in which finer apprehensions perceive as much delightful association as men of musical taste do in the most tricksome harmonies and accompaniments of Mozart or Beethoven. Between such gravity and such mirth there is as much difference as between the driest and dreariest psalmody, and that exquisite laughing trio, "E voi ridete," which is sung in "Così fan tutte." A Quaker's coat and a garden are not more dissimilar; nor a death-bell and the birds after a sunny shower. It is on such occasions, indeed, that we enjoy the perfection of what is agreeable in humanity, -the harmony of mind and body-intellect, and animal spirits. Accordingly, the greatest geniuses appear to have been proficients in this kind of nonsense, and to have delighted in dwelling upon it, and attributing it to their favourites. Virgil is no joker, but Homer is; and there is the same difference between their heroes, Æneas and Achilles, the latter of whom is also a player on the harp. Venus, the most delightful of the goddesses, is Philommeides, the laughter-loving-an epithet, by the by, which might give a good hint to a number of very respectable ladies, "who love their lords," but are too apt to let ladies less respectable run away with them. Horace represents Pleasantry as fluttering about Venus in company with Cupid: Quem Jocus circumvolat, et Cupido; " and these are followed by Youth, the enjoyer of animal spirits, and by Mercury, the god of persuasion. There is the same difference between Tasso and Ariosto as between Virgil and Homer; that is to say, the latter proves his greater genius by a completer and more various hold on the feelings, and has not only a fresher spirit of nature about him, but a truer, because a happier; for the want of this enjoyment is at once a defect and a deterioration. It is more or less a disease of the blood; a falling off from the pure and uncontradicted blithesomeness of childhood; a hampering of the mind with the altered nerves; dust gathered in the watch, and perplexing our passing hours. It may be thought a begging of the question to mention Anacreon, since he made an absolute business of mirth and enjoyment, and sat down systematically to laugh as well as to drink. But on that very account, perhaps, his case is still more in point; and Plato, one of the gravest, but not the shallowest, of philosophers, gave him the title of the Wise. The disciple of Socrates appears also to have been a great enjoyer of Aristophanes; and the divine Socrates himself was a wit and a joker. But the divine Shakespeare-the man to whom we go for everything, and are sure to find it, grave, melancholy, or merry-what said he to this exquisite kind of nonsense? Perhaps next to his passion for detecting nature, and overinforming it with poetry, he took delight in pursuing a joke; and the lowest scenes of his in this way say more to men whose faculties are fresh about them, and who prefer enjoyment to criticism, than the most doting of commentators can find out. They are instances of his animal spirits, of his sociality, of his passion for giving and receiving pleasure, of his enjoyment of something wiser than wisdom. The greatest favourites of Shakespeare are made to resemble himself in this particular. Hamlet, Mercutio, Touchstone, Jaques, Richard the Third, and Falstaff, "inimitable Falstaff," are all men of wit and humour, modified according to their different temperaments or circumstances; some from health and spirits, others from sociality, others from a contrast with their very melancholy. Indeed, melancholy itself, with the profoundest intellects, will rarely be found to be anything else than a sickly temperament, induced or otherwise, preying in its turn upon the disappointed expectation of pleasure; upon the contradiction of hopes, which this world is not made to realise, though, let us never forget, it is made, as they themselves prove, to suggest. Some of Shakespeare's characters, as Mercutio and Benedick, are almost entirely made up of wit and animal spirits; and delightful fellows they are, and ready, from their very taste, to perform the most serious and manly offices. Most of his women, too, have an abundance of natural vivacity. Desdemona herself is so pleasant of intercourse in every way, that, upon the principle of the respectable mistakes above mentioned, the Moor, when he grows jealous, is tempted to think it a proof of her want of honesty. But we must make Shakespeare speak for himself, or we shall not know how to be silent on this subject. What a description is that which he gives of a man of mirth of a mirth, too, which he has expressly stated to be within the limit of what is becoming! It is in "Love's Labour's Lost:" "A merrier man, Within the limit of becoming mirth, I never spent an hour's talk withal, His eye begets occasion for his wit: For every object that the one doth catch, The other turns to a mirth-moving jest; Which his fair tongue, conceit's expositor, Delivers in such apt and gracious words, That aged ears play truant at his tales, And younger hearings are quite ravished; So sweet and voluble in his discourse." We have been led into these reflections, partly to introduce the conclusion of this article ; partly from being very fond of a joke ourselves, and so making our self-love as proud as possible; and partly from having spent some most agreeable hours the other evening with a company, the members of which had all the right to be grave and disagreeable that rank and talent are supposed to confer, and yet, from the very best sense or forgetfulness of both, were as lively and entertaining to each other as boys. Not one of them, perhaps, but had his cares-one or two, of no ordinary description; but what then? These are the moments, if we can take advantage of them, when sorrows are shared, even unconsciously; moments, when melancholy intermits her fever, and hope takes a leap into enjoyment; when the pilgrim of life, if he cannot lay aside his burden, forgets it in meeting his fellows about a fountain, and soothes his weariness and his resolution with the sparkling sight, and the noise of the freshness. To come to our anticlimax, for such we are afraid it must be called after all this grave sentiment and mention of authorities. The following dialogue is the substance of a joke, never meant for its present place, that was started the other day upon a late publication. The name of the book it is not necessary to mention, especially as it was pronounced to be one of the driest that had appeared for years. We cannot answer for the sentences being put to their proper speakers. The friends whom we value most happen to be great hunters in this way; and the reader may look upon the thing as a specimen of a joke run down, or of the sort of nonsense above mentioned; so that he will take due care how he professes not to relish it. We must also advertise him, that a proper quantity of giggling and laughter must be supposed to be interspersed, till towards the end it gradually becomes too great to go on with. A. Did you ever see such a book? Among the first things which we remember noticing in the manners of people, were two errors in the custom of shaking hands. Some, we observed, grasped everybody's hand alike, with an equal fervour of grip. You would have thought that Jenkins was the best friend they had in the world; but on succeeding to the squeeze, though a slight acquaintance, you found it equally flattering to yourself; and on the appearance of somebody else (whose name, it turned out, the operator had forgotten), the crush was no less complimentary; the face was as earnest and beaming, the "glad to see you' as syllabical and sincere, and the shake as close, as long, and as rejoicing, as if the semi-unknown was a friend come home from the Deserts. On the other hand, there would be a gentleman now and then as coy of his hand as if he were a prude, or had a whitlow. It was in vain that your pretensions did not go beyond the "civil salute" of the ordinary shake; or that, being introduced to him in a friendly manner, and expected to shake hands with the rest of the company, you could not in decency omit his. His fingers, half coming out, and half retreating, seemed to think that you were going to do them a mischief; and when you got hold of them, the whole shake was on your side: the other hand did but proudly or pensively acquiesce, there was no knowing which you had to sustain it, as you might a lady's in handing her to a seat: and it was an equal perplexity to know how to shake or to let it go. The one seemed a violence done to the patient; the other, an awkward responsibility brought upon yourself. You did not know, all the evening, whether you were not an object of dislike to the person; till, on the party's breaking up, you saw him behave like an The equally ill-used gentleman to all who practised the same unthinking civility. B. Never, in all my life. It's as dry as a chip. A. Or a cup in a currant tart. B. Ah, ha; so it is. You feel as if you were fingering a brick-bat. A. It makes you feel dust in the eyes. B. It is impossible to shed a tear over it. lachrymal organs are dried up. A. If you shut it hastily, it is like clapping together a pair of fresh-cleaned gloves. Both these errors, we think, might as well be avoided; but, of the two, we must say we prefer B. Before you have got far in it, you get up the former. If it does not look so much like to look at your tongue in a glass. A. It absolutely makes you thirsty. particular sincerity, it looks more like general kindness; and if those two virtues are to be B. Yes. If you take it up at breakfast, you separated (which they assuredly need not be, if drink four cups instead of two. 4. At page 30 you call for beer. B. They say it made a reviewer take to drinking. 4. They have it lying on the table at inns to considered without spleen), the world can better afford to dispense with an unpleasant truth than a gratuitous humanity. Besides, it is more difficult to make sure of the one than to practise the other; and kindness itself is the best of all truths. As long as we are sure of that, we are sure of something, and of something pleasant. It is always the best end, if not in every instance the most logical means. This manual shyness is sometimes attributed to modesty, but never, we suspect, with justice, unless it be that sort of modesty whose fear of committing itself is grounded in pride. Want of address is a better reason, but this particular instance of it would be grounded in the same feeling. It always implies a habit either of pride or distrust. We have met with two really kind men who evinced this soreness of hand. Neither of them perhaps thought himself inferior to anybody about him, and both had good reason to think highly of themselves; but both had been sanguine men contradicted in their early hopes. There was a plot to meet the hand of one of them with a fish-slice, in order to show him the disadvantage to which he put his friends by that flat mode of salutation; but the conspirator had not the courage to do it. Whether he heard of the intention, we know not; but shortly afterwards he took very kindly to a shake. The other was the only man of a warm set of politicians who remained true to his first love of mankind. He was impatient at the change of his companions, and at the folly and inattention of the rest; but, though his manner became cold, his consistency still remained warm; and this gave him a right to be as strange as he pleased. SPRING.-DAISIES.-GATHERING FLOWERS. The spring is now complete. The winds have done their work. The shaken air, well-tempered, and equalised, has subsided; the genial rains, however thickly they may come, do not saturate the ground beyond the power of the sun to dry it up again. There are clear crystal mornings; noons of blue sky and white cloud; nights, in which the growing moon seems to lie looking at the stars, like a young shepherdess at her flock. A few days ago she lay gazing in this manner at the solitary evening star, like Diana, on the slope of a valley, looking up at Endymion. His young eye seemed to sparkle out upon the world; while she, bending inwards, her hands behind her head, watched him with an enamoured dumbness. and perfect mark of the season-the true issuing forth of the spring. The trees and bushes are putting forth their crisp fans; the lilac is loaded with bud; the meadows are thick with the bright young grass, running into sweeps of white and gold with the daisies and buttercups. The orchards announce their riches in a shower of silver blossoms. The earth in fertile woods is spread with yellow and blue carpets of primroses, violets, and hyacinths, over which the birch-trees, like stooping nymphs, hang with their thickening hair. Lilies of the valley, stocks, columbines, lady-smocks, and the intensely red peony, which seems to anticipate the full glow of summer-time, all come out to wait upon the season, like fairies from their subterraneous palaces. Who is to wonder that the idea of love mingles itself with that of this cheerful and kind time of the year, setting aside even common associations? It is not only its youth, and beauty, and budding life, and "the passion of the groves," that exclaim with the poet "Let those love now, who never loved before; And those who always loved, now love the more."* All our kindly impulses are apt to have more sentiment in them than the world suspects; and it is by fetching out this sentiment, and making it the ruling association, that we exalt the impulse into generosity and refinement, instead of degrading it, as is too much the case, into what is selfish and coarse, and pollutes all our systems. One of the greatest inspirers of love is gratitude -not merely on its common grounds, but gratitude for pleasures, whether consciously or unconsciously conferred. Thus, we are thankful for the delight given us by a kind and sincere face; and if we fall in love with it, one great reason is, that we long to return what we have received. The same feeling has a considerable influence in the love that has been felt for men of talents whose persons or address have not been much calculated to inspire it. In springtime, joy awakens the heart; with joy awakes gratitude and nature; and in our gratitude we return, on its own principle of participation, the love that has been shown us. This association of ideas renders solitude in spring, and solitude in winter, two very different things. In the latter, we are better content to bear the feelings of the season by ourselves; in the former, they are so sweet, as well as so overflowing, that we long to share them. Shakespeare, in one of his sonnets, describes himself as so identifying the beauties of the spring with the thought of his absent mistress, that he says he forgot them in their own character, and played with them only as with her shadow. See how exquisitely he turns a commonplace Then the young green. This is the most apt into this fancy; and what a noble brief portrait But this is the quiet of spring. Its voices and swift movements have come back also. The swallow shoots by us, like an embodied ardour of the season. The glowing bee has his will of the honeyed flowers, grappling with them as they tremble. We have not yet heard the nightingale or the cuckoo; but we can hear them with our imagination, and enjoy them through the content of those who have. * Hazlitt. * Pervigilium Veneris-Parnell's Translation. of April he gives us at the beginning! There is indeed a wonderful mixture of softness and strength in almost every one of the lines. "From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose: Shakespeare was fond of alluding to April. He did not allow May to have all his regard, because she was richer. Perdita, crowned with flowers, in the "Winter's Tale," is beautifully compared to "Flora Peering in April's front." There is a line in one of his sonnets, which, agreeably to the image he had in his mind, seems to strike up in one's face, hot and odorous, like perfume in a censer: "In process of the seasons have I seen Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned." His allusions to spring are numerous in proportion. We all know the song containing that fine line, from the most brilliant of palettes: "When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight." We owe a long debt of gratitude to the daisy; and we take this opportunity of discharging a millionth part of it. If we undertook to pay it all, we should have had to write such a book as is never very likely to be written-a journal of numberless happy hours in childhood, kept with the feelings of an infant and the pen of a man. For it would take, we suspect, a depth of delight and a subtlety of words, to express even the vague joy of infancy, such as our learned departures from natural wisdom would find it more difficult to put together than criticism and comfort, or an old palate and a young relish. But knowledge is the widening and the brightening road that must conduct us back to the joys from which it led us; and which it is destined perhaps to secure and extend. We must not quarrel with its asperities, when we can help. We do not know the Greek name of the daisy, nor do the dictionaries inform us; and we are not at present in the way of consulting books that might. We always like to see what the Greeks say to these things, because they had a * But sweet, but.-Quære, But sweet-cut? sentiment in their enjoyments. The Latins called it Bellis or Bellus, as much as to say, Nice One. With the French and Italians it has the same name as a pearl-Marguerite, Margarita, or generally, by way of endearment, Margheretina.* The same word was the name of a woman, and occasioned infinite intermixtures of compliment about pearls, daisies, and fair mistresses. Chaucer, in his beautiful poem of "The Flower and the Leaf," which is evidently imitated from some French poetess, says: "And at the laste there began anon For, as methought, among her notes sweet, She said, 'Di douset est la Margarete."" "The Margaret is so sweet." Our Margaret, however, in this allegorical poem, is undervalued in comparison with the laurel; yet Chaucer perhaps was partly induced to translate it on account of its making the figure that it does; for he has informed us more than once, in a very particular manner, that it was his favourite flower. There is a very interesting passage to this effect in his "Legend of Good Women;" where he says, that nothing but the daisied fields in spring could take him from his books. "And as for me, though that I can but lite Save, certainly, when that the month of May As she that is of all flowers the flower." He says that he finds it ever new, and that he shall love it till his "heart dies;" and afterwards, with a natural picture of his resting on the grass: The longé day I shope me for to abide For nothing ellis, and I shall not lie, This etymology, which we have no doubt is the real one, is repeated by Ben Jonson, who takes occasion to spell the word "days-eyes;" adding, with his usual tendency to overdo a matter of learning: "Days-cyes, and the lippes of cows;" videlicit, cowslips: which is a disentanglement of compounds, in the style of our pleasant parodists: "Puddings of the plum, And fingers of the lady." Mr Wordsworth introduces his homage to the daisy with a passage from George Wither; which, as it is an old favourite of ours, and extremely applicable both to this new article and our whole work, we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of repeating. It is the more interesting inasmuch as it was written in prison, where the freedom of his opinions had thrown him. He is speaking of his muse, or imagination. "Her divine skill taught me this; Mr Wordsworth undertakes to patronise the celandine, because nobody else will notice it; which is a good reason. But though he tells us, in a startling piece of information, that "Poets, vain men in their mood, yet he falls in with his old brethren of England and Normandy, and becomes loyal to the daisy. "Be violets in their secret mews The flowers the wanton Zephyrs choose; Thou livest with less ambitious aim, "A nun demure, of lowly port: Or sprightly maiden of Love's court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations; A queen in crown of rubies drest; Thy appellations. "A little Cyclops, with one eye, That thought comes next, and instantly The shape will vanish, and behold! A silver shield with boss of gold, "I see thee glittering from afar; Who shall reprove thee. "Sweet flower! for by that name at last, When all my reveries are past, I call thee, and to that cleave fast; That breath'st with me in sun and air, My heart with gladness, and a share Of thy meek nature!" Mr Wordsworth calls the daisy "an unassuming commonplace of Nature," which it is; and he praises it very becomingly for discharging its duties so cheerfully, in that universal character. But we cannot agree with him in thinking that it has a "homely face." Not that we should care if it really had, for homeliness does not make ugliness; but we appeal to everybody whether it is proper to say this of "la belle Marguerite." In the first place, its shape is very pretty and slender, but not too much so. it has a boss of gold, set round and irradiated with silver points. Its yellow and fair white are in so high a taste of contrast that Spenser has chosen the same colours for a picture of Leda reposing: Then "Oh wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man! That her in daffodillies sleeping made, From scorching heat her dainty limbs to shade." It is for the same reason, that the daisy, being chiefly white, makes such a beautiful show in company with the buttercup. But this is not all; for look at the back, and you find its fair petals blushing with a most delightful red. And how compactly and delicately is the neck set in green! "Belle et douce Marguerite, aimable sœur du roi Kingcup!" we would tilt for thee with a hundred pens, against the stoutest poet that did not find perfection in thy cheek. But here somebody may remind us of the spring showers, and what drawbacks they are when upon going into the fields. Not at all so, |