Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN I
 
 COLLOQUIES, 
 
 CHIEFLY UPON POETRY AND POETS,
 
 ill TUB AUTHOK, ROMSKY.

 
 COLLOQUIES, 
 
 DESULTORY, BUT 
 
 CHIEFLY UPON POETRY AND POETS; 
 
 BETWEEN 
 
 AN ELDER, ENTHUSIASTIC, 
 AND AN APOSTLE OF THE LAW. 
 
 " One caveat, good Reader, and then GOD speed thee! Do not open it at 
 adventures, and by reading the broken pieces of two or three lines, judge it; 
 but read it through, and then I beg pardon if thou dislikest it. Farewell !" 
 
 T. ADAMS. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 ORR AND CO. AND HOULSTON AND STONEMAN. 
 ROMSEY: LORDAN. 
 
 MDCCCXJUV.
 
 CONSIDERATION 
 
 tS BESOUGHT FOR THE FOLLOWING PAGES, ON THE PLEA THAT THEY 
 EMBODY WHAT IS PRESUMED TO HAVE BEEN THE FIRST UNWRITTEN 
 BOOK. FROM SUCH AS MAY NOT PEREMPTORILY REFUSE TO HEAR 
 
 MORE OF THIS MATTER IS INTREATED THE EXTRAORDINARY BOON 
 OF A PERUSAL OF THE PRELUDE DEDICATORY. THE MECHANICAL 
 SINGULARITY THEREIN ADVERTED TO, IS NOT CLAIMED FOR THIS 
 EDITION, WHICH CONTAINS ADDITIONS TO THE ORIGINAL VOLUME. 
 BUT FOR A SENTENCE TANTAMOUNT TO " REPRINT," PRONOUNCED 
 OVER THE FORMER PAGES BY PRESIDENTS IN THE REPUBLIC OF 
 LETTERS, THEY MIGHT NOT HAVE HE-PRESENTED THEMSELVES IN 
 BOOK-SHAPE ON A THRONGED STREAM, WHEREIN NONE BUT THE 
 STRONG MAY SWIM. STILL THE NOVEL SPECIES OF REMORSE THAT 
 IMPEDED THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE ON THE SURFACE, MAY POSSIBLY 
 NOW HELP THEM INTO A SUHER CURRENT TO THE HAVEN OF TBX 
 READER'S FAVOR. 
 
 -1 -4 

 
 HEADS OF CHAPTERS. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY 
 
 II. THE OLD ENTHUSIAST'S SHELL, WITH A SAMPLE OF ITS 
 
 ECHOES 33 
 
 III. THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH 59 
 
 IV. TURNING MAINLY UPON HOLY MOTHER 89 
 
 V. A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE 139 
 
 VI. TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON 191 
 
 VII. THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE .. 233
 
 TO PROFESSOR WILSON. 
 
 RIGHT-ADMIRED SIR, 
 
 IT might have very well comported with the line 
 of argument adopted by a certain Pleader in a case 
 of great notoriety to make light of the virtue of a 
 NAME : " WTiafs in a Name ?" The ardent advocate 
 to whom I allude, might have been justified in pro- 
 testing against the undue influence of patronymics, 
 considering they were synonymous with prejudices 
 which the most impassioned pleading could not over- 
 rule, and that their authority, had it been decisive, 
 would have insisted on a nonsuit. His interrogative, 
 however, is remarkably happy in the elasticity of its 
 signification: / intend it to be read with another 
 punctuation WHAT'S in a NAME ! and thus employ 
 it to convey an emphatic converse meaning to that 
 which it expresses in re Romeo Montague.
 
 11. 
 
 The pages to which I venture to prefix a Name 
 with Poesy " linked like leaves to flowers," afford 
 an habitation for sundry cogitative vagrancies over 
 that delectable territory, rich in all floral luxuriance, 
 which considerate Muses have fertilised for the health- 
 ful holiday of young hearts, and for the reinvigoration 
 of the world-wearied to whom the " constant revo- 
 lution of the same repeated cares" might else 
 
 " make languid life 
 A pedlar's pack, bowing the bearer down." 
 
 It would, however, have required a reckless confidence 
 in the benignity of PROFESSOR WILSON, to proffer 
 these stray conceits as an acceptable thank-offering 
 for many hours charmed pursuit of his efflorescent 
 pen; crude as they are in conception, and cramped 
 in conformation, this presentation of them to a Poetic 
 Mind would, if it were written, be indited with a 
 trembling pinion. But certain peculiarities in the 
 construction of the " habitation," encourage me to 
 hope for a lenient scrutiny of its contents. 
 
 Of the little volume* before you, one individual 
 has been composer, and compositor and imprinter 
 
 * The last Chapter did not appear in the original edition.
 
 111. 
 
 throughout: this circumstance is only noticeable, 
 inasmuch as it may be a mental and mechanical com- 
 bination unprecedented, but unimposing. Printers 
 have been authors of renown ; and Methuselah, with 
 a knowledge of the art, adequate materiel, the patience 
 of Job, and sufficient perseverance, might, singly, 
 have completed a work, voluminous as the bulkiest 
 Cyclopedia of the present day. 
 
 But the pen has been a stranger to the prose part 
 of its composition, and the scribe's office subverted: 
 with the exception of acknowledged quotations, I 
 have been unaided by a line of manuscript or other 
 copy. There is a rhythmical extravaganza in the 
 sixth chapter, which I very reluctantly signalize in 
 this place, because the skeleton of twenty lines of it, 
 or thereabouts, was pen-traced; the composing-stick 
 has been otherwise my sole mechanical " help to com- 
 position." Memory has supplied me with sentiments 
 syllabled aforetime, to the occupation of three or four 
 pages; so unpremeditated else were its contents, that 
 when, as an employment for leisure, I commenced the 
 chapter called Introductory, it heralded I knew not 
 what. Evidences of a want of design and forethought 
 will, I fear, too frequently recur to substantiate this 
 
 A 2
 
 fact, and to prevent an innocent illusion I should wish 
 to create, that my " actors" are not " spirits," but 
 independent personages, holding separate opinions, 
 and endowed with the gift of tongues. 
 
 In proportion as this explanation may be injurious 
 to subsequent vraisemblance, it may propitiate the 
 severe. The entire absence of a preconcerted plan 
 from the beginning, may " show cause" why no pro- 
 fessional uniqueness distinguishes a literary bantling, 
 to which, possibly, the annals of printing may not 
 " parallel a fellow." But having accustomed myself, 
 at distant intervals, to simultaneous composition, I 
 had closed the first colloquy before it occurred to me 
 that perseverance might accomplish a novelty. It was 
 essential to uniformity that I should proceed in the 
 plain style of execution in which I had commenced. 
 
 I shall be fortunate, Sir, should its " plainness move 
 you more than eloquence." The practical disadvan- 
 tages inseparable to the mode pursued in its com- 
 position, will (I repeat my hope,) modify the strictures 
 
 of the considerate. 
 
 C. L. LORDAN. 
 
 Itomsey, March, 1843.
 
 COLLOQUIES.
 
 COLLOQUIES, 
 
 DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, BUT CHIEFLY UPON 
 POETRY AND POETS. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 " There is Poetry that is not written. As I here use it, it is delicate percep- 
 tion ; something which is in the nature, enabling one man to detect harmony, 
 and know forms of beauty better than another. It is like a peculiar gift of 
 vision, making the world we live in more visible. The poet hears music in com- 
 mon sounds, and sees loveliness by the wayside. There is not a change in the 
 sky, nor a sweet human voice, which does not bring him pleasure. He sees all 
 the light and hears all the music about him and this is POETRY." 
 
 MANY thanks, O charming MARY RUSSELL MITFORD ! 
 for a short and satisfactory definition of a theme, 
 which, when certain of our Poets essay to elucidate, 
 dilates delectably for perusal, but fills with despair 
 the seeker after a summary signification. Look, for 
 instance, at that masterly and stirring reply to What 
 is Poetry ? in an Appeal for Poets from the pen of 
 Barton; a glorious whole, which it were gothic to 
 garble by quotation. A marvellous creature, by the
 
 2 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 way, that Bernard Barton worthy of love and honor ! 
 Hath Quakerism foregone its frigidness, or how came 
 he in the cold cradle of his caste? and not he alone, 
 but others, whom that same " frozen bosom" hath 
 strangely quickened with poetic breath, and sent 
 forth in poetic guise, lovely as " yellow cowslip and 
 pale primrose from flowery lap of May." The Howitts 
 among these, and especially Saint MARY ! where is 
 verse more suffused by Innocency than hers, more 
 guileless and gladsome, more redolent with the air 
 of the Garden anterior to the great Mother's misdeed ? 
 How easy were the Law one whit less inexorable 
 how easy to conceive a mental reservation, made in 
 Mary's favor, by Eve, before the Fall ! 
 
 Among the multifarious subjects which, in our days, 
 our fathers', and, perhaps, in annals yet more remote, 
 have attracted, instructed, or diverted the public 
 mind, what singular or individual subject has retained 
 a potency so perennial as that of POETRY? Chrono- 
 logers who descend to the minutiae of modern times, 
 will, in all conscience, have need of flexible pens to 
 pourtray faithfully the fluctuations of feeling and of 
 general opinion which have characterised the age; 
 its web has indeed been of " a mingled yarn, good
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 3 
 
 and ill together;" and whether, in the judgment of 
 posterity, glory or shame shall be deemed to pre- 
 dominate in their review of the past proximate, the 
 historian, if metrically inclined, may thus impartially 
 usher in his lucubrations : 
 
 " Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, and mourn, 
 For here there is much matter for all feeling." 
 
 But, (let us hope that the symptom be not necessarily 
 vicious !) the mind created " upright," has of late ap- 
 proved itself so fecund with " inventions,"* has so 
 diversely disported with fantasy, fanaticism, and folly, 
 that few of the swarming " topics of the day" can 
 be dignified by the record or expected at the hands 
 of the chronologer. The age has developed lineaments 
 which, however, are British, or, in other words, are 
 bold, vigorous, and philanthropic, and these will find 
 an " habitation and a name" in the imperishable page ; 
 as to the host of bubbles, over whose birth trum- 
 pets were blown, sometimes by fools, at others, by 
 knaves they have evaporated, as was inevitable, 
 before the breath of 
 
 " Time's old daughter, Truth." 
 These, if they deserve the mention of their paternity, 
 
 * " God made man upright, but they have sought out many in- 
 ventions." Ecclesiastes.
 
 4 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 were chiefly the offspring of Politics in a phrenzy ; 
 but the " fitful fever" of the parent has subsided, 
 and its morbid progeny sleep well. The mild genius 
 of Poetry will probably experience in times future, 
 as it has experienced recently, the strongest check to 
 its diffusiveness and, consequently, to its dominion, in 
 the jealousy and turbulence of that spirit, just now 
 subdued, but " scotched, not killed," which smoul- 
 ders in the body politic: a restless spirit whose 
 element is contention, troubled in its very repose, and 
 swiftly, with a fancied right or fancied wrong, making 
 
 " all Europe ring, from side to side." 
 
 Freest of all lands from monster-violences of Faction, 
 yet not without her peccadillos is this saucy, sea-girt 
 Albion and could her white cliffs blush, as deep a 
 pink as dyes the brier-rose might tinge her ocean- 
 aspect in contrition for occasional foibles. But Bri- 
 tain now is growing less Babel-like, and, politically 
 speaking, we English people are becoming more " of 
 one language and of one speech:" for notwithstanding 
 that (in perilous identification of the vox populi with 
 the vox Dei,} the old and solid carved-work of our 
 good ship, " The State," has been threatened by 
 utilitarian axe and hammer, the proud bark rears her
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. O 
 
 head again flauntingly, as conscious of invulnerable 
 bulwarks and of skilful pilotage. Be it as 't may, 
 the manly* Mariner at the helm who believes her 
 buoyancy to be a property infinite will by no means 
 risk her stranding ; though the ship's superseded com- 
 pany predict foul weather, and say the subsidized sea 
 will be found surgy in many places and tempestuous. 
 
 " In your modern books for the most part," said 
 Coleridge, " the sentences in a page have much the 
 same connection with each other that marbles have in 
 a bag they touch without adhering :" in the actual 
 perpetration of irrelevancy how just appears the 
 observation ! yet art thou, gentle Reader, forewarned, 
 that in these pages many a swerving from strict con- 
 nectedness may be expected; and therefore pray we 
 that Nature, in thy apportionment of attributes, may 
 have endowed thee with a less austere regard for 
 " unities" and " oneness" than that developed by 
 Mr. Curdle, in his profound disquisitions upon the 
 essentialities of the legitimate Drama. 
 
 But on a scribe who cannot " wander at his own 
 sweet will " without having to travel back again, his 
 
 * For the propriety of this appellative vide the Premier's speeches 
 in propounding and defending the Income- Tax Act.
 
 O INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 errings avenge themselves ; and the spirit of digression 
 is certainly of that rebellious class which "no exorcism 
 can bind." Revenons! Before the word politics 
 escaped us we were adverting to the pinnacle which 
 POETRY has serenely maintained in a discordant and 
 distracted generation; shedding, from the lofty sum- 
 mit on which her seat is fixed, an influence benign, 
 pacific, and ennobling, through all the acrimony of 
 political and literary contest, the birth, rise, and fall 
 of hydra-headed faction, and the busy dissemination 
 of doctrines, pestilent though ephemeral, and de- 
 moralising although delusive. 
 
 Not to detain thee, dear Reader, longer on a 
 dubious threshold, I will hint at what may be anti- 
 cipated in the following papers. In the early spring 
 of the year of grace, forty-one, it was my lot literally 
 to stumble on an individual, in whose companionship, 
 originating in this contingency, Time seemed to aug- 
 ment the velocity of his flight. Age, as I afterwards 
 discovered, had dealt leniently with him; for though 
 in close proximity with the grand climacteric, his 
 visage was little marred by furrows, and hoar hairs 
 have won reverence for many a younger brow. He 
 had been an enthusiast in admiration of poetry and 
 poets, nay was himself a poet according to the tenets
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 7 
 
 of Miss Mitford, one of the " many that " (says a 
 Voice from Rydal Mount,) " are sown by Nature ;" 
 and this enthusiastic temperament was still the idio- 
 syncrasy of the man. Externally, with one exception, 
 his aspect was so unmarked by peculiarity, that in 
 the thronged streets of a city the majority would have 
 honored him far less than Wordsworth's Wanderer, 
 and have passed him without remark. But they, 
 who, from accident or audacity, had looked in for a 
 few consecutive moments at the lattice-lights of his 
 soul, forgot rudeness in yielding to fascination so 
 incessantly-varying was the expression seen there. 
 Yet never in their unrest were they uncomely lights 
 to look upon the revealers never of repulsive pas- 
 sions but, pure as the scintillations of a star, re- 
 pudiated all sympathy with the sordidness which 
 degrades and the vices which pollute the crowd. 
 
 He was of average stature, and his nether propor- 
 tions were arrayed in that old-gentlemanly garb, by 
 ancient scriptural translators imputed (in name at 
 least) to primitive times, and to the invention of one 
 of our first parents the paternal ancestor, no doubt. 
 Supplements in the shape of gaiters, of a dark hue 
 to match their antecedents, completed the covering 
 of locomotives of no ungraceful structure, and ex-
 
 8 INTRODUCTOKY CHAPTER. 
 
 tended over the major part of shoes, well-shaped 
 and rather accurately fitted. His upper garment, less 
 than any other, betrayed subserviency to the Parisian 
 idol; for the placid artist whom he delighted to honor, 
 establishing each primal pattern as a precedent abso- 
 lute, and " nursed at happy distance" from, or paying 
 platonic indifference to, conflicting Reports of Fashion, 
 never tortured his patron's body or kindled ire in his 
 flashing eye, by chasing a fugitive comme il faut for 
 the more becoming decoration of his person. That 
 unreasonable (and, were it not for custom, unseemly) 
 item, which, without the recommendation of comfort 
 or elegance, humanity has so long chosen, under one 
 contour or another, for the conservation of the cranium 
 from ungenial elements or casual assaults that formal 
 and vacant product of a block, which Englishmen call 
 hat, as it appeared on the personage of whom I speak, 
 was in keeping with the ensemble. That part of it 
 which the half-gallon measure at a potato-shop most 
 strikingly illustrates, was rather low than lofty, and 
 would have made a lucrative gauge for the merchant 
 if employed in such a dispensation of his wares. Its 
 margin was capacious, and, slightly aiding gravity, 
 served also to render less evident to first-sight the 
 swift vicissitudes of visionary expression to which I
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 9 
 
 have adverted ; but, in further reference to this " pe- 
 culiar eye," its keenness of perception (I would aver 
 with humility) was not surpassed by the Wanderer's 
 in the Excursion. In youth it had been subject to 
 short-sightedness; and now, from causes clear, I be- 
 lieve, to oculists, Time, so far from clouding, clarified 
 its powers. Indeed, the vigor of this faculty in one 
 so old was almost incredible; nor was it until after 
 long intercourse that I, who met him oft, was made 
 to comprehend the full reach of that tremendous 
 organ, and then by an acquisition of intelligence 
 more sudden and startling than the stoppage of a 
 bank to an American. My friend for in sooth he 
 and I were soon 
 
 " A pair of friends, though 1 was young 
 And he was sixty-two" 
 
 my friend (I mention it to thee in a whisper, fair 
 Header,) existed in a state of celibacy, sometimes 
 miscalled single blessedness; [a man who knew what 
 happiness meant so well as he, lived not designedly 
 so, you may be sure but of the causes, peradventure, 
 anon:] and there came occasionally to brighten the 
 old Sponsor's abode by her presence, and make it 
 more melodious with the sweet outpourings of her
 
 10 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 solicitude than it was wont to be with poets' voices, 
 a Visitant, lovely enough to be ideal, but happily of 
 more perdurable material than " dreams are made of." 
 With this fair form, when acquaintanceship had duly 
 ripened into familiarity, I commenced a kind of tele- 
 graphic correspondence the signals consisting of 
 amatory glances and sighs ; and confiding too implicitly 
 in the denseness of that curtain which Old Age 
 lowers, with hasty or gentle hand, on eye and ear, we 
 saw in the Ancient's presence no absolute impedi- 
 ment to all communication. So we continued to 
 exchange dispatches, till the conspiracy demanded 
 a denouement, and we resolved she, of course, re- 
 luctantly that " the catastrophe should be a nuptial." 
 That only which allied perplexity with passion was 
 the unquestioned fact, that Mary's godfather was as 
 profoundly in the dark about her leaning " to the 
 soft side of the heart," as (if there be truth in tory 
 tattle) was wont to be a merry ex-chief-minister, 
 touching the movements and projects of his right- 
 trusty and well-beloved co-mates in the executive. 
 
 The happiest day of one's life is not invariably ap- 
 proached by pleasurable steps. The business of oral 
 confession is embarrassing to the most voluble tongue, 
 if the tale it tells to the ear mostly concerned be one
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 11 
 
 of truth ; but the embarras augmenteth mightily if 
 another avowal be expedient. However, having to 
 leave town for an indefinite space, and reflecting that 
 wishes " had not a body in them" to make confession 
 by proxy, I racked up my resolution to the highest 
 degree of desperation, and with stammered accent and 
 in paralytic phrase besought to inform him of that 
 which " he had read (if outward signs of things 
 within could be read) connectedly, from alpha to 
 omega, and of which he flattered his discernment he 
 could have given me the earliest information!" 
 
 He was a bachelor, but he loved the poets and 
 his godchild in particular, all mankind in general. 
 His conversation, when it turned not on practical 
 subjects, was poetic in conception, and often poetic in 
 expression, and was enriched and stimulated by an 
 exuberancy of quotation. It is some of such that I 
 shall endeavour, from crude and hasty notes, to tran- 
 scribe. Where there may appear intelligence, the 
 praise be his ; where insipidity, the reproach be mine : 
 and this must, I fear, frequently occur for charms 
 of voice, impressiveness of gesture, and eloquence of 
 eye, are efficient auxiliaries to any theme too subtle, 
 alas ! to be " turned into shape" by any but a " poet's
 
 12 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 pen;" and even by that inspired instrument, are 
 seldom in strict fidelity transfixed on the poet's page. 
 
 It only remains, among preliminaries, to relate liow 
 I became acquainted with the individual I have very 
 imperfectly described; and here a fitting occasion 
 presents itself (at least, in my opinion, which I sub- 
 mit with deference,) for some elucidation of the first 
 person in the singular number in this narration. My 
 dramatis personce are limited, and the expediency of 
 personal portraiture will consequently, and perhaps 
 fortunately, be unfrequent. Nevertheless, where a 
 prolonged intercourse is probable, it is preferable to 
 foreknow something of one's camarade; nay, it is 
 desirable, though he be but the convive of a festal 
 hour, or the companion in a stage-coach. In steam- 
 carriages such prescience is a matter of indifference, 
 so is a pleasant prospect and a brawling brook, 
 everything, in short, except the bursting of an engine 
 0r sepulchral symptoms in a tunnel. 
 
 Be it then known unto thee, friendly Reader, by 
 these presents, which come greeting, that the part 
 I was to act upon the stage of life (provided I should 
 retain an essential principle,) was appointed for me 
 ere I had emerged from swaddling-clothes. At what 
 precise period in the present century I made my debut
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 13 
 
 in a part which, like the lion's (allotted to Snug*), is 
 done " extempore, for it is nothing but roaring," it is 
 not pleasant to communicate. A desire to avoid 
 divulging the exact antiquity of the chronicle com- 
 menced by Time coeval with our birth, is a delicate 
 refinement now so generally displayed, that a definite 
 reference to the calendar is out of date, and, indeed, 
 indicates eccentricity in a writer. The cause may be 
 questionable whether this exquisite sensibility be 
 fostered by the increase of infant seminaries sanctioned 
 by an enlightened legislature, or by the diffusion of 
 liberal arts and sciences, by ultra-liberal hawkers 
 promulgated upon the lowest possible terms on the 
 mercurial side of nothing the cause, I repeat, may 
 be questionable, but this effect is undeniable, that an 
 antipathy to reveal with precision the passage of Time 
 over our heads, is becoming universal as intelligence. 
 It seems to be a resolution of the day, that if the 
 mighty Hunter's f reckless Whipper-in will ride 
 rough-shod over this corporeal compound, his deface- 
 ments shall not be noisily blazoned but rather sighed 
 over secretly. So that (out of life-insurance offices) 
 the utmost admission made consists of a plaintive 
 
 * Midsummer Night's Dream, iii. 1. 
 t " Death, that mighty Hunter!" Night Thoughts. 
 
 B 2
 
 14 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 iteration of the Patriarch's lament "few and evil 
 have the days of the years of my life been." 
 
 I borrow from the Prophet the paternal, maternal, 
 and grand-maternal decree concerning myself: here 
 it is briefly, " To the law!" I grew up in the 
 dangerous and isolated position of an only son not 
 dangerous because isolated, but because idolised. I 
 always foresee fearingly the fate of an only son 
 shudderingly if there be a grandam in existence. A 
 unique " pledge," in such a case, is more hapless 
 and more to be lamented over than the least-likely 
 to be redeemed at a pawnbroker's. To every volition 
 of his will there is regard to every appeal, assent ; 
 and how can either teeth or temper maintain a purity 
 against indulgences, dispensed with freer hand than 
 that of Pope of Rome in direst poverty ! Much less 
 to be expected then, from such matriculation, is any 
 premature penchant for those interesting studies and 
 that agreeable discipline adjudged by Lord Eldon to 
 be essential to such as hope to live by the law. 
 
 My forensic future was proverbial in my boyhood, 
 and numberless were the exhortations to docility and 
 studiousness to which it supplied a text. " I heard 
 them, but I heeded not." The pedagogue to whose 
 training I was entrusted at a later stage, bewailed my
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 15 
 
 " mania for wood-walking and vagaries in verse, which 
 for the most part were vanity, and would doubtlessly 
 end in vexation of spirit;" but was too tender-hearted 
 to chastise, and, like Southey's, " never consumed 
 birch enough in his vocation to make a besom." How 
 strongly some oddities protest against oblivion ! Poor 
 M ! never shall I forget the " anger, insignificantly 
 fierce," which, when it distorted thy patient features, 
 was certain to defeat its purpose, provoking to risi- 
 bility, with difficulty suppressed, the culprit it was 
 intended to daunt. Nor ever can I fail to remember 
 those quiet bubblings from thy natural fount of hu- 
 mour, whose current the cares of a contentious wife 
 and seven clamorous bantlings had not sufficed en- 
 tirely to dam. 
 
 M astounded and delighted me a few weeks ago, 
 by presenting himself at my chambers. London has 
 always a choice collection of comicalities in human 
 shape, or claiming a kindred with humanity, and the 
 worthy dominie of D (in the far west) was no mean 
 metropolitan marvel during his sojourn in the vast city, 
 " whose streets," quoth he, " are verily interminable, 
 presenting a changeless perspective of sooty dwellings, 
 dimly visible through an atmosphere of smoke." M, 
 was an amateur of lowly pretensions on the violin ; and
 
 16 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 in the lull of holiday-freedom he sought in psalmody 
 a refuge from connubial reproach, which yielded to 
 but one assuaging influence sleep. M. had a tune 
 on the title of which he jested with lugubrious levity 
 There is balm (said he) in Gilead! Conscious of 
 his enjoyment of sweet sounds, I insisted on his ac- 
 companying me to a concert in Hanover-square; and 
 during the plaudits which followed a pathetic aria 
 from a female singer, he remarked, with a physiogno- 
 mical expression in which humour, ecstasy, and gra- 
 vity were strangely mingled, " Of a verity, Mr. C., 
 yon syren's was the sweetest melody that, in the 
 years of my experience, I ever heard produced by a 
 Birch!*" 
 
 The season of boyhood is certainly as swift of wing 
 as the seasons which succeed it ay, by the light of 
 Memory, whose property it is to condense tribulation 
 and to dilate joy, it appears scarcely less swift than that 
 Spring of the seasons of the soul its first love. Before 
 I was half prepared to relinquish my capacity as 
 
 " a Dreamer among men, 
 Indeed an idle Dreamer," 
 
 I was summoned to sterner engagements, in the coil 
 
 of which, narrowing as it did the boundaries of all 
 
 * It was the cantatrice of that name who sung.
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 17 
 
 previous pleasures, I syllabled, in con expressions 
 monotony, 
 
 " Ah, happy years! who would not be again a boy?" 
 
 Let all on the side male who cannot plead guilt- 
 less of this ejaculation, in spirit if not in the very 
 letter, come with me hereupon to an arbitrement; 
 and as many elegant minds have imbibed many unin- 
 telligible fancies from " The Childe," who, were the 
 state of childhood again their own, would not appear 
 as boys, either by creation or by choice, let us em- 
 brace the supplicants of both sexes, and determine 
 who are they that were the change optional would 
 antedate their lives agreeably to their longings. 
 
 Not the youth who is professing love, nor the 
 maiden who is pondering upon marriage. 
 
 The youth might who has gone before the priest, 
 and finds himself nearer purgatory than paradise; 
 and so might a wife wedded " by attorneyship," or 
 the mother of a thankless child. 
 
 Not the youth who is advancing to manhood and 
 to great possessions to the freedom of majority and 
 the unrestrained right to do as he likes with his own. 
 
 Such a " major" might who has gained discretion 
 and lost his domain; and so might a young man
 
 18 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 made old by excesses ; so might a saint in an outburst 
 of innocency, and a sinner in a paroxysm of despair. 
 
 So might he who hath seceded from vice, and is 
 troubled at the tears he hath occasioned, or harrowed 
 by the heart he may have broken. 
 
 So might he to whom the moral aspect of the time 
 is " dark as Erebus," and who is discontented at 
 everything. 
 
 But so would not he who knows that progressive 
 privileges attend progressive age, and each nobler in 
 its order: that intellectual advancement, founded 
 upon holy Truth, is the superworthy aim, congenial 
 element, and noblest safeguard of the soul its fitting- 
 discipline, in the twilight-hour of its terrestrial so- 
 journ, for the cloudless immutable meridian of its 
 celestial exaltation. 
 
 It is a work of considerable difficulty which in- 
 creases daily to keep one's footing on the road to 
 Honor, beset as it now is beyond all precedent, by a 
 host of aspirants beyond all calculation. It is the 
 struggling, hustling, anxious course, on which the 
 million compete, and the few unconcernedly regard. 
 And of the crowd which enter for the race, how 
 few attain the goal of the countless array of com-
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 19 
 
 petitors, how scanty arc the gifted with the garland ! 
 That ramification of the said road which leadeth unto 
 legal eminency, is especially notorious for its tortuosity 
 and glorious uncertainty; and many a chancellor and 
 chief baron in nocturnal visions (which befriend*), 
 has, in the reality of broad day, found himself still 
 Mow the bar, and there not seldom unlike the dispu- 
 tative angels " in wandering mazes lost." With all 
 my respect for that learned body to which my sire 
 supplied an insignificant limb in my unworthy person, 
 I did not suddenly burn to be esteemed a Daniel in 
 judgment, nor was I sensible of any instantaneous 
 exhilaration from inspiring ether oracularly rarified, 
 nor was I roused to emulation by the conflict of the 
 courts. A simple summary of the subjects with which 
 it was necessary to be conversant, convinced me that 
 Cromwell had singularly fallen upon truth when he 
 said, that, " there being so many law-books of great 
 bulk, so many old musty records and reports, as that 
 after the time spent in school-learning, the rest of the 
 time of the flower of a man's life would be little 
 enough to read them over and peruse them." Vigi- 
 lantibus non dormientibus subserviunt leges, should be 
 
 * " Night visions may befriend, 
 
 Our waking dreams arc fatal." Night Thoughts.
 
 X\J INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 an aphorism in as constant repetition with a student, 
 as his " A.ve" with the suppliant of a certain creed. 
 No doubt the truism is distressing, but it is salutary. 
 If, thought I, I devote myself to this " sage and 
 serious doctrine," it must be at the sacrifice of pur- 
 suits infinitely more pleasurable, though certainly less 
 profitable, if estimated by the Hudibrastic standard 
 
 " What is the worth of any thing 
 But so much money as 'twill bring ?" 
 
 Then, too, I had scruples, suggested by admiration 
 of Consistency and reverence of Truth, which, per- 
 haps, but for lofty prototypes in punctilio, I might 
 have coyly concealed. To lie like truth, to imitate 
 in one particular a celebrated parliamentary refugee, 
 
 " Hazer lo bianco negro, y lo negro bianco," 
 
 and with the consciousness of crime to assume and 
 argue as for innocency, were hard to be reconciled 
 with preconceived notions of the sanctity of Right, 
 or made conformable to a moral creed, of which it 
 was a primary article that " The simple energy of 
 Truth needs no ambiguous interpretation." Yet if 
 such reasons could prevail upon the noble and high- 
 minded father of Hale, with so much force as to
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 21 
 
 induce him to retire from the practice of his profession, 
 to what can we look for a more effective confutation 
 of their right to prevail, than to the character of his 
 illustrious son? in the contemplation of which I 
 derived a quietus for this order of compunctious 
 visitings. 
 
 My countenance was not always " sicklied o'er with 
 the pale cast of" parchment which it now wears, and 
 on the eve of my entry at Lincoln's-inn, I cogitated 
 on a subject of mutual concern with myself and grand- 
 mother (not Blackstone). I had still sympathy enough 
 with rustic vulgarity to look lovingly on a visage 
 whose ruddy tinge betokened a connexion with the 
 heart, a connexion, the existence of which in law- 
 yers is sometimes disputed by the profane, on other 
 grounds than that of a bloodless physiognomy. It 
 was grievous to think that ere long I might as 
 strikingly resemble " a thing that ne'er had life" 
 as did respectively H and B and P , whose 
 ghostly apparitions flitted before me, like weird 
 and warning monitors, their livid features dilating 
 in awful elongation, till the sphere proper to the mas- 
 ticatory process appeared in each like an emporium 
 of ivory tusks. And these, not long since, had been 
 " sweet-faced men as one shall see in a summer's day ;"
 
 23 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 and, fitted once to personate Pyramus, could hence- 
 forth be counted as stars perhaps only as satellites 
 in the Apothecary line for ever ! But the " venerable 
 Maid" has no more regard for the pride of the 
 physical constitution, than Miss Mary- Ann Walker 
 for the pride of the political; and 
 
 " The visage wan, the purblind sight," 
 
 are phases and signs which the prejudices of the 
 multitude obstinately identify with ability. I re- 
 member once on the circuit leaving the court-house or 
 hall at Salisbury, on the heels of smiling Mr. M j 
 and as he turned a corner, while I remained at the 
 window of a book-shop, I overheard a countryman 
 say to his companion, alluding to the comely barrister, 
 " Now, if I did want a laayer, I wouldna choose he ; 
 he be a dale too fat and pleasant-looking for a 
 laayer!" 
 
 Enfin, (dissyllabic darling of our neighbours, help 
 me to an end!) enftn, I became that which I am. 
 Blackstone, in his " Farewell to the Muse," enume- 
 rates a train of penalties, contingent with the fervent 
 embrace of "fair Justice," which are penalties although 
 poetically clothed, as pills made palatable with sweet- 
 meat are still physic. But, comprehensive as is his
 
 IKfTRODFCTOKY CHAPTER. 23 
 
 catalogue of contingent ills, there is a remainder un- 
 mentioned, before which all recited evils " hide their 
 diminished heads :" can the briefless need a reminder 
 that their condition is not included in his detail 
 of professional calamities? But the sanguine tem- 
 perament of youth is not prone to anticipate chagrin 
 or privation, and dwells more interestedly on arenas 
 of legal contention anticipates the applausing hum 
 of courts, the murmured homage to eloquence fore- 
 fancies championship and conquest; and preconceives 
 the florid invocation, resistless argument, and eloquent 
 propitiation of a decree, on which are suspended the 
 absorbing interests of Life, and Fame, and Honor; 
 and speeds, by an ideal path, to renown, preferment, 
 ease. Soon, on the stoicism of adolescence, ambition 
 works; and soon I looked at this, the bright side of 
 the scene. Hume (the historian) estimates a natural 
 disposition to view things on the sunny side, as more 
 than equivalent to a fortune of 10,000 a year. A 
 living economist might think the calculation hasty, 
 and feel disposed to cavil at so large a " tottle." In 
 embracing law I had, moreover, home anticipations 
 not to realise, for they were Utopian, but to cherish, 
 for they were fond. Advising, after twelve months 
 application, with a visitor at the paternal residence,
 
 2 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 on a plain principle, a copious (and superfluous) use 
 of technicalities convinced my father that my time 
 had been well spent, and threw around me the halo 
 of an oracle in the dim eyes of a venerable maternal 
 ancestor, who would " die happily could she live to see 
 me a judge" her ne plus ultra of forensic dignity. 
 Dear old Lady ! without this anodyne her " sleep of 
 death" was peaceful as a pleasant dream, and little 
 recked she of the superadded " labor and sorrow" 
 that must have been entailed on her by the fruition 
 of her wish. For my own part, my aspirations are 
 less presumptious ; and a silk gown, which never would 
 have occurred to her as a desideratum with men, 
 would appease my longings and be gratefully ac- 
 knowledged. 
 
 Prolixity, O Reader ! is, as thou mayest haply know, 
 peculiar to the Law and its disciples; and if herein 
 I stand accused of circumlocution, would that I could 
 truly interpret to thee that encouragement to expatiate 
 which now I feel, in assured freedom from the frowns 
 of impatient jurymen, ungifted with eye or ear to 
 comprehend the subtleties of the statute-book, and 
 willing to cut off Magna Charta from their children, 
 so they sires of the spirit of Esau might 'scape 
 judicial durance vile, devour their pottage at-home, 
 and rejoin their aprons.
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 25 
 
 On an April morning in 41, I was proceeding ta 
 
 my chambers in . I had been engaged during 
 
 the greater part of the night in a complicated inves- 
 tigation, and having arrived at an opinion which I 
 considered to be as well-grounded as it would be 
 satisfactory to my client, I was disembarrassed of care, 
 and my spirit seemed gifted with the volatility of 
 an angel's wing. " Town-imprisoned," as gentle 
 Mary terms it (William Hewitt's Mary, not mine), 
 town-imprisoned, we taste but a dilution of the joy- 
 enkindling elixir which Delight, prime almoner to the 
 Queen of seasons, pours lavishly by wood, and field, 
 and stream, in the golden light of an April morn. 
 Yet, weakened as becomes the pure effluence by com- 
 mixture with the murky atmosphere of busy haunts, 
 it still retains ingredients which inspire with a joyous 
 consciousness of the time ; and even in the clamour 
 of a city the heart recognises and leaps lithely at the 
 voice of Spring. For stony limits may sooner shut 
 out Love* than exclude Nature; and when the all- 
 animating Spring passes over creation, with her vivi- 
 fying breath making the old world young again, her 
 influence operates in man like a renewal of GOD'S 
 
 * " With Love's light wings did I o'crperch these walls, 
 For stony limits cannot hold Love out." Romeo and Juliet.
 
 %b INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 breath of life ; and the indefinable exultation which 
 rises in his bosom attests but his participation in the 
 instinctive and insuppressible sympathy which all 
 things living own for youth the doctrine of whose 
 infinite prolongation in a happier sphere lends the tint 
 of transport to fabled felicity, and gilds the pinions of 
 a surer and sublimer Hope. Eternal youth ! What 
 other epoch of existence can imagination appropriate 
 to the glad heritage of bliss? Not the dawn of 
 capacity, or its decline ; not immaturity or imbecility 
 but the ever-ripening, ever-rosy Morn; Morn 
 which prevails in perpetuity, and which cannot 
 hasten Noon, for Noon is Night's precursor, and 
 Night may not spread her sable mantle over the 
 Realm of the Rejoicing! 
 
 On the morning to which I have adverted, I had 
 resigned myself to the Spirit of the Air, 
 
 " The pleasant season did my heart employ; 
 My old remembrances went from me wholly, 
 And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy." 
 
 Who has not smiled at his own locomotive irregula- 
 rities, when governed by the impulses of an ecstasy 
 to which all temporal care is alien, and inspired with
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 27 
 
 which the human heart yearns, from its most hallowed 
 depths, with the boundless desire TO BLESS? 
 
 " To me that morning did it happen so;" 
 
 and having, in changing mood and by changing mo- 
 tion, nearly attained my destination, I had lingered 
 in loving dalliance before the attractive exposition of 
 a bibliopolist one of those tempting arrays of title- 
 pages, which to this day (unless urged onwards by a 
 professional pressure from without,) detain me with 
 the virtue of an arrest. There were treatises, by 
 master-minds, on the Religion which reconciles the 
 contradictions and irradiates the oft-beclouded per- 
 spective of life ; on the pharmaceutic Science, by which 
 purchasers might secure an immortality p las ; and 
 on Law, by which its mysteries were simplified to the 
 scale of Readings made Easy. And, above these, a 
 rank of Poets, living and dead if indeed true Poets 
 can die cherished titles all, the humblest of which by 
 mere articulation sounds a chord that kindles rapture. 
 There were but what need to recapitulate names 
 " familiar as household words?" Last of all stood 
 Burns ; and, swift as thought, the rapture within me 
 found utterance in jocund words of song:
 
 28 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 " O LIFE ! how pleasant in thy morning:, 
 Young Fancy's rays the hills adorning ! 
 Cauld- pausing Caution's lessons scorning, 
 
 We frisk away, 
 Like school-boys at th' expected warning, 
 
 To joy and play!" 
 
 Then, lest I might be longer beguiled by that " sweet 
 companie," I receded hastily, and in unconscious 
 vicinity with the Old Man too long lost sight of in 
 these pages, who had been standing behind me, I 
 came into a collision with him so violent and unex- 
 pected, that for a moment I was a painful witness of 
 a critical experiment on the laws of gravitation. 
 
 Of course I was instantly earnest in apology, which 
 was not, he benignantly assured me, needed. There 
 are symbols out of Masonry which attest fraternity 
 of feeling, and a disposition towards attachment was 
 suddenly and reciprocally developed by us two. The 
 passion of Celia and Oliver, who " no sooner looked 
 than they loved,"* was not quicklier conceived than 
 our friendship. He had heard my quotation from the 
 Scottish bard, (which I had vented audibly, believing 
 myself alone,) and though tolerably well-stricken in 
 years, he appeared to appreciate the ecstatic pride 
 
 * As You Like it.
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 29 
 
 of life to which the poet has supplied a language. 
 We conversed awhile and parted, for recollections of 
 waiting clients gat hold upon me : but we exchanged 
 addresses ; and when in reply to his earnest solicita- 
 tion that I would visit him soon, very soon, I promised 
 on the evening of the second day to call on him at 
 Ivy Lodge, it was with a strong confidence that I 
 should find it a " haven where I would be." 
 
 c 2
 
 COLLOQUY L 
 
 THE OLD ENTHUSIAST'S SHELL, WITH A SAMPLE OF ITS 
 ECHOES.
 
 COLLOQUY I. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 " Whate'er you see, wbate'er you feel, display 
 The Realm you sought for." PAHNELL. 
 
 THE habitation of the individual with whom I had 
 thus become acquainted, and for whom I was sensible 
 of a sudden and singular interest, was situate in one 
 of the pleasantest environs of London. The day was 
 in a deep decline at the period of my presentment, 
 but yielded still abundant light about the Lodge to 
 display the neatness of its external aspect, which, as 
 well as the arrangement of a limited parterre, bespoke 
 its owner's sense of chasteness and propriety. The 
 house was in its character more rural than, in that 
 neighbourhood, suburban dwellings are in general; 
 and whilst its size and situation might have adapted
 
 34 CHAPTER II. 
 
 it for the retreat of a merchant, the absence of certain 
 features pleasant to the eyes of a commer^ant, con- 
 vinced you that it was not the harbour of a merchant- 
 man, or that if it was, its appearance guaranteed his 
 good taste and true gentility. [I protest, en passant, 
 against any illiberal deduction from this remark, 
 which merely implicates gout, not worth: I rejoice 
 over several clients in the commercial interest all 
 honorable men, very.] The entrance-gate opened by 
 a peculiar catch, and formed part of a wooden fencing 
 of lattice-work, which, being high and over-run with 
 ivy, concealed from pedestrian passers-by the lower 
 rooms of the Lodge. The house also was nearly 
 covered with the same vagrant root, displaying two 
 distinct hues that which grew upon the projections 
 of the building being of a deeper green than that 
 which overspread its recesses. A few vases and 
 rustic flower-stands were dispersed in judicious dis- 
 play, and were garlanded with the snowdrop and 
 primrose. And opposite the housedoor, and com- 
 manding obliquely the outer gate, a roomy kennel 
 (also over-run with ivy) was established, from which 
 there partially protruded the caput of a mastiff, " life- 
 like and awful to view," though merely carved and 
 colored (as you discovered on a closer and keener
 
 COLLOQUY I. 35 
 
 scrutiny), and representing the sentinel as keeping 
 a vigilant eye upon the wicket, although in couchant 
 attitude. 
 
 The public thoroughfare to which the domicile was 
 contiguous, was not the most-frequented route to the 
 metropolis, though sufficiently peopled ; yet, from the 
 height and density of the fence that bounded it, 
 the gate was no sooner closed on the inside, than you 
 seemed in a realm sacred to Silence in a sanctuary 
 upon whose stillness there intruded only the fitful 
 note of some drowsy wood-warbler, nestling down 
 for the night, very languidly carolled, but not on 
 that account the less heart-soothing, 
 
 " as it sank 
 On the lull'd ear, its melody that drank." 
 
 And many a weary wing had its quiet resting-place 
 there not more secure in leafy solitudes than in the 
 depths of that redundant ivy and the guardianship of 
 the kind heart it sheltered. The stillness that reigned 
 without the Lodge presided more intensely within 
 a realisation of Peace made palpable Quietness (like 
 Darkness once in Egypt) that might be felt. Win- 
 dows, some partially and others wholly composed of 
 amber-colored glass, imparted to the interior a dim,
 
 36 CHAPTER II. 
 
 religious light, of that chastened hue, neither silvery 
 nor golden purely, but a rich commingling of both 
 such, fair Lady, as your own starry orbs may have 
 witnessed in the west at eventide, ere the Day's 
 lustrous orb had suffused the horizon with the deep 
 crimson radiance which consummates his setting. 
 There is a peculiarly-tranquillising influence in that 
 soft amber light; and perhaps from associating it with 
 the quietude that prevails at sunset, or with the 
 solemn splendour which it sheds over sacred places, 
 we connect it instinctively with serenity. The apart- 
 ment in which I found the genius loci, had an air 
 of luxurious comfort, utterly apart from ostentation ; 
 the walls supported the effigies of six generations 
 of his fathers; and though the room was not large, 
 the chief portion of the space left unoccupied by his 
 ancestors was devoted to the accommodation of four 
 capacious bird-cages, " the lodging" (as he observed 
 smilingly, the instant he perceived my eye upon them,) 
 " the lodging of a few parlour-boarders, in addition 
 to a numerous singing-class in the eaves and leaves 
 without. I feel," he continued, in reply to a remark 
 I made connected with his in-door aviary, " I feel, if 
 not a sacred, an ' home-felt delight,' in the strains of 
 my domestic quire, which, by-the-bye, the last few
 
 COLLOQUY I. 37 
 
 days of warmth and sunshine have driven to such 
 excess of riot, as made them almost 
 
 ' vex with mirth the drowsy ear of Night:' 
 
 but my joy was well-nigh at an end, and my band in 
 danger of being broken-up, by a doctrine of humanity 
 taught with the power of poesy by that dear Disturber 
 in the North, the undying CHRISTOPHER of that 
 name, for whom I will not impute to you the bar- 
 barism of a want of love and reverence. He denomi- 
 nates the singing of caged birds * a rueful simulation 
 of music ;' and ' upon this hint I spake,' though loth, 
 a sentence of emancipation in favor of that unconscious 
 captive roosting on the upper perch there, (still wide 
 awake, per Hercule! J my feathered knight, Sir Fre- 
 deric to whom esteem yourself as introduced. My 
 servant is infected with his master's prejudices, and 
 did the part of Liberator as lazily as would a more 
 reputed son of Fame, were his liberating efforts hono- 
 rary. And indeed my newly-born humanity was nearly 
 convulsed at the bird's embrace of Liberty, whom I had 
 not heart to hail then as ' the merry mountain-nymph ;' 
 for, independently of the favoritism induced by long 
 companionship, I had gloomy forebodings of a compul- 
 sory indolence and disenchanted solitude, if the ' fy tte*
 
 38 CHAPTER II. 
 
 caught from the Recreations of Christopher should 
 have four days' continuance. What matinal employ- 
 ment could I invent, as a substitute for the duty of 
 preparing sustenance for those devourers? That 
 same blithe bigot, Sir Fred, turns sullen and threatens 
 felo de se by starvation if any other hand than mine 
 presumes to meddle with his provision; and the 
 Queen Dowager near my honored grandsire's por- 
 trait even she does despite to a hallowed Name, by 
 signs of uiiamiable temper, if other than I prepare 
 her royal board. But away after long pausing and 
 beginning late away went Sir Frederic on his ' ad- 
 vent'rous flight,' to a shrub five yards distant from his 
 prison-house, whence, after a perplexing reconnoitre, 
 he adjourned to the ivy above the window here. We 
 saw no more of the knight till morning, and then he 
 was discovered en attendant on the window-ledge, in 
 a frame of feathers 
 
 ' That, in the various bustle of resort, 
 Were all too ruffled and somewhat impaired.' 
 
 A luckless boon was freedom to Sir Fred! The co- 
 lonists on the outside an envious Ishmaelitish 
 mobocracy! did most despitefully entreat and per- 
 secute the yellow-crested knight. But yet (you
 
 COLLOQUY I. 39 
 
 remember the philosophic chant of the Swan of 
 Avon) 
 
 ' There is some soul of goodness in things evil ;' 
 
 and the maladventures of my marred and maimed 
 minstrel over-ruled the ultra-liberalism of the North ; 
 enabled me with quiet conscience to retain my house- 
 hold company of melodists ; and did assuredly qualify 
 me, by patient watchings and successful healing, 
 for a physician's diploma in ornithological pharmacy. 
 Really I am bound to apologise for permitting a 
 mere canary-bird thus early and, perhaps, indeco- 
 rously to incite me to garrulity. But I have a 
 secret faith that I may, with you, assume the freedom 
 of a more prolonged intimacy. Read you ever the 
 Poet-Preacher (Taylor)'s Sermon on the Marriage- 
 Ring? No! Then, abstain from it if you would 
 avoid the state of wedlock! f No man,' says that 
 divine Divine, ' can tell, but he that loves his children, 
 how many delicious accents make a man's heart to 
 dance, in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges. 
 Their childishness, their little angers, their innocence, 
 their imperfections, their necessities, are so many 
 little emanations of joy and comfort to him that de- 
 lights in their persons and society.' Now I am a
 
 40 CHAPTER II, 
 
 doating old man, unwedded, and the birds you see 
 around me are some of my fondlings my adopted 
 children." 
 
 A tone of voice, soft, and touched with the gentlest 
 trill, (not dissimilar to that which, about nine years 
 ago, distinguished the Bishop of Winchester's,) and 
 the peculiar visual expression I have mentioned, gave 
 wondrous effect in speech to what may appear tame in 
 transcript. His eye! it was nearly tantamount to 
 another tongue, the mind's interpreter by an optical 
 language. And his voice, though not naturally pow- 
 erful, was capable of inflexions so nice and gifted with 
 intonations so musical, that, together, he spake and 
 looked an expiring subject into vivid life again: and, 
 making every object he alluded to, live in description, 
 there breathed from him, as he pleaded his concern 
 for his feathered family, such ineffable fondness, that 
 in the purity of his affection you admired it the more 
 for its simplicity, and felt the effect of its eloquence 
 to be a new estimation of canaries. 
 
 The sanctum in which he was seated, was sur- 
 rounded with book-shelves, fitted under, and forming 
 an additional support to, his progenitors on the canvas. 
 On one side of the apartment were arranged the 
 works of prose authors, the back of each serving as
 
 COLLOQUY I. 41 
 
 a remembrancer of reputation, either time-honored or 
 cotemporary : and the opposite compartment was filled 
 with the works of poets, chiefly British. A volume 
 of the Faery Queene, another of Racine, Chalmers' 
 Tron Church Sermons, and Les Oraisons Funebres de 
 Bossuet, were lying on the table. We discoursed for 
 a brief space upon current topics, and the circum- 
 stance of our rencontre. He told me of his peculi- 
 arities of taste and sentiment, " which are not either 
 peculiarities, I trust," said he, in summing them up, 
 " since my best hope is in Religion, my warmest aspi- 
 ration for my fellows' good, and my chief pleasure 
 in Poetry which is to Nature (which is all, save 
 GOD !) as the handmaid of a lovely regal maiden, who 
 indicates, and calls upon you to admire, the charms 
 of her sovereign mistress." 
 
 I availed myself of a momentary cessation to glance 
 at the books before him. " To use a phrase familiar 
 to you," said he, " I have been turning to each of these 
 works for a refresher. My memory, which I kept 
 tolerably ' schooled and exercised ' in youth, plays the 
 truant 'in mine age, now I am gray-headed;' and, 
 faithful from period to period, has not fidelity which 
 can abide a paragraph. A lady of my acquaintance 
 has made my cottage eloquent to-day with the praises
 
 42 CHAPTER II. 
 
 of Mile. Rachel: her name recalled the Hermione 
 of Racine's Andromaque, whom I heard and saw at the 
 Theatre Francais. The Englishman's World-painter, 
 glorious Will himself, and in his own language, often 
 dwindles into doggrel in attempting to jingle; but 
 the French tragedial rhyme is intolerable. What 
 sympathy can one feel for sentiment, that should move 
 with the majesty and ease of a monarch, stalking on 
 stilts, and rescued from a monotonous twang only 
 by manifest effort?" 
 
 (7. Little, indeed; though the first-class artistes 
 avoid with much dexterity the gulf which yawns at 
 the close of each couplet! This difficulty and, to 
 us, defect, displays in full-relief the scarecrow which 
 Milton designates ' the troublesome and modern 
 bondage of rhyming.' 
 
 E. True. You have seen Rachel then? 
 
 (7. I have, but not as Hermione. 
 
 E. She is the reigning deesse with our fickle 
 friends, whose fashion it is intensely to idolise, or 
 to dispatch, unaneled, au diable. Each line here 
 suggests Poetry in a palsy, and occupies nearly as 
 long in reading, as the birth, progression, and decay 
 of an affaire du cosur an amour eterncl in the Centre 
 of Civilisation. Nevertheless, here are lines which
 
 COLLOQUY I. 43 
 
 seem to rise from the page with the nerve of a 
 giant refreshed. Where shall we alight upon a 
 scene of conflict more fiery and impetuous than this, 
 where every little word on the tongue of a French 
 girl becomes a stiletto ! 
 
 " Ne vous sufiit-il pas que je 1'ai condamne? 
 Queje le hais; enftn, seigneur, queje I'aimai!" 
 
 Sorry justification enough for requiring Orestes to 
 add to his character of miserable that of murderer ; 
 but Rachel, once seen hurling this passion-poisoned 
 shaft, in fitful vengeance, at her unhappy suitor 
 he sighing like furnace can never be forgotten. It 
 is indelible as the recollection of a lightning-flash 
 which in youth may have blasted a human creature 
 on your right-hand, and swept by you scatheless 
 horrified but unhurt. I have never before recog- 
 nised so forcibly as now I do, in this reminiscence, 
 the strength of this sentence of Madame de Stael :* 
 " Tant d'individus traversent V existence, sans se douter 
 des passions et de leur force, que souvent le theatre 
 revele Vhomme a VJiomme, et lui inspire une sainte 
 terreur des or ages de Vdme" 
 
 C. An axiom whose base, alas ! appears to be un- 
 * Sur " La Declamation."
 
 44 CHAPTER II. 
 
 settling ! But you have, there, French eloquence of 
 another order a style which, partial as I am to poetry 
 in my proper tongue, claims pre-eminent admiration 
 in the Gallic. What an avalanche of the elements 
 of oratory, what facile flow of language, what graphic 
 delineation, what sonorous adjective-aid, what mel- 
 lifluous cadence, conspire, in presence of a lofty am- 
 bassador in things divine, to sink (pour le moment J 
 the terrestrial; to make " the merry-hearted sigh;" 
 and to win, from fair aspirants after bliss, the homage 
 of a fervent " C'ttait magnifique ! " on their return 
 from the mass to attire for the masquerade ! 
 
 E. Ay, the preacher's end and aim, conviction, 
 is, I fear, a fruit rarely found in profusion ; yet, as it 
 regards the discours, many an epic poem has been 
 pronounced from a French pulpit. That which Cole- 
 ridge is reported to have said of Taylor, that he 
 seldom wrote prosaically excepting in rhyme, applies 
 antithetically with equal justice to the more intel- 
 lectual of the priesthood of France their sermons are 
 Poetry, dismounted from the stalking-horse on which 
 it paces the stage. Here, for instance, in Bossuet's 
 Oraison Funebre de la Heine de la Grande-Bretagnc, 
 is an exordium of grandeur, worthy to be admired of 
 all men, and to sink into the hearts of princes : " Cehti
 
 COLLOQUY I. 45 
 
 qui regne dans les deux, et de qui relevent tous les 
 empires, d qui seul appartient la gloire, la majestt et 
 V independence, est aussi le seul qui se glorifie de faire 
 la loi aux rois, et de leur donner, quand il lui plait, de 
 grandes et de terribles lemons" And this " solemn 
 opening" precedes no " insignificant conclusion;" his 
 theme is at all points arrayed as befits its majesty, 
 and merits Collins's quaternity of epithets 
 
 " Warm, energic, chaste, sublime." 
 
 If an old man's company should induce you often 
 hither, we will scan more intently the legacy of this 
 holy Priest and of others of mighty Massillon! 
 Strange sovereignty of a Name, whose sound arouses 
 the soul's feelings from a long and deep repose, sud- 
 denly as a tired host might start from slumber at the 
 thrilling note of peril! Memory, at the name of 
 MASSILLON, unrols a picture wrought in colors weird 
 as the gate of Death in lines wildly terrible as the 
 vision of Belshazzar's Feast, or, more fearful still, the 
 Deluge, with its multitude in all the horror of mad- 
 ness but without its unconsciousness urging their 
 gasping flight from the gorge of the on-rolling, in- 
 exorable wave. He portrays, as present, the END; 
 and the dense assembly, with its many phases of cha- 
 
 D 2
 
 46 CHAPTER II. 
 
 racter, are bowed, as might have been one contrite 
 Sodomite of old, conscious of his city's coming doom, 
 and adding his importunity to that marvellous human 
 Plea which strove with the Wrath of GOD. But hear 
 the Predicateur : " Je suppose quo ce soit ici notre 
 derniere heure a tous: que les cieux vont s'ouvrir 
 sur nos tetes ; que le temps est passe et que 1'eternite 
 commence; que Jesus Christ va paraitre pour nous 
 juger selon nos ceuvres, et que nous sommes tous ici 
 pour attendre de lui 1'arret de la vie ou de la mort 
 eternelle! Je vous le demandc frappe de terreur 
 comme vous, ne separant point mon sort du votre, et 
 me mettant dans la meme situation ou nous devons 
 tous paraitre un jour devant Dieu notre Juge; si 
 Jesus Christ, dis-je, paraissait des a present pour 
 faire la terrible separation des justes et des pecheurs, 
 croyez-vous que le plus grand nombre fut sauve? 
 Croyez-vous que le nombre des justes fut au moins 
 egal a celui des pecheurs? Croyez-vous que, s'il 
 fesait maintenant la discussion des oeuvres du grand 
 nombre qui est dans cette e*glise, il trouvat seulement 
 dix justes parmi nous? En trouvcrat-il un seul?" 
 They tell us that his words ran like a chilly winter- 
 stream through his hearers' veins; and even when 
 you read them you feel an involuntary shudder, and
 
 COLLOQUY I. 47 
 
 almost seem to fluctuate on the brink of that dread 
 abyss, over whose despair etherial Hope for a moment 
 folds her wings. And yet this Massillon, whose 
 every stroke in this picture of awe serves, but sus- 
 pends, the climax, till the concentration of all ima- 
 ginable calamity is before you ; this Massillon, who 
 seizes upon and sways the mind like a despot, and 
 urges it through gradations of increasing tumult into 
 a mental Reign of Terror ; this strife-creating Spirit 
 has a voice placid as the smile of Peace a power to 
 dissipate the dark clouds which he has made to lower 
 over a near and drear Futurity; to curtain-up that 
 chasm of Despair whose influence worked like palsy 
 on the wing of Hope ; and by vivid colorings of the 
 heritage still accessible to the faithful, to re-invigorate 
 the daunted pinion, till it speeds exultingly and of right 
 to an altitude above the stars. Through the lurid 
 haze of Awe you pass on to the bright heaven of Per- 
 fect Love; and see again your lost birthright of 
 beatitude, and. feel your property in the Infinite. 
 
 C. The forte of French preachers, as far as I 
 have observed, consists mainly in description and in 
 declamation ; and the predominancy of the latter may 
 perhaps account for the unsatisfying results of their 
 ministry : the Voice that should penetrate the heart,
 
 48 CHAPTER II. 
 
 too often plays but on the ear as a pleasant cymbal. 
 I shrink from the presumption of giving judgment 
 on the French as a people; but La Gaitt is their 
 Diana, and they have not resolution to abstract them- 
 selves from the worship of the idol, and to sit down 
 in silent solitude, and be thoughtful. How great a 
 contrast to the general style of the French divines is 
 presented by the Scottish Chalmers, who descrip- 
 tive in an eminent degree is irresistible in argument. 
 E. Perhaps by Southrons the eloquent Scot is 
 better read than heard. But he arrests the proud 
 host of Prejudice, which are apt to rise now in man 
 as they have ever risen since the Great Rebellion in 
 the year of the world 1, they recede, I say, before 
 this Legate of Truth, like the waves of an ebbing 
 tide. Would you enter the lists of controversy with 
 him, you are sensible of the impotency of a stripling, 
 in the iron grasp of a gladiator. Demonstration is the 
 term he chooses for his theological motto, and he has 
 a right to it. Read at your leisure (if it is a sermon 
 yet unread,) this seventh of the Tron Church dis- 
 courses, and if you discover a loop-hole, admitting 
 the escape of any single character from the respon- 
 sibility of a searching self-investigation, then I will 
 consider your ingenuity stimulated by aid obnoxiously
 
 COLLOQUY I. 49 
 
 superhuman. On the arguments of Chalmers, as on 
 a broad and buoyant tide, Truth stems contending 
 elements triumphantly as did the Ark the inundating 
 waters. Hear an old divine analogising thereupon : 
 " "When the waters of the flood came upon the face 
 of the earth, down went stately turrets and towers. 
 In like sort, when the waters of affliction arise, down 
 go the pride of life, the lust of the eyes, in a word, 
 all the vanities of the world. But the ark of the soul 
 riseth as these waters rise, and how too ? even nearer 
 and nearer unto heaven."* Those old men speak, do 
 they not? with admirable simplicity, and shape out a 
 moving picture almost in monosyllables. Is the 
 primitive mantle rejected from Dan even unto Beer- 
 sheba? is the spirit of the fathers' style " interred 
 with their bones?" 
 
 C. Ah ! the moan, not unmelodious, of discontent 
 with things present, the sigh for past perfections, 
 echoed from the Poet there ; not captiously, but with 
 the tone of complaint natural to moralists with whom 
 
 " was rapture once what is but memory now." 
 
 E. Complaint! and caught from Edmund Spenser! 
 At what infectious spot? 
 
 * Disce Mori. Sutton.
 
 50 CHAPTER II. 
 
 C. From this most " musical and melancholy 
 chime/' it may be 
 
 " So oft as I with state of present time 
 The image of the antique world compare, 
 Whenas man's age was in his freshest prime, 
 And the first blossom of faire vertue bare 
 Such oddes I find 'twixt those, and these which are, 
 As that, through long continuance of his course, 
 Meseemes the world is run quite out of square 
 From the first point of his appointed sourse ; 
 And being once amisse grows daily wourse and wourse." 
 
 E. Upbraid not the Poet for repining at the ills 
 of eld for " grief, which is but grandeur in disguise" 
 for such, and only such degree of discontent with 
 Earth, as stirs him to the lofty enterprise of a New 
 World: a sphere whose lustrous outline the piercing 
 eye of the Poet by Piety directed may have traced, 
 obscurely perhaps, but with sufficient distinctness to 
 animate his hope of inheritancy, and sanctify with 
 pure religious fervor his longing for 
 
 " that same time when no more change shall be, 
 But steadfast reste of all things, firmly stayd 
 Upon the pillars of Eternitie, 
 Which is contraire to mutabilitie: 
 For all that moveth doth in change delight, 
 But thenceforth all shall reste eternallie 
 With him that is the God of Sabaoth highte. 
 O that great Sabaoth God, grant me that sabbath's sighte!"
 
 COLLOQUY I. 51 
 
 C. Impressive as Luther's Hymn, heard in 
 Westminster Abbey! 
 
 E. Nay, Poetry, of however sublime a birth, 
 can never be so effective alone as when wedded to 
 Music, and then in the celestial alliance Poetry is the 
 weaker vessel. For among all the instruments to our 
 delight, there is not one so potent (during its fugitive 
 control) or so mysterious as Music. The hind, moulded 
 from the clod and almost as senseless, acknowledges 
 its irresistible might, as it undulates on his drowsy 
 ear, rousing, and charming, and holding captive; 
 while on finer-fibred spirits does it not operate like a 
 breaking-up within the bosom of " the fountains of the 
 great deep !" But its mystery is a nobler and an en- 
 nobling theme a theme which is not of the earth, 
 earthy, but which has to do with the imagination, 
 detaching its wing from a low brooding over material 
 things, and urging it to soar into that vast Realm of 
 Anticipation, to which, as the heirs of infinite promise 
 and the creatures of infinite hope, we have hereditary 
 right. And making us to marvel, that if such vivi- 
 fying influence belongs to the concord of human 
 creation, what ecstasy shall be ours amid the minstrelsy 
 divine sounding from the harps of angels, in spheres 
 whose secret preparations for his bliss the ear of man 
 hath not heard nor can hear !
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 E. was so borne away by the impetuosity of feeling 
 excited by his subject, in which his whole being ap- 
 peared to be absorbed, that, as he came to a close, his 
 faculty of enunciation was impeded, and he rested 
 his head upon his hand for a minute. The efferves- 
 cence had worked away during that interval, and he 
 resumed, his countenance the visible seat of gentle- 
 heartedness, and his voice " soft as the west wind's 
 sigh."- 
 
 " Though I spake with the tongues of men and 
 angels," I should fail to depict faithfully the dominion 
 which this celestial Captivator possesses over me. 
 And attributing to it as I do not the powers of tra- 
 ditionary miracle, but yet a mighty power to modify 
 the harshness of humanity, and cause many a tract in 
 the waste wilderness to blossom as the rose, I pant 
 for the promulgation from high quarters of a well- 
 advised system of instruction. Next to Holy Truth 
 itself, which the Spanish proverb majestically desig- 
 nates as the Daughter of GOD 
 
 " La verdad es hija de Dios" 
 
 next to Truth, I venerate its shrine next to the 
 priceless Pearl, I am anxious for the Ark which bears 
 it through the troublous sea of Time : and with the
 
 COLLOQUY I. 53 
 
 impression I have of the ameliorating, spiritualising 
 influence of an extension of the empire of Music, 
 I would that the solemnly-affianced sons of the Mother 
 of my Faith the English Church were energetic 
 in its promotion. Her temples do not yet resound 
 with holy song the vernacular language of Gratitude, 
 and the temperature of the frigid zone prevails at 
 the gate of heaven. For in praise it is that the 
 mighty power of harmony subserves its most majestic 
 purpose: attuned in homage of Him before whom 
 so many worlds move in order and " give out music 
 as they go," it is but the reverberation, as it were, of 
 the inaudible but not invisible concord that pervades 
 the universe; the sacrifice of accordant sound to its 
 refulgent Soul and Source ! 
 
 C. The poet Wordsworth, referring to the sud- 
 den and spreading rise of new churches, describes 
 the time as conscious of its ivant. In regard to the 
 energy, the absence or paralysation of which in our 
 services you bewail, this consciousness of a privilege, 
 in many places inadequately appreciated, and in some 
 (excepting in form) passed into desuetude, approves 
 itself to be reviving, and in the symptoms of resusci- 
 tation which it exhibits, gives us grateful 
 
 " help, when we would weave 
 A crown for Hope."
 
 54 CHAPTER II. 
 
 E. The wedding-chime for an only child could 
 not more sadden me in its first effect or more gladden 
 me in its second, than that past stifling and present 
 unshackling of the spirit of reverential song. And 
 depend on it our Church will experience a mighty 
 strengthening of her sinews in nourishing this breath 
 of song. For her symmetry and fair proportions, 
 " long concealed, concealed and cherished long," are 
 developing largely now before children capable of the 
 only invulnerable allegiance an intelligent one. Day 
 by day our Fathers' Faith has fewer champions on the 
 sole score of its having been the Faith of our Fathers 
 though that challenge hath a magic charm over 
 many hearts; but daily are augmenting its puissant 
 defenders, whose consciences have weighed its tenets 
 and found them not wanting. And thus the attach- 
 ment of our time is combining the deep veneration 
 of the soul with the warm affection of the heart. 
 You have alluded to the " joyful haste" with which 
 ascending spires and the sound of " the church-going 
 bell" are gladdening the land, fertilising its length 
 and breadth. 'Tis the sovereign'st characteristic of 
 the age ! The Proposer of Fifty new Churches in a 
 single city, will need no elaborate epitaph to invite 
 the praises of posterity.
 
 COLLOQUY I. OO 
 
 The timepiece sounded reprovingly, and I arose to 
 leave, taking a slight liberty with Spenser 
 
 " Ere long the northerne waggoner will set 
 His sevenfold tearae behind the stedfast starre." 
 
 E. Ah! Alma Mater has seduced us from the 
 Faery Queene ! yet, soft as a melody of love murmuring 
 in the heart's core is the Requiem of Reason, Fancy, 
 Imagination, at thought or sight or sound of Name 
 of GENTLE EDMUND SPENSER ! Name sculptured in 
 memory deeper than in marble, and wreathed with 
 faery flowers, lowly as though warmed into being 
 by the starlight in keeping with the Poet's predomi- 
 nating traits. You seldom meet with Edmund in a 
 storm, or behold his eye " in a fine frenzy rolling;" 
 but he conducts you on a calmly-flowing tide, over 
 waters whose little heavings and undulations are lit by 
 moonbeams, to a garden which you know has golden 
 fruit, for now and then you see it; but the greater 
 part of its produce is netted sometimes very thickly 
 netted. And now, if you persist in going, " A Dieu /" 
 in serious significancy. But harkye ! never reproach 
 gentle Edmund again, unless for this and then 
 hushed as a spirit's voice, for he confesses the foible 
 that " the whole intention of his conceit is too clowdily 
 enwrapped in allegorical devises."* 
 * Letter to Raleigh.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 
 
 " I cannot mend it, I must needs confess, 
 And do remain as neuter." YORK, in RICH. ix. 
 
 THREE days had elapsed since the interview which 
 closed with the last chapter, and in company with 
 applications for professional " opinions from all sorts 
 of people," Rowland Hill's emissary for the district 
 in which my chambers were situate, deposited therein 
 on the morning of the fourth day, the original of the 
 following : 
 
 " Ivy Lodge, 9th Ap. 41. 
 
 " Did my parting salutation on Monday night in- 
 clude an ' Au revoir ? ' My reminiscent faculties 
 resolved into a committee of inquiry betimes this
 
 60 CHAPTER III. 
 
 morning, and the result is present pyrrhonism. Once 
 for all, prithee cause the * deep umbrage' of my 
 locale to prate of your whereabouts whensoever you 
 will, and consider the old man here as your friend. 
 I seldom remember to invite; make therefore this 
 injunction a standing one, like the whoop of " He- 
 reditary Bondsmen ! " 
 
 " Your apprehension concerning the expediency of 
 refixing the kalends to suit the disordered state of the 
 months, may soothe itself in contemplating April, true 
 to its ancient reputation of Inconstant, and not unlike 
 a fair form torn by epilepsy. What a fit the poor 
 month suffered on Friday ! Would the Meteorological 
 Society accept my theory of the frequent sulkiness 
 of Friday? a crude allegory upon practices in the 
 Commons' House ; to wit, that an elemental opposition 
 goes on against the Tory Premier, Sol, on Fridays, 
 and that the fine old fellow is sometimes overpowered 
 for a brief space by an incongruous coalition, lashed 
 into turmoil by a most obstreperous tail. 
 
 " But he has recovered the mastery; and if any 
 stormy malcontent, in the guise of a cloud, presumes 
 to rise in his presence, and to cough or expectorate, 
 the gorgeous Minister radiates the splenetic effusion 
 with prismatic colors. The profound in these matters
 
 CHAPTER III. 61 
 
 affirm that we severally sustain an immense pressure 
 of atmospheric air I forget if it be hundreds-weight 
 or tons per square inch of shoulder. How is it that 
 no philanthropic senator, casting a lynx-eye on the 
 fardels which affect the masses, has entered his pro- 
 test against this grievous oppression. Is it not enough 
 to be taxed for light! are we also to be burdened 
 by air? Will no indignant son of Erin pray for a 
 rippale of this union, or move, that the Phaeton of 
 the cabinet do take a diplomatic drive up to Phoebus, 
 and entreat for terms less onerous. 
 
 " Well, with all this ponderosity without, I can 
 still sing (alas! 
 
 ' Omnia Tempus edax carpit omnia sede movet!' 
 
 Momentarily oblivious of dental deficiencies, I re- 
 member that I can only say) Je suis content! 'Tis 
 happy for us that these poor barks our bodies 
 laden, as sage men at St. Stephen's assure us, heavier 
 than barges, are constructed on and conceal a buoyant 
 principle ! By the throttle (regarded as a channel of 
 song, the marvellous throttle) of Sir Fred! so many 
 things above, around, beneath have been to-day 
 in compact alliance with that unreasoning lassie Joy, 
 (espied awhile ago from Rydal, under guidance of a 
 
 X 2
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 sunbeam, the lax rover !) that the weather-beaten bark 
 whose anchorage is superscribed, has metaphorically 
 nathless its heavy freight of wrongs been dancing 
 like a very skiff on summer -breeze-delighted billows. 
 " You may think me here, alone, ivied-in, kinless, 
 kithless, an old man to be pitied. Spare your com- 
 passion ! Even were all my plumed pets under dis- 
 cussion among worms, I have a petticoated pet who 
 humours and enraptures me and there is exquisite 
 joy in loving her. I became part-proprietor of the 
 darling at her baptism, nineteen years ago, and have 
 given her more attention than was stipulated in the 
 bond. Dutiful in much, the hussy has her conceits, 
 ' gives proof,' as old John Harrington observes, 
 ' of woman's ways;' and as to poetry, though she 
 doesn't dispute openly the supremacy of King Will, 
 her allegiance is undermined by the pathos of Queen 
 Felicia and the charms of divers others of that line 
 of queens." 
 
 A few days afterwards, towards evening, I turned 
 my back upon the smoke and stir of Town, and re- 
 visited E. The morning had been marked by the 
 " uncertain glory" peculiar to the month; but the 
 afternoon was altogether lovely, and the sun set with
 
 CHAPTER III. 63 
 
 unusual splendour. E. was intently watching its 
 parting rays when I entered, and had no sooner pro- 
 nounced my welcome than he inquired if I had 
 witnessed the transcendent lustre of the sun's decline. 
 
 A disquisition rather than a colloquy followed my 
 reply; for, happening to incorporate with it a sen- 
 timent of Wordsworth, the old man remarked that 
 he had omitted at our previous interview to ascertain 
 definitively my opinion of this Poet, whose especial 
 lot it was he went on to observe neither to be 
 approved or discommended in moderation ,- but who 
 was esteemed by the enthusiastic of one class as an 
 angel of light, and regarded by the inveterate of 
 another class as a " despised and broken idol." 
 
 E. had tacitly and rightly accredited for admiration 
 the frequent loans I had levied on the thoughts and 
 expressions of Wordsworth, and avowed himself also 
 in the foremost rank of the poet's admirers. He ex- 
 pressed the sadness, not unpleasing, with which the 
 contemplation of the departing sun had filled him 
 a state of feeling aided by solemn reflections suggested 
 by the thoughtful Poet; and alluded to a severe 
 critique upon his works, which he had recently read, 
 indignant with its ill-concealed malevolence; advert- 
 ing, with no profusion of compliment, to that portion
 
 64 CHAPTER III. 
 
 of the community of critics who are wont to indite an 
 author's penal settlement with ink of an uncommonly 
 acidulated quality. 
 
 E. " The grand affair," says Rousseau, " is, to 
 think differently /" and the conception which, in the 
 pomp and circumstance of publication, issues from 
 one mind, is often a signal for the conflict of many; 
 so that the dulcet-strain of the few, fitted by education, 
 judgment, and reflection, to be Rulers and Guides 
 of Opinion, is drowned in the penny-trumpet din 
 of the canaille; for as wisdom is proverbially diffident 
 and frequently reserved, so is folly as proverbially 
 dogmatic and as generally loud. It is the deep river 
 that flows in silence the shallow in commotion : and 
 so of minds; the superficial are contentious the 
 sterling, composed. It is unchristian to detest, but 
 to the hyper-critic the extremity of my dislike verges 
 on detestation ; and when I encounter the profound 
 absurdities of such commentators, I ask with Burns 
 (and perhaps with more impatience than beseems the 
 sere leaf) 
 
 " If honest Nature made you fools, 
 What sairs your grammars?" 
 
 Why should my Isle of Palms be made desolate as
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 65 
 
 a City of the Dead, by the coloring of cynicism or of 
 pragmatic stupidity? Is the living landscape, in 
 which there may perchance be here a stunted tree 
 and there an unseemly hovel scarcely-seen unsight- 
 liness which leaves the wtiole lovely, are all the fair 
 hues of its glory to be discolored before my gaze, 
 because another, whose happiness is not nourished at 
 the same fount with mine, has looked upon this pic- 
 ture with a jaundiced eye? Such an one may make 
 a survey, if he pleases ; but it is not desirable that he 
 should report it unless, indeed, to cheapen paper 
 for the chandler. 
 
 C. How multitudinous and motley a host have 
 levelled insult, contempt, and coarse abuse, at Words- 
 worth his design and its achievement! 
 
 E. Pardon me, the design of Wordsworth is yet 
 far from its achievement. Other poets have left us 
 much to learn, but Wordsworth more than any; and 
 the age will be millennial in its character, which 
 realises the beau ideal of this Poet. It might not 
 suit the temper of the present house of commons to 
 create a poetic episcopacy, but in the event of such a 
 measure the archbishopric should be named from Rydal 
 Mount ; and if I smile at the idea, I say it not irreve- 
 rently ; for the philanthropic aim of Wordsworth has
 
 66 CHAPTER III. 
 
 been to purify the avenues of the cotter's mind, and 
 render it accessible to a new and noble enjoyment; 
 in few words, to correct the waywardness and wil- 
 fulness of humanity by a pleasant " medicine of 
 cherries."* He who kindles gratitude upon the altar 
 of the heart, though he possess not the credentials 
 of a priest, has performed an important part of the 
 priest's office; and if Wordsworth but succeeds in 
 illuming a spot " wildered else and dark," he sustains 
 the hallowed joy by constant annunciation of 
 
 " the cheerful faith, 
 That all which we behold is full of BLESSINGS." 
 
 I touch with reverence, profound as Cowper's, the 
 pulpit: but in what terms by what representation 
 can man be more effectually exhorted, than by this 
 belief, to habitual thankfulness? a feeling which 
 should ascend, like perpetual incense, before that 
 " Parent of good," who " openeth His hand and filleth 
 all things living with plenteousness." 
 
 <7. And yet the Propounder of this Poetic Faith 
 above all others salutary, has been above all others of 
 his order, a mark for the violence of " envy, hatred, 
 malice, and all uncharitableness." 
 
 * Sir Philip Sidney.
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 67 
 
 E. Provoked, not perhaps so much by the doc- 
 trine as by its occasional development. But the lion 
 may be stung by gnats, and the stately vessel be re- 
 tarded by remorae. The " mild Apostate from poetic 
 rule" was not, happily, irritated by petty persecution 
 into the scornful silence of misanthropy, and left not 
 the argosy, freighted with the principles of his new 
 faith, to sink, because of the animalcules that clung to 
 its keel. When Wordsworth arose, to announce his 
 creed and expound its peculiarities, a thousand arrows 
 were launched at his devoted head 5 among them, 
 but not of them, were canons of fearful fulmination 
 literary ordnance of heavy caliber which boomed 
 like a knell of annihilation upon the ear of the 
 period (for each era has its idiosyncratic eye and ear), 
 and to Wordsworth then might have been not inap- 
 propriately applied a line from Prior* 
 
 " Lord of his new hypothesis he reigns! " 
 The Poet, in his hours of weariness and persecution, 
 must, however, have found solace and invigoration in 
 an axiom which he has couched in the beauty and 
 power of truth: 
 
 " Every gift of noble origin 
 Is breathed upon by HOPE'S perpetual breath: 
 
 * Ode on Exodus iii. 14.
 
 68 CHAPTER III. 
 
 and surely the prime lineaments of the Poet's aim 
 bear the stamp of nobility, and approve themselves 
 
 " Majestic in their own simplicity." 
 
 I do not, of course, intend the term " simplicity" to 
 apply to those indeterminable hypotheses of a pre- 
 vious state of existence, of which Wordsworth is so 
 eloquently credulous. That 
 
 " The soul which rises with us, our life's Star, 
 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar," 
 
 is a theory which may dominate in the imagination, 
 and glow on the Poet's page, as it does in the Ode* 
 from which I have quoted; but it is conjectural, and 
 must remain so as long as the immortal part of the 
 mysterious compound, man, is girdled by mortality. 
 
 If I mistake not, it was Seneca who said, that the 
 most miserable object which could be conceived, was 
 an old man who would be young again. I had been 
 young and was old, when first I imbibed with an 
 appetite the spirit of Wordsworth ; but I remember 
 well there ran along with my blood as it were, a 
 rivulet of rapture, at the visible embodiment in lan- 
 guage, of innumerable phantoms wherewith I had 
 
 * Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood.
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 69 
 
 been haunted ; and then, reflecting how comparatively 
 torpid were my sensations to what they would have 
 been in an earlier day, then, for the first and last 
 time in my life, I felt that I would renew my youth, 
 were its renewal in my power. For the doctrines 
 of this Poet require to be woven with the primary 
 principles of our moral and intellectual being, and to 
 grow with our growth; they are but grafted on the 
 man; and the elements of age, although in casual 
 instances ardent and predisposed, cannot retain the 
 plasticity of youth : and indeed, the susceptibility to 
 impression which lends a charm to the spring-time 
 of life, would imply instability and be considered as 
 indiscretion in the man of maturer years. But even 
 now, when the " wild ecstasies" of former days are 
 stilled into sober pleasure, there are no gradus ad 
 Parnassum that I tread with a happier or more 
 improved spirit than those shapen by the Poet 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 E. paused an instant to respire, and resumed with 
 a livelier air and less soliloquisingly 
 
 Wordsworth is eminently the Oracle of Nature. 
 He has tuned his lyre at various founts, and many 
 of his less legitimate notes are cherished among the 
 " sweet sounds and harmonies" which have their home
 
 70 CHAPTER III. 
 
 in memory; but when he stands by the side of a 
 murmuring stream, in fair field, or flowery dell, 
 intent on the portraiture of unheeded loveliness, on 
 redeeming the scene in which he stands, like isolated 
 minstrel, from the reputation of a voiceless solitude, 
 and on quickening in all things a spiritual intelligence ; 
 then the Poet appears overwhelmed with " a sense 
 sublime," and his harp-strings seem wrought of the 
 fibres of our very being. He guides the admiring 
 eye over the many-featured face of Nature, with a 
 rod of enchantment, whose property it is to invest 
 with grace and gladness every object to which it 
 points; and there is not a single exiled feature but 
 he rescues it from demerit, and does so endow it 
 with charms, that you are led captive to the con- 
 fession of a 
 
 " glory in the grass and splendor in the flower." 
 
 And, turning from Nature herself, how touchingly 
 does he depict the child, and youth, and man, as 
 swayed unconsciously by the Influence above us and 
 around, to the intelligent observance of which, man- 
 kind in thousands are deadened, by custom " heavy 
 as frost." Here is a cast, not from the lineaments but 
 from the characteristics of the child: refer me, in the
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 71 
 
 entire range of poetic delineation, to a happier illus- 
 tration of boyhood and girlhood the natural im- 
 petuosity of the one, the sweet timidity and tenderness 
 of the other: 
 
 " Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days, 
 
 The time when, in our childish plays, 
 
 My sister Emmeline and I 
 
 Together chased the Butterfly, 
 
 A very hunter would I rush 
 
 Upon the prey with leaps and springs 
 
 I followed on o'er brake and bush, 
 
 While she GOD love her! feared to brush 
 
 The dust from off its wings!" 
 
 Call nothing henceforth common; Wordsworth has 
 power to make a child's involuntary gesture poetical, 
 and to extract something tangible and to look at from 
 an urchin's sigh. 
 
 Then, too, he has a singular art in sinister strokes. 
 We are familiar with the apothegm, that " Vice, to 
 be hated, needs but to be seen ;" but you would not 
 for a moment think of imputing flagrancy to a bag- 
 man, because he passed a buttercup without halting 
 to do it homage ; yet recite, with ordinarily-becoming 
 emphasis, the following triplet, and Peter Bell the 
 Potter becomes positively an atrocious character, for
 
 72 CHAPTER III. 
 
 regarding a field-flower in no other light than that 
 of a field-flower ! 
 
 " A primrose by a river's brim 
 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 
 And it was nothing more!" 
 
 From the beginning, in every age, the heaven- 
 instructed Poet has recognised in the made a sha- 
 dowing forth of the attributes of the Maker, and, if 
 devout, has caused this discernment of the Deity to 
 redound to His praise. It is the Poet's function 
 and how august a function! to rend from the 
 aspect of Nature the dense veil of indifference thrown 
 over it by habitual unconcerned intercourse, and, in 
 the winning accents of " sweetly-uttered knowledge,"* 
 to rouse the listless creature to wakefulness, thence 
 on to interested watchfulness of the Creator's opera- 
 tions; to convince him that the garniture of earth 
 and its star and sun-emblazoned canopy are not un- 
 meaning display inexpressive adornment but to 
 the observant eye are all replete with a sublime sig- 
 nificance: that the humblest object which can attract 
 his gaze, though seemingly inanimate or inert, is yet 
 an instrument of design in the laboratory of the Lord 
 
 * Sidney.
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 73 
 
 of all. And tracing in all things an impress divine, 
 and accepting as co-infinite with His power the wis- 
 dom of the Almighty Mechanist, it is an essential part 
 of the Poet's faith that nothing has been created vainly, 
 but that each minute object is the component of a 
 stupendous whole, and subserves in its vocation the 
 inscrutable purposes of Omniscience. And this ex- 
 alting doctrine has been, I repeat, the Poet's argument 
 from the beginning: faithful to this great First 
 Article of a Poet's Belief, the muse of Chaucer thus 
 attests his credence in the early lispings of our mother- 
 tongue : 
 
 " Eternalle God that through thy purveyauncc, 
 Ledist the worlde by certaine governaunce, 
 In idle, as men saine, ye nothing make." 
 
 Would not the time fail me to recount by name 
 the illustrious succession of Defenders of this Faith? 
 and have they not each minstrel in his ministry 
 received a special gift? all, save Two of an unbounded 
 realm Wanderers by every of the thousand rills 
 which flow " from Helicon's harmonious springs." 
 Yes, to each, in his demonstration of the divinity 
 perceptible in man's daily walk, has been allotted his 
 individual province ; and in his own peculiar empire
 
 74 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Wordsworth stands pre-eminent. For him it is not 
 enough that the silent wood be invested with ca- 
 thedral solemnity and grandeur; he creates a priest- 
 hood by the wayside. He will not that our path 
 through the Desert to the Garden be coldly allowed 
 to possess occasional attractiveness; he clears a film 
 from the traveller's eye, and his pilgrimage becomes 
 not pleasurable only, but enchanting. It suffices him 
 not simply to describe the earth's glory he dissects 
 it; and beneath the soft enamel of this lowly flower, 
 he will trace its vivid veins and arteries, and will 
 impress you with so acute a sense of its life, that 
 thenceforth you feel it would be inhumanity to crush, 
 with careless foot, the " active principle" in form so 
 sensitive and lovely. He will not that you look upon 
 the tree, to admire its outline only, or even that you 
 gather an abstract morality from its foliage, now fair, 
 now withering; he claims for it an eloquence more 
 subtile he insists that its leaves are legible. He re- 
 presents all things, in heaven above and on the earth 
 beneath, as ministering to man's faith and hope ; and 
 would amalgamate all the heart's affections in one 
 predominating passion of charity one grand, ab- 
 sorbing frate'r-feeling, whose flow of love should be 
 ceaseless as the mercies of GOD!
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 75 
 
 When Death, shall have lent his consecration to the 
 Name of Wordsworth, and many shall " call him 
 noble" who had been their reproach, this cannot but 
 be told emphatically to his posthumous praise that, 
 moved mightily by " high objects," it was yet the 
 labor of his best energy to make conspicuous dis- 
 regarded things, and clothe in loveliness, dishonored. 
 Maintaining ever the ubiquitous existence of that 
 
 " Vast chain of being, which from God began," 
 
 it has characterised the world's minstrelsy to laud, with 
 comparative exclusiveness, the Magnificent among 
 created things the Captivating among the graces and 
 attributes of mankind ; to descant on themes whereof 
 he who spake in gifted language might rely on rapt 
 listeners. For bowed by ever so weighty a bondage 
 to Darkness or to Degradation, in humankind un- 
 quenchable but with the master-flame of life is an 
 instinctive veneration for the Great and the Glorious 
 not invariably, alas! for the Good. Thus in the 
 celebration of objects or qualities which had already 
 a latent fascination for the mind, the Celebrator had 
 no war to wage with prepossessions, by opposition 
 soon roused into passions, nor with antipathies that 
 cling with greater tenacity at provocation. But the
 
 76 CHAPTER III. 
 
 task of Wordsworth was facilitated by few and feeble 
 latent consonancies of sentiment between the Bard 
 and his auditory zwattentive though few. Leaving, 
 in the " vast chain of being," those links of ineffable 
 refulgency or of majestic mould, about which it hardly 
 needed that a Poet should stand to proclaim the 
 manifest achievement of a GOD he, the far-seeing 
 and laborious, must clear from the corrosion of long 
 neglect, or the injuries of cursory investigation, such 
 dim, obscure links as should, when lucidly developed, 
 display the elaborate handiwork of the Perfect One, 
 and to the earnest eye of adoration disclose new and 
 innumerable evidences of the beauty and harmony of 
 creative skill. Confessedly imposing the enterprise, 
 that clearance of the line of life from its Eternal 
 Source, through earth, and sea, and " sunny air, 
 
 " To stop no record hath told where !" 
 
 And very pleasant is it to contemplate the meek 
 attitude of the Man in his absorbing and patient, 
 noble but long-unapplauded work : now, indeed, may 
 they who hallow his genius in their heart of hearts, 
 rejoice in this, his exultation, that by a " vision and 
 a faculty divine" he has discerned and given effective 
 prominency to many, many links, aforetime " remote
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 77 
 
 from observation," parts of that far-reaching chain 
 which extends " through all the worlds;" and by the 
 contagious virtue of a gifted intellect has stimulated 
 the soul's desire to " commune with the glorious Uni- 
 verse," and prepared it for a participation in all 
 ecstatic, and reverential, and ennobling sensations. 
 
 If Shakspeare, in a signification comprehending his 
 intuitive familiarity both with man and the scene in 
 which he moves, has been styled Nature's " darling," * 
 to Wordsworth (in an especial scenic signification,) 
 may be applied the title, by himself suggested, (not 
 to himself appropriated,) of Nature's foster-child; 
 and undoubtedly his master-strokes are drawn when 
 clinging closest to the Mother's breast. Then in the 
 vast Temple wherein he worships, not a niche but 
 has its property of inspiration; taught as from be- 
 yond its " dome of sky, how beautiful ! " then through 
 flori-tessellated aisles and the wood's green cloisters 
 
 " the rich stream of nmsic winds along, 
 Deep, majestic, clear, and strong:" 
 
 yet, as I just now remarked, the Poet's lyre is some- 
 times tuned to a key, perhaps less legitimate, though 
 scarcely less euphonious, producing strains which 
 
 * Progress of Poesy. 
 
 F 2
 
 78 CHAPTER III. 
 
 pass at once to the treasury of Music within us, and 
 are numbered with its most welcome augmentations. 
 I have no intention to particularise that prized mis- 
 cellany ; but lest I " talk you dead" or into dormancy, 
 I will refresh you by the recital of a solitary and brief 
 constituent: on the tympanum of an ear charmed, 
 as is yours, by the "Wordsworthian chant, the strain 
 I am about to re-echo has the rousing power of a 
 trumpet on a war-horse; and say, by whom has 
 Indignant Patriotism more vernacularly spoken? A 
 high-caste Spaniard, you will remember, is contem- 
 plating the overtures made by Napoleon : 
 
 " We can endure that he should waste our lands, 
 Despoil our temples, and, by sword and flame, 
 Return us to the dust from which we came ; 
 Such food a tyrant's appetite demands: 
 And we can brook the thought, that by his hands 
 Spain may be overpowered, and he possess 
 For his delight, a solemn wilderness 
 Where all the Brave lie dead. But when of bands 
 Which he will break for us he dares to speak, 
 Of benefits, and of a future day 
 When our enlightened minds shall bless his sway 
 Then the strained heart of fortitude proves weak! 
 Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare 
 That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear." 
 
 It is delightful to recall the beauties of Words- 
 worth, to the severe be left the banquet furnished
 
 AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 79 
 
 by his defects. The age is not yet prepared to ap- 
 preciate the Poet in his fulness; and our hopes for 
 the ultimate universality of his faith, repose, with all 
 our other hopes, in the Future. He has left to his 
 kind a telescope, which does not create, but which 
 discloses the created and existing; which charms 
 both the eye and the mind; to the one, revealing and 
 expanding forms of beauty ; to the other, unfolding 
 the expressive ccconomy of a myriad of things super- 
 ficially accounted as insensate : acquisitions that, like 
 the forbidden fruit in Eden, but without its penal 
 contingency, are to the eye, pleasant; by the mind, 
 to be desired to make one wise. But the eye the 
 eye of the period requires sublimation ; " this muddy 
 vesture of decay" doth yet too grossly close in its 
 visual faculty. Man and Nature, as they appear 
 through the telescope of Wordsworth, assume no ideal 
 grace, no visionary excellence ; but discerned by the 
 instructions of Philanthropy, they wear a comeliness 
 which engenders optimism, rendering it, as far as 
 
 man is concerned, 
 
 " a joy to think the best 
 We may of humankind;" 
 
 and, in reference to his position in nature, enforcing 
 acquiescence in the assertion, 
 
 "THY LOT, O MAN! is GOOD, THY PORTION FAIR."
 
 80 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Wordsworth has given a certain provocation to 
 censure in having corroborated the testimony borne 
 by all past ages, that indomitable Zeal is frequently 
 heedless of the barriers erected by Opinion and the 
 prevailing Taste; and in having continued the chain 
 of evidence attested by the illustrious of yore, that 
 Energy, when Herculean, is liable to the error of 
 excess in its manifestation. One so wise as is he, 
 would renounce the pretension to faultlessness ; and 
 who would defend the exemption from fault of either 
 Shakspeare or Milton? Johnson, in Rasselas, con- 
 tends, that imperfections are reasonably to be ex- 
 pected from those " who have much to do;" and 
 Wordsworth, as the Founder of a Faith promulgated 
 in the clamour raised by Prejudice and Jealousy, had 
 assuredly much to do. Yet the dauntless champion 
 has survived to witness his creed become of earnest 
 and increasing acceptation, and the confessions of 
 grateful proselytes deck gloriously as garlands the 
 Poet's retreat. May an old man's benedictory tribute 
 be permitted to mingle with the heart-thanks which 
 flow to the Seer of Rydal Mount to WORDSWORTH, 
 of the intellectual creditors of our age, a Chief among 
 ten thousand!
 
 CHAPTER III. 81 
 
 During the delivery of the greater portion of this 
 comment, E.'s manner had been marked by a gravity 
 which contrasted strongly with the vivacity he had 
 displayed at our previous interview. Now and then, 
 at the recurrence of an image moulded in poetic grace, 
 or in recounting the Poet's claims to praise, his eye 
 brightened and his energy revived. His dissertation, 
 void alike of effort reflective or enunciatory, flowed 
 like a tranquil current of articulate thought its pro- 
 gress stayed for a moment at unfrequent intervals, 
 and again calmly resuming its onward course, as a 
 stream which petty obstacles at times impede, is soon 
 impelled by accumulating waters rearward. As soon 
 as E. had fairly ended, I recalled him to his former 
 self by preparing for departure ; and starting at once 
 into jocularity, he said, 
 
 " Now if I were of that unenviable temperament 
 which glorious Will has sketched by simply hinting 
 at, that is, were I in danger of ' creeping into the 
 jaundice by being peevish,' I'd vent a spleen-simoom 
 at being thus ensnared by your quiescence into that 
 besetting sin of age, prolixity. My plea is that of the 
 disordered Lear, 'I am an old man ; pray you now 
 forget and forgive.' I protest against the Talmud's 
 libel on the softer sex, in asserting that often measures
 
 O CHAPTEK III. 
 
 of garrulity awarded to our race, the women took 
 nine ! It does not break my heart, this consciousness 
 of culpability, but it reminds me of the wail of Itho- 
 cles, in the Broken Heart of Ford 
 
 " I now repent it: this now is now too late!" 
 
 Shade of the Poet! regard benignly a parody propped 
 upon certitude and uttered in contrition 
 
 Our tongues elongate as our days decline. 
 
 " Before you leave, hear, at least, my request, that 
 you will defer till morning your return in future. 
 Express, if it please you, the astonishment of the 
 lawyer, at the absence of ' cauld-pausing Caution ;' 
 but I ken more of you than you may suppose. Are 
 you not retained in the case of S v. Wainwright?" 
 
 I had that honor, and acknowledged it. 
 
 " Eh bien : the plaintiff and I have been these four- 
 teen years exchanging draughts he is my wine- 
 merchant and the good man reposes confidence in 
 me. On the morning in which my corns so narrowly 
 escaped crushing by your retrogressive movement from 
 the bookseller's window, I was on a mission to the 
 merchant's ; and, while there, his solicitor entered to 
 communicate an opinion of Mr. C. I ascertained the
 
 CHAPTER III. 83 
 
 identity of this Mr. C. with the carnal cataclysm that 
 had nearly overwhelmed me at the bookshop; and 
 when the solicitor retired, S. related the particulars 
 of his suit, as well as certain professional incidents to 
 your personal credit: inter alia, the defence " 
 
 I had long been on terms of intimacy with the 
 good-hearted vintner, whom to know was to esteem; 
 and remembering his loquacity, and apprehensive of 
 exaggerated commendation, I felt a slight effeminate 
 tinge getting the better of my professional sangfroid 
 a mark of modesty so monstrous, that the old man 
 reined-up abruptly, and exclaimed, astounded, 
 
 " Eh, sirs ? a blush on the face of a lawyer ! I vow, 
 then, the tribe is basely slandered and maligned : the 
 calumny of the Talmud, after this, sinks into a " soft 
 impeachment;" and in dilating upon the qualities 
 essential to the appreciation of Wordsworth, it seems 
 I have not been feeling for a pulse in the dead ! " 
 
 I bore with all the fortitude I could summon, the 
 raillery excited by the display of a constitutional 
 infirmity which I had hardly mastered at that time, 
 but which, fortunately, does not now interfere with 
 the imperturbable nonchalance indispensable (or nearly 
 so) to the legal profession, wherein reputation is not 
 a little favored by the preservation of a wintry ex-
 
 84 CHAPTER III. 
 
 terior. Women must have strange tastes or trie com- 
 passion of angels (/ attribute it religiously to the last 
 alternative,) to wed with lawyers of first-rate, unco- 
 guid physiognomical advantages (professional), cased, 
 as they appear to be, in a covering of that complexion 
 which seems made of soiled skins, a hue bloodless, 
 but less like the untrodden snow on Linden, than that 
 in a thoroughfare, which is in process of dissolution 
 and dingy. 
 
 Previously to leaving Ivy Lodge on this occasion, 
 I was bent upon obtaining information of the visits 
 there of the child mentioned in E.'s letter; and to 
 avoid returning unenlightened, I was constrained to 
 prosecute an indirect examination, which elicited for 
 the maiden the ready Elder's affectionate praises, and 
 for me, sufficient data whereupon to determine my 
 next appearance at the Lodge. E.'s fondness and 
 fervour for his godchild was of that order of love 
 which, according to Scott, has in it " less of earth 
 than heaven;" and the glowing old man's tone was 
 so thankful for this treasure of his heart, that, as he 
 indulged in its expression, his feelings deepened and 
 his voice grew tremulous imparting to his language 
 and his look an effect of indescribable pathos.
 
 CHAPTER III. 85 
 
 " God's name be blessed! " said E. looking upwards 
 with patriarchal grace, " His mercy be praised for 
 this one gift, that having endowed me with the heart 
 to love, I am not left in the wide world to mourn in 
 loneliness that unencountered one, for whom our 
 Human Nature yearns; in whose absence, if deeply 
 felt, the craving of Solicitude knows no appeasing, 
 but supplicates the boon, with plaint fathomless as 
 the source of life and holy as the hope of heaven ! 
 Of the bosom's better instincts, the least despoiled of 
 its divine simplicity is, methinks, the pure longing 
 to lavish our heart's wealth upon a child; and even 
 where, as here, the strong paternal bond is wanting, 
 the great Father of love doth sometimes implant a 
 principle exotic, whose tendrils intertwine and wreathe 
 around their object with such tenacity and tenderness, 
 that stronger I can hardly conceive to originate in 
 man the Parent. Once lang syne I might have 
 cherished the hope of closer ties, and did cherish; 
 and e'en now, encompassed by the goodness of an 
 overflowing Hand, this scarce-resigned heart is apt 
 to repine at what the Father willed not; and stirs to 
 re-invest with the irksome mantle of mortality a spirit 
 which thanks to the Finisher of our Faith it is 
 my confidence as that I live, is enrolled among that
 
 86 CHAPTER III. 
 
 blissful band from whose faces GOD hath for ever 
 wiped away all tears. There is a stanza of Campbell 
 that moves deep feelings in me like a heaving flood 
 when I think of it, for in its solemn plaintiveness 
 I hear again that angel's breath, while lingering at 
 the portal of the City whose dwellings have their 
 light and joy from the countenance of the Lamb : 
 
 ' Clasp me a little longer, on the brink 
 
 Of fate, while I can feel thy dear caress; 
 
 And when this heart hath ceased to beat, oh! think, 
 
 And let it mitigate thy woes' excess, 
 
 That thou hast been to me all tenderness, 
 
 And Friend to more than human friendship just. 
 
 O! by that retrospect of happiness, 
 
 And by the hopes of an immortal trust, 
 
 God shall assuage thy pangs when I am laid in dust.' "
 
 COLLOQUY II. 
 
 TURNING MAINLY UPON HOLY MOTHER.
 
 COLLOQUY II. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 " And sure there seem of human kind 
 
 Some born to shun the solemn strife; 
 Soi^p for amusive tasks designed 
 
 To soothe the certain ills of life, 
 Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose, 
 Call forth refreshing shades, and decorate repose." 
 
 SHENSTONE. 
 
 THERE were three souls in the sanctum at Ivy Lodge 
 on a laughing day in merry May. The Church, 
 by a rather affecting process, quite apart from necro- 
 mancy, has since resolved those three into two, after 
 an honest and straight-forward fashion, on which one 
 needs not to be over-explicit. I have before hinted 
 at this " catastrophe." That eulogistic description in 
 detail which it might have been excellent gratification 
 to attempt for E.'s god-daughter, as such, would be
 
 90 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 egregious impropriety under an existing connection. 
 I have two codes of law, by one of which I regulate 
 my conduct socially, and by the other, my conduct 
 professionally; and so distinctly maintained are their 
 respective dictates, that, out of court or chambers, I 
 jealously avoid hyperbole and equivoque, and am 
 careful, when I doff the coif, to don sincerity. The 
 testimony, too, of all interested witnesses, is inherently 
 vulnerable ; and the portrait of a young wife, drawn 
 by a spouse peradventure uxorious, could hardly be 
 set up for the scrutiny of Candour, the mind of the 
 painter being by hallucination blinded to the fault 
 of an extravagant use of vermilion. So, like Bassanio 
 before the gaudy golden casket, " I will none of it." 
 It may be reasonable or, to avoid all contention 
 about terms it may be suffer able to laud the object 
 of one's idolatry while yet advancing on that path- 
 way of pleasant meanderings which wend ultimately 
 through the church-porch and have their terminus at 
 the altar-rail; but that goal once attained, the sound 
 of rhapsody beyond grates on the general ear, and 
 incites to sarcasm and a search after blots. I restrain 
 my ink, therefore, at the chops of a channel, into 
 which, if its current once entered, Impartiality might 
 be deluged, and the pilotage of Prudence despised.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 91 
 
 It is comfortable to hear the cooing of old couples, 
 who, having well-nigh ended their journey over the 
 thorny wilderness, and loving the more tenderly for 
 its lacerations, are justified in the congratulation, that 
 the hazardous result of custom has approved itself in 
 reciprocal solace, not in satiety. But I distrust the 
 discretion of those who, barely entered on the perilous 
 noviciate of the nuptial noose, announce their conjugal 
 felicity to be secured on a lease for life, and confi- 
 dently calculate upon realising a vague amount of 
 bliss, equivalent to Paradise regained. Experience, 
 however, like the wary inspector of a building-plan, 
 made captivating by impracticable embellishments, 
 reminds the credulous and eager candidates for so 
 blissful a possession, that the paradise which fascinates 
 them exists merely in design; that the soil (de la 
 nature humaine,} is always uncertain, and may be 
 sometimes treacherous, concealing stubborn rocks 
 and gnarled roots; that this portal of the home 
 of Pleasure, to-day gaudy in fanciful decoration, may 
 to-morrow be made grotesque by mutilation, or be 
 pitilessly shattered by storm ; and that the fabric, in 
 its best estate, lodges, with its possessors, a little 
 reptile-horde of bickerings in embryo, which, exposed 
 to a particular heat, burst from the shell at once into
 
 92 CHAPTER IV, 
 
 rigour, and are deadlier in their enmity than armed 
 men. These cautious cavils raised by Experience 
 are not agreeable to dwell upon, but they lend no 
 feeble aid to Prudence, in advising the suppression 
 of a premature proclamation of happiness which is 
 to be. " The world's a stage" on which the scene 
 sometimes shifts as soon as the poor player has strutted 
 a few paces; and in the scene of a marriage,, the 
 merry bridal-peal has often almost subsided into the 
 note of burial; so brief the intermission between 
 transport and the tomb. To sum up, therefore, I 
 conceive it better becomes the newly-married to be 
 taciturn than babblers about bliss, lest at any time a 
 nuptial dirge should suddenly succeed a nuptial ditty. 
 
 The month of May could never have presented a 
 comelier aspect or have diffused a kindlier influence 
 than at the time of which I have spoken. The quire 
 about Ivy Lodge were urging their tiny throats to a 
 dangerous distension; and the Elder's eyes were 
 ready to start from their sockets in a perfect fever 
 of exhilaration. 
 
 E. " Welcome hither, as is the spring to the 
 earth ! * " Mr. C. By frantic Fred ! (Mary, is that bird 
 inebriated?) by Sir Fred! we are to-day most highly 
 * Winter's Tale, 5, i.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 93 
 
 favored. My daughter-in-baptism, Sir; Mary, this 
 is Mr. C., who promises to surpass thee as a patient 
 listener, child : nay, no incredulous smile ; 'tis 
 honest verity, I vow. We practice here, Sir, no 
 " fashion or ceremony the appurtenance of wel- 
 come," as Hamlet hath it; and had " the old sexton, 
 Time," plyed his pickaxe less ruthlessly parmi les 
 dents, I'd sing you a strain of welcome, shrill as Sir 
 Fred's. Seriously, Madam, is our parlour becoming 
 a republic? these yellow villains take unbounded 
 licence when the Lodge is under female government, 
 and I may as well go whistle to the wind as call the 
 rioters to order. Have done, ye chartists! Prithee 
 fetch wool, good Mary, wool, for the ears of Mr. C. 
 I have cause to be concerned for a faculty of hearing 
 so long-sufFering ! " 
 
 There be some that say, Who will show us any 
 good ? Of course on the ears of such the Priest's and 
 the Poet's representations fall alike heavily, and either 
 do not reach the heart or awaken in it no willing 
 response. For the health's sake of the mass, such 
 disaffectedness before heaven and before man should 
 be treated as of old was leprosy the victim isolated 
 from the herd, and left in solitude to inspire the 
 
 G 2
 
 94 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 malaria of his own breath. Priests have their note 
 of terror to sound and re-sound ; but ere its echoes 
 eease to vibrate on the awed ear of Conscience, the 
 strain swells into triumph, and lifts the creature, just 
 now depressed, from the tombs of Palmyra to the top 
 of Pisgah from the survey of ruins to the recognition 
 of a present large fruition and to the sublime expec- 
 tancies of Hope. " The priestly Guide for me," says 
 mine ancient friend, " is him who leads, not drives ; 
 and who, as we travel onwards through the valley of 
 the shadow, has a smile for its sweet-scented flowers, 
 and takes comfort in them as types of a richer produce. 
 Still the pastoral guide must check the admiration 
 that would suggest a folding of the hands to slumber 
 and the impulse to seek a long repose there ; for the 
 valley has its 
 
 " sunken glens, whose sunless shrubs must weep," 
 
 and down from the steep hills will, at some hour, 
 sternly sweep the Storm on the unwary who icould 
 insist on patient rest despite the warnings of the wise. 
 But the poet-teacher is under no grave coercion to 
 reiterate the solemn cry, " All flesh is grass and the 
 glory thereof as the flower:" to him, whose mission 
 leads him out among God's works that he may report
 
 CHAPTER IV. 95 
 
 their language, there is a delectable compulsion to be 
 cheerful ay, and if the charms of the progeny he 
 adopts excite more praiseful pride than reverend 
 oracles consider orthodox, let such heterodoxy be 
 castigated by the Clergy : though the priesthood hath 
 in it many favorers in our own list of friends, one 
 eloquent supporter of the heresy, who forgive him, 
 Gracious Queen ! and be lenient, my Lord Bishop of 
 London ! has, in this ivied cell, drawn comparisons 
 between the attire worn in palaces and the petals of 
 a pale lily, at which, though derogatory to royal 
 robes, the lovely Mistress of the royal wardrobe could 
 not for her life have frowned. The old Clerk, may 
 it not displease your Majesty, is heartwhole in his 
 loyalty his offering of our Mother's Petitions for 
 the Queen attest that; and an Illustrious Precedent, 
 my Lord Bishop, will reconcile you to a faithful 
 Shepherd, whose anxious eye but seldom wanders 
 from his fold, and who distils a wondrous medicinal 
 property from simple flowers seen in bypaths and in 
 the fields wherein his lambs have their pasturage." 
 
 Really this digression originally proposed, and now 
 re-proposes, but one brief moment's " aside" from the 
 Elder in his mirth, to ejaculate, as travellers are wont 
 to do at sudden introductions to sweet landscapes on
 
 yo CHAPTER IV. 
 
 the highroad, " A pleasant prospect ! " or " A charm- 
 ing scene ! " Who will show us any good, indeed ! 
 Why on the right reverend finding of Bishop Hall 
 eleven excellent things have been discovered and 
 triumphantly proclaimed, one of which has reference 
 to " a cheerful companion without vanity;" par 
 excellence, I take it, a religious old man mirthful. 
 Why the bishop halted in his inventory on the de- 
 ficient side of a dozen, and yet left out of his catalogue 
 t\e talk of very young children, is a circumstance 
 which the editor of the next edition of his Life will 
 oblige us by explaining. Bishop Taylor would never 
 have omitted that item in his list of good and pleasant 
 things. That admirable priest alludes specially to the 
 allegro movements of a father's heart in the hearing 
 of such " pretty conversation :" let the man remodel 
 himself without delay to whom such conversation 
 proves no pleasure. Of sublunary joys, second perhaps 
 to that which " stands alone, like Adam's recollection 
 of the Fall," is the racy dialect of one's firstborn in its 
 early efforts at elocution. So, at a subsequent stage, 
 pregnant with pleasure is the wild shout of careless 
 childhood the glad eye kindling at the call to 
 revelry. Nor, when tempered by an instructed mind, 
 less pleasant is it to witness glee in a guileless old
 
 CHAPTER IV. 97 
 
 age; a comfortable sign it is of enduring verdure 
 about the venerable tree against which Time has 
 upheaved his iron arm iiidestructively; a cheering 
 testimony that the advances of Decay and approxima- 
 tion of the Grave have brought no gloomy Winter to 
 the soul; a welcome earnest rather, to the hoary 
 traveller, of the calm of a protracted Autumn, sub- 
 merging at last into the glories of an eternal Spring. 
 
 E. If Regret could possibly to-day find entrance 
 into Ivy Lodge, her only plea were this that you 
 came not earlier, and have thus lost intercourse with a 
 revered friend of mine, the Rector of a neighbouring 
 parish. Mr. F. is, like myself, a sexagenarian ; and 
 my views on church polity and construction of doctrine 
 coincide with his in every particular. Have you ever 
 met with persons with whom you felt a pleasure an 
 active pleasure in differing; and others, with whom 
 to disagree was to maintain integrity at the expense 
 of real regret? Mr. F. is, in my circle of acquaint- 
 ance, of this latter class ; a man of so much worth and 
 sound judgment that it would be grief to me to differ 
 from him. Then we are both thorough sticklers for 
 the excellency of Holy Mother; but though her 
 reverend son and servant will not bate one jot to her
 
 98 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 adversaries, he maintains the meekness of the Christian 
 champion 5 and while, as from a superior eminence, 
 he looks down upon " the errors and wanderings, the 
 mists and tempests in the vale below, his prospect is 
 chiefly with pity, not with contemptuous pride." "Tis 
 verily music to the mind to hear that eloquent old 
 man recounting the virtues and superiorities of our 
 Mother for we both designate our Church by that 
 fond appellative. If the liberty of Truth were again 
 subjected to the shackle, F. is one of the many who 
 possess, and would prove, the constancy and courage 
 of a martyr. The excellent man comes here occasion- 
 ally, but only too rarely, and we congratulate each 
 other upon the growing influence and cheering pros- 
 pects of the Establishment; and when he tarries 
 leisurely, and Mary is not here to suffer penance by 
 speechlessness, we indulge in chess at which (in 
 modesty 'tis spoken,) the layman is rather more au 
 fait than his spiritual teacher. 
 
 C. Apropos of chess: I was amused the other 
 day in reading extracts from an ancient and curious 
 book, entitled " The Game and Playe of the Chesse, 
 translated out of the French, and imprinted by William 
 Caxton. Fynysshed the last day of Marche, the yer 
 of our Lord God a thousand foure hondred Ixxiiij."
 
 COLLOQUY II. 99 
 
 The book is considered, upon high authority, to have 
 been the first work printed in England ; and in it the 
 translator assumes for the game of chess a high moral 
 ground : he dedicates his book to the Duke of Clarence, 
 to whom he sends " peas, healthe, joye, and victory e; 
 not presumyng to correcte or empoigne ony thynge 
 agenst his noblesse, but to thentent that other of what 
 estate and egrese they stand in, may see in this said 
 lityll booke, that they governed themself as they ought 
 to doo." He dates the origin of the game to the time 
 of Emsmerodach, king of Babylon, " a jolly man, 
 without justice," and a parricide; and states as " the 
 first cause wherefore it was founded, to correct and 
 reprove the king." He quotes the " holy doctour 
 saynt Paule," where the apostle says that " alle that is 
 wrytten is wrytten unto lerning;" and he intends, 
 though he travels to a little distance in expressing it, 
 that his " lityll and symple booke" should lessen " the 
 nombre of foles, which, saith Salamon, is infenyte." 
 And in a second edition of his book, he asserts, " that 
 the kyng, that tofore tyme had been vyctous, and dis- 
 ordynate in his lyuyng, was made just and vertuous, 
 debonayr, and ful of vertues unto all peple. And a 
 man that lyuyth in thys world without vertues lyueth 
 not as a man, but as a beste. Thenne, late every
 
 100 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 man, of what condycion he be that redyth or herith 
 this litel book redde, take thereby ensaumple to amend 
 hym." And for as many as read it leniently, he " shal 
 pray, that God, of his grete mercy, shall reward them 
 in his euerlastyng blisse in heuen, to the whiche he 
 brynge us that wyth his precious blood redemed us. 
 Amen." 
 
 E. The pious perorations of the olden time would 
 now be deemed " preposterous conclusions." Such a 
 termination to a modern treatise on chess, would be as 
 unexpected, as the recent benediction of a preacher, 
 who, after enumerating the merits of an exemplary 
 spinster deceased, and representing her to the special 
 imitation of the single sisterhood, ending by observing 
 to them " Thus she lived, and thus she died, a 
 blameless old maid ivhich that you may all do, may 
 GOD of his infinite goodness grant." 
 
 You expressed, some time ago, the interest which 
 conjecture upon the mystery of music possessed for 
 you. Very various are the tastes of men. One of my 
 most estimable friends a man of fine feeling, whose 
 memory is a kind of poetic jewel-house has assured 
 me, that he should be disappointed to find the in- 
 fluence of music, under any development, a primary 
 ingredient in the joys of heaven. He and the Rector
 
 COLLOQUY II. 101 
 
 are at antipodes in this opinion; and I once heard* 
 the pastor persuade his people to value the unheeded 
 privilege of assimilating their worship to the adoration 
 of the angels, in terms which I cannot forget, and 
 with impressiveness I cannot imitate. Thus spake, 
 emphatically, the zealous priest: 
 
 " It is the peculiar province of Sacred Music to 
 liberate the immortal mind from the thraldom of 
 earthly thoughts, and on the wings of holy harmony 
 the soul uprises towards heaven. In sacrificial song 
 it is that the homage of the sinner and the seraph 
 correspond in character, however dissimilar in degree; 
 and, when sincere, it is a religious rapture of the 
 supremest order of delight. It gives birth to an 
 indescribable joy but Piety is reconciled in it, and 
 the majesty of the Most High propitiated, for it is 
 that pure joy which accompanies ever the kindling 
 emotions of Gratitude." F. paused for a moment, 
 as in thought " too deep for words upon their stream 
 to bear;" and you heard your bosom in its beatings, 
 so profound was the silence of the sanctuary. " O ! " 
 resumed the priest, " O lamentable unconsciousness 
 of its overwhelming debt to the Power which might 
 have hurled us into the abyss of torment, but for that 
 mysteriously-prevailing Love which would allure us
 
 102 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 to the realms of bliss! deplorable insensibility to 
 Mercy, or alarming indifference to its manifestations, 
 is that of the heart torpid and voiceless in presence 
 of Him in whom it lives, and moves, and has its 
 being. How marvellous the contradiction and the 
 coldness too often visible in the demeanour of Chris- 
 tians, congregated ostensibly for united praise ! Say, 
 if this be in very truth our purpose, would it not be 
 rational to study the example, and strive to emulate 
 the fervour, of beings who worship in a loftier sphere ? 
 there is not a reasonable soul in this assembly but 
 responds affirmatively; but, alas! of this assenting 
 throng, how few are there who do not reproach 
 themselves in the acknowledgment. What! confess 
 that the celestial example is worthy of all emulation, 
 and yet abide in this unbroken lethargy ! Is the altar 
 of Gratitude within you so ice-bound, that incessant 
 bounties from on high cannot excite there the audible 
 accents of a thanksgiving song ? Yet, as many of ye 
 say in words, and all, I trust, in spirit, ' it is meet 
 and right, and our bounden duty, to magnify the 
 Lord God of sabaoth:' avowing this, quit ye like 
 men. Think ye, my brethren, that sombre Silence 
 hath part or place in the bright land to which we 
 hasten? ah, which of you would accredit me if I
 
 COLLOQUY II. 103 
 
 said, that in the clime whose very atmosphere is 
 harmonical there lived one songless spirit that among 
 all its countless myriad of minstrels there could exist 
 one sullen lyre ? 
 
 " Sacred Music irradiates the mysteries of Faith, 
 with the glow of imagination gives vividness to the 
 gorgeous creations of Hope, and induces a sense 
 of exaltation wherein 
 
 ' We feel that we are greater than we know:' 
 
 thus, its influence subjugates the grosser qualities of 
 the heart; expands its nobler capacities; familiarises 
 its conceptions with whatsoever things are pure; 
 advances the mortal to the dignity of a ministering 
 spirit; and accelerates the progress of the mind to- 
 wards that eminent altitude of perfection which, while 
 within its earthy confines, the soul has not freedom 
 to attain. The assurance of a vast beatitude, too 
 illimitable, exhaustless, and exquisite for the com- 
 prehension of man in his degeneracy, is the revealed 
 distinction between the supreme enjoyments ofheaven 
 and the subordinate pleasures permitted to the up- 
 right of the world; but the grateful power of harmony 
 on the complicated fabric of natural feeling, would 
 encourage in us the expectation that the large bounty
 
 104 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 of enthroned Benevolence has mingled the raptures 
 of choral consummation with the guerdon in reserve 
 for His redeemed ones. ' The ransomed of the Lord 
 shall return with singing unto Zion ;' and not alone 
 are the felicities which there await them affirmed to 
 be indistinguishable to human eye and inconceivable 
 by human heart; it is likewise pronounced concern- 
 ing them, that the ear of man hath not heard the 
 rich reward which God hath prepared for them that 
 love Him. 
 
 " The dynasty of depravity in the constitution 
 of man has, in truth, despoiled the purity of those 
 glorifying strains vernacular to the stainless soul; 
 and anthems ascending with simultaneous charm 
 from the high estate of primal innocence to the 
 sphere of the excellent glory, have been exchanged 
 by its dominion for dissonant and broken music. 
 Yet though sin and sorrow have subdued the tone 
 of man's rejoicing the victory over Death, the 
 purification from defilement, redemption, unmerited 
 providence, the wiping away of tears, and the eternal 
 joy, are themes which remain to our fallen race; and 
 invited to a reconciled Father, his rescued children 
 may well forget their fleeting infirmities in the inter- 
 minable perspective of peace their light afflictions
 
 COLLOQUY II. 105 
 
 in the glad heritancy of a weight of glory, and still 
 delight to come before his presence with a song ! " 
 
 This, continued E., is all that Mary and I could 
 bring away, for closet-consideration; but the effect 
 of F.'s discourse, aided, as I have remarked, by an 
 extraordinarily -impressive delivery, was highly grati- 
 fying ; and when you attend his church, you will not 
 fail to remark there the " meek fervour of devotion," 
 which Wordsworth laments as a characteristic of an- 
 cient piety, defective in the modern: nor will you 
 wonder that the multitude should be all absorbed in 
 the moving eloquence of the Church's petitions, when 
 you hear them, in all their sacred force and compre- 
 hensive meaning, from the lips of this pious man, 
 who, imputing to form and ceremony no availing 
 influence per se, does not therefore disdain to demand 
 veneration for antiquity, and cement attachment by 
 representations and persuasions, which the schismatic 
 rather than devout might pronounce to be conducive 
 to a superstitious iegard, but which, by more ingenuous 
 disciples, are found to promote an ardency of affection 
 for the form, which aids rather than supersedes the 
 spirit of a reasonable worship. The signs of the 
 times induce an apprehension, that the bosom of the
 
 106 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Church will be agitated ere long by ultra-advocates 
 of two classes the one insisting too pertinaciously on 
 precision in ritual ceremonies ; the other, displaying 
 a lax observance, amounting, in the indiscreet, to dis- 
 respect and contumely, exceedingly to be deprecated. 
 The tenets of F. are, I conceive the juste milieu; and 
 the calm authority of opinions such as his, will main- 
 tain our holy Mother's equilibrium, until her querulous 
 children shall " cease from troubling." Many there 
 are who prophecy " Woe ! woe !" some in timid alarm 
 in envious gratulation others at the prospective 
 issue of these dissensions ; and an old friend a kind 
 of brother in my youth, alack ! a weary distance to 
 look back upon would have made me melancholy a 
 few days ago, if gloomy predictions from a venerable 
 prophet could have prevailed over anticipations more 
 sanguine. I wish you to understand the complexion 
 of that virtue which F. attributes to the extraneous 
 circumstance of antiquity and of hereditary sonship. 
 He would urge his flock to scrutinise the intrinsic 
 strength and moral grandeur of the Ark of our Faith 
 to mark well her bulwarks ; and is content that by 
 her own merits she stand or fall. You shall not 
 wafted in a tiny boat, on sunny ripples in Spring, 
 around a noble bark motionless as a structure built
 
 COLLOQUY II. 107 
 
 up in stateliness and beauty through the pellucid sea 
 I say you shall not in a petit shallop contem- 
 plate the Flower of your country's fleet with a more 
 complacent assurance of security and overpowering 
 sense of majesty, than when on the current of that 
 Charmer's oratory you " go round about and tell the 
 towers" of Christian-England's Ark. Then, after 
 demonstrating her superior construction to that of the 
 surrounding small-craft, and convincing you of her 
 surpassing sailing qualities by reference to many a 
 remembered contest and truthful record then will 
 he press her upon our affections by energetic argu- 
 ments ab extra. " Our fathers" says he, " our 
 FATHERS reared this Ark, despite of terrors never 
 be their holy heroism forgotten! and having launched 
 it on the tide of Time, they committed themselves to 
 its guardianship; and generations have since been 
 borne in it to the haven where they would be. And 
 in our voyage, shall we hesitate to embark in that 
 imperishable vessel which has survived the wreck of 
 ages and which shall survive? ' From the cradle to 
 the grave we are on the stormy sea;' but may we 
 not well exult, that in trusting the treasure we carry 
 with us to the keeping of the Ancient Mariner, we 
 are able to confide in our Pilot? And shall we, then,
 
 108 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 look indifferently on, while the foes of the ship we 
 sail in are attempting to dismast the stately fabric 
 which they cannot overwhelm 9 " 
 
 C. You make me anxious to hear your clerical 
 friend : his sentiments appear to be in strict accordance 
 with what I recognise as the theory of legitimate 
 churchmanship the love of our Church primarily as 
 the uncompromising Expositress of Truth ; secondarily, 
 because bequeathed to us like the inestimable Hope 
 of Glory at the price of anguish and of blood. The 
 wise man preserves with solicitude the costly pur- 
 chase of a prudent ancestor ; and the unlettered poor 
 regard, with religious carefulness, the heir -looms of 
 sires who sleep. The Protestant Church descends to 
 us as a legacy which inherent worth enriches and 
 historic associations sanctify; and Montgomery, in 
 extolling the past chivalrous patriotism of Britons, 
 expresses our estimation of the valiant who reared 
 and defended the nation's best bulwark : 
 
 " Their deeds of old renown inspire 
 Our bosoms with our fathers' fire ; 
 A proud inheritance we claim 
 In all their sufferings, all their fame." 
 
 And now our Church resembles, morally, a luminary 
 in whose radiations are cheering and all-hallowing
 
 COLLOQUY IT. 109 
 
 influences influences which can hardly altogether 
 expire while the elements of our present nature con- 
 stitute man. For, amid the incessant tumult of sec- 
 tarianism, enlightened by that calm beam which the 
 experienced Instructors and judicious Senators of our 
 age are concerned in shedding upon the intellect of 
 the people the flickering meteor-light of mere se- 
 cular intelligence tranquillised and gently coerced by 
 the salutary companion-ray of Religion enlightened 
 thus, unperverted by sophistry, unmoved by scorn, 
 the heart which values a stedfast anchor for its faith 
 will render its ready tribute of admiration to the 
 fortitude that wrought it; and with the reverence 
 which from a child he is taught to yield to Wisdom, 
 will the Man blend the veneration he instinctively 
 owns to Antiquity. To me it is joyful to perceive, 
 on all sides, a simultaneous endeavour in the clergy 
 to rivet the links which attach the English Churchman 
 to the ancestral altar, by appealing to feelings 
 
 " Essential and eternal in the heart;" 
 
 an earnest striving to quicken a soul in the cold habit 
 of modern conformity; to strengthen present decre- 
 pitude by illustrations of primitive vigour; to fetter 
 us by the permitted rumination not the unlicensed 
 
 H 2
 
 110 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 vagaries of Fancy, as well as by the stirring re- 
 presentations of Reality; and, by poetic pictures of 
 past attachment, 
 
 " Leaving that beautiful which still was so, 
 And making that which was not, till the shrine 
 Becomes religion, and the heart runs o'er 
 With silent worship. * * The dead still rule 
 Our spirits from their urns." 
 
 E. If that\>e the character of your churchmanship 
 Mr. F. is your priestly champion; and in the Eccle- 
 siastical Armoury of Wordsworth might you have 
 found a cartel, in terms entrancing as the strains of 
 Momus' Mother and the Syrens: 
 
 " More sweet than odours caught by him who sails 
 
 Near spicy shores of Araby the blest, 
 
 A thousand times more exquisitely sweet 
 
 The freight of holy feeling which we meet, 
 
 In thoughtful moments wafted by the gales 
 
 From fields where good men walk, or bowers wherein they rest." 
 
 But I am guilty of a kindred superstition. I remember 
 part of an ex cathedra exhortation to fidelity to holy 
 Mother, made by F. during the Voluntary-system 
 struggle, and delivered from the pulpit because " he 
 believed it due from him to warn his people against 
 the craft and malice of designing men, and could not
 
 COLLOQUY II. Ill 
 
 hope for the opportunity of doing so from another 
 place." I might justly say of F. that 
 
 " Surely never did there live on earth 
 A man of kindlier nature;" 
 
 and it is not in the power of ordinary provocations to 
 
 " stir the constant mood of his calm thoughts, 
 Or put them into misbecoming plight;" 
 
 but of the pressure of three-score years the priest 
 seems utterly unconscious when his feelings are 
 quickly touched ; and at that period of hubbub about 
 religious equality, the honest man waxed warmer with 
 indignation than I had or have ever seen him : for he 
 is well read in man ; and the rancorous enmity which 
 bound in brief and ineffective alliance an incongruous 
 phalanx, using Conscience for its watchword, and 
 trampling upon Consistency, excited his animadversion 
 and disgust. So it was in no " well-bred whisper" 
 that he reminded his parishioners of their privileges 
 and line of duty. After manifesting the injustice 
 which the conscientiously-inspired were panting to 
 promote, he adverted to the sleepless spirit of an- 
 tagonism to the Establishment, and said, 
 
 " It becomes your duty, Men and Brethren, to
 
 112 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 emulate the adversaries' activity, deprived of its acer- 
 bity. Our Church is calumniated to the very corners 
 of the land by a host of vindictive assailants, whose 
 familiar theme is the vituperation of the established 
 order of things, and who, in the face of their system's 
 poverty and nakedness, avouch vociferously that it is 
 " rich, and increased with goods, and hath need of 
 nothing." And now are we summoned to preserve 
 from the fierce desecration of the profane and the 
 envious intermeddling of the equivocally-pious, the 
 Casket of Christian Truth, the consecrated Repository 
 of our Religion, the Ark of that New Covenant whose 
 light was to lighten the Gentiles, and which, preserved 
 intact in this our favored isle, shall one day be declared 
 the glory of God's Israel; the Landmark for our 
 souls' guidance, the setting-up of which was so sacred 
 an enterprise with our fathers, that the soil in which 
 this landmark was enfixed may almost be said to have 
 been soddened by the warm gushings of their life- 
 blood. And the Virgin Daughter which they alienated 
 from a Mother whom corrupt men had sullied, has, 
 in process of time, herself acquired the sanctity of 
 maternity; and in this present day, amid renewed 
 but most wanton efforts to defame, dismantle, and dis- 
 honor her, are we appealed to as sons, to whom a
 
 COLLOQUY II. 113 
 
 consciousness of filial responsibility and a sentiment of 
 filial affection are not considered foreign. That nursing 
 Mother to whose arms we were carried for her bap- 
 tismal benediction, and who will receive us again to 
 her bosom when we rest from our labors, demands of 
 us, Is a Parent's defence in a gainsaying age no part 
 of the duty of her children ? Guarding us from the 
 awful peril of Infidelity, from the difficulties and 
 bewilderments of Dissent, from the solitariness of 
 Schism, from the slavery of Superstition, and, by the 
 pure light of Truth, guiding our feet into the way of 
 Peace, is there no emotion of gratitude in our hearts, 
 prompting us to rally round her standard, and vigo- 
 rously contend for the Faith once delivered to the 
 Saints? Martyrs a noble army, to whom life was 
 less deai- than her integrity call us to the contest. 
 That great Head of the Church, whose earthly prayer 
 it was, and whose heavenly will it is, that His may 
 be one in Him, even as He is one with the Father, 
 He too summons us to defend, as a quality inviolate, 
 the unity of His church on earth. Breathing the very 
 prayers of saints in successive generations gathered 
 into rest by solemn commemorative fast and festival 
 tracing their footsteps in the pathways of the Holy 
 One and thus connecting ourselves with the long
 
 114 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 line of the faithful, is it our lethargy that shall con- 
 spire to surrender the Church to the will of her 
 enemies, who, dead to the bleeding sorrow wherewith 
 Piety contemplates sacrilege, would glory and not 
 grieve ' to see her in the dust;' enemies, too, puny 
 in consistent ranks, but strengthened now for a fleet- 
 ing hour by most unprincipled confederacy : and it is 
 ours to behold and to repel this onset of the Voluntary 
 System, which, like a huge battering-ram, is levelled 
 at the Fortress of our Faith, from the Babel of belief, 
 by a motley army, in the concentrated violence of a 
 thousand conflicting animosities ! " 
 
 C. Tempora mutantur! Such a change has come 
 o'er the spirit of the nation's dream, that the present 
 prostration of the antagonistic party seems irrecon- 
 cileable with the late vaunt of invincibility; and in 
 the lull of the affray we look about us for the groupes 
 who were rushing with loud invocations to the idol, 
 Religious Liberty a guardian genius if her placid 
 lineaments be regarded with reverential eyes, but at 
 that time by turbulent zealots followed, sought, and 
 sued, as 
 
 " A reeling goddess with a zoneless waist." 
 Like the Indian at his early home, inquiring for the
 
 COLLOQUY II. 115 
 
 friends of his youth, we ask after the sectarian chiefs, 
 " Where are they? and Echo answers, Where?" 
 
 E. Woe betide this bonny isle of Britain and 
 her manifold dependencies if words had oftener been 
 deeds ! * There were many, however, in that alliance, 
 in whom the furor of hostility blinded their better 
 judgment; for, in a moral war, which that essentially 
 should have been, they had not else rejected Prin- 
 ciple, which is moral strength, in favor of Union, 
 which is physical. But the veriest tyro in physics 
 who ever unwittingly poisoned, or in metaphysics who 
 ever floundered in a mental morass, would agree in 
 this, that in a raging fever it is not from the victim 
 we must expect a timely application of his febrifuge. 
 I have no sympathy whatever with sectarianism; and 
 the sects which too continually subdivide Christendom 
 at the impulse of graceless ambition or pragmatical 
 whim by every subdivision rending that mantle 
 which should be seamless and entire these mushroom 
 corps attest in how little fearful regard is held the sin 
 of schism. Still, I think that many dissenters of the 
 Equality-epoch went not voluntarily into the rough 
 arms of Republicanism, nor courted with a consenting 
 mind the traitor-kiss of Rome ; rather, that in yielding 
 * " Words are no deeds." Hen. viii. Sbakspeare.
 
 116 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 themselves as coadjutors nominally, but, virtually, as 
 instruments of the Demagogue and the Devotee, they 
 could not discern with how despicable a political and 
 objectionable a religious company of freebooters they 
 were hail-fellows, badly met. If they did recognise 
 their true position, we may conclude that the near 
 prospect of a large concession, made compulsory by 
 numbers, was too tempting to retreat from at the 
 recommendation of Rectitude or the counter mandates 
 of pious seceders, deceased or living. To the name 
 of Irons it is pleasant to pay respectful tribute : but 
 when I think of that general hapless wallowing in 
 defilement, and that Puritanism, blind-folded and 
 urged on by the designing, should have thus wantonly 
 immersed itself in pitch and pollution, I feel (as 
 gentle Edmund felt for beauty in tribulation,) that 
 " all for pity I could die." The professedly-religious 
 began the contest with the elements of moral warfare, 
 with argument, and plea, and the protestations of 
 Conscience (grown pitiably sore and petulant, by the 
 way !) ; but evil communications corrupt, you know ; 
 and after the exhaustion of their argumentative am- 
 munition, which flashed and did no more, they re- 
 sorted to expedients which, if severely scanned, must 
 be remembered with scorn ; but, regarded with com-
 
 COLLOQUY II. 117 
 
 passion, suggest merely a comparison with the little 
 angers of wayward urchins, who, annoyed by a 
 robuster youth, and vexed with the feeling of infe- 
 riority, will wreak their harmless ire in hasty ver- 
 biage, and hurl promiscuous missiles at him they 
 cannot reach. 
 
 C. " Yonder harlot, throned on the seven hills," 
 must have " coined her cheek to smiles" at the co- 
 operation of the children of the conventicle, some of 
 whose more fastidious fathers repudiated and rejected 
 the reformed Church, because of an alleged remaining 
 taint of Popery. Rome could not but have waxed 
 complacent at the evidence of docility where, of yore, 
 was loud and deep defiance. I firmly believe that a 
 strong (if not the strongest) general check experienced 
 by the movers of that sectarian sedition was the result 
 of a conviction pressed upon the public mind, that 
 the continued strife for equalisation would ultimately 
 tend to promote the designs of never-dormant Rome. 
 The doctrine of egalitt either civil or religious 
 is known by Englishmen to involve an absurd con- 
 stitutional anomaly ; and though our countrymen are 
 " liable to have their understandings played upon by 
 unmeaning terms,"* yet, once convinced of error or 
 * Palcy.
 
 118 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 fatuity, they are much too sensible to persevere in the 
 " strenuous idleness" of a chase after chimeras. To 
 those who looked forward who saw events in their 
 causes and could ascertain contingencies* the issue 
 of a successful league against the Establishment pre- 
 sented itself in the disturbed guise of a temporary 
 religious republic, in which energies whose proper 
 direction should be dictated by Religion, might be 
 seen rapt in the zeal of partisanship and restless 
 struggle for pre-eminency. And in this fever of 
 aspiring sectaries, it was easy to foresee the stealthy 
 form of Popery, with its ready bait, false wile, and 
 specious reasoning, winning its unsuspected way over 
 minds too jealous of surrounding rivalry to detect 
 the not-unpalatable poison of the dissembling Phy- 
 sician, or to scrutinise the artful artillery wherewith 
 the citadel of Belief is frequently besieged, a siege 
 so cunningly contrived and conducted, that the pro- 
 selyte's surrender is often startling to himself, and 
 seemingly unreal as " a phantasma or a dream." 
 
 E. You have alluded to the Church of Rome as 
 to a spiritual physician. In palmier days she was, 
 in that capacity, most accommodating in her dispen- 
 sary, and considerate in her cures: but she insisted 
 * Johnson.
 
 COLLOQUY II. 119 
 
 on the patient's faith in her all-sufficiency, and virtue 
 went not out from her where this credulity was wanting. 
 For the rest, she had soul-salves at all prices the 
 costliest, of course, the most mollifying ; and herbs in 
 infinite variety the bitter for the scrupulous and 
 ascetic, and sweeter-savoured for the rich devotionless. 
 And in the matter of preparing for an easy purgatorial 
 probation, the standing prescription in her pharma- 
 copoeia was The needy, lacerate; the wealthy, pay. 
 [The old man's countenance fell.] This was her mode 
 of treatment in that drear, dark time, when men had 
 lost sight both of Freedom and their bonds ; ere any 
 mind enslaved had risen from the stagnant slough, 
 resolved to burst the manacles which bound it; ere 
 those who sat in darkness had regained any glimpse 
 of the " great light" so long occult. Had that light, 
 on its slow re-issue from the cloud, burst like a blazing 
 meteor on the wide moral wreck, what human mind 
 but must have shrunk appalled from the task of that 
 wreck's regeneration? icho have deemed himself 
 competent to the mind's cure in that diseased con- 
 dition ? Yet, in the wise supervision of Providence, 
 the dark Hour had its indomitable Man, the Exigency 
 its well-equipped Appliance, the monster Falsehood 
 his undaunted Foe a Foe that in the face of scowling
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Principalities dared designate as infernal the chi- 
 canery which had sapped the soul's vitals, eclipsed 
 the divine penetration of its eye, and degraded the 
 thoughtful allegiance of reason to a spiritless and 
 automatic routine. O ! a daring sway was that Church 
 of Rome's ! a dread responsibility, that of her then 
 representatives ! 
 
 C. Dread, indeed, is the accusation against her; 
 for her guilt has not simply been the concealment of 
 truths divine she has distorted and deformed them : 
 from the lighthouse to which men's souls would, un- 
 directed, look for a pure religious ray upon the path 
 of their pilgrimage, she suspended a deceptive beacon: 
 her goverment was a mystery of iniquity; her cere- 
 monies were a meretricious pageant; her calendar 
 became a populous mythology; her overthrow was 
 a loosing of the prisons to the bound 
 
 E. And when Freedom smiled in upon the poor 
 succumbent captive, O it is full of interest to imagine 
 him uprising from his crouched attitude, and to con- 
 ceive the new nerve of delight he felt when, walking 
 erect under the clearing firmament, he " saw for him- 
 self" a reflex of the Sun of Righteousness gleaming 
 on the starry wings of Hope ! But about this bruit 
 raised by fault-finders of all creeds, and cavillers
 
 CHAPTER IV. 121 
 
 of none that the papacy has conspirators in our own 
 priesthood ; that the upas-tree has taken root at home, 
 and is actually exhaling its pestilent influence under 
 our innocent noses. I have it by oral tale and written 
 story, that dreadful things are discovered by those 
 who have the gift of construing the countenance of 
 Time a little in advance of the events which are to 
 stand registered in his furrowed face. Down the 
 vista of futurity the rm/-far-sighted distinguish ho- 
 nest protestant churchmen aghast at the expose of 
 concealed bones of contention of elephantine magni- 
 tude ; our dear old Mother in dismay at the desertion 
 of her surpliced servants; and pseudo- protestant 
 clergymen wrangling for precedency in saluting the 
 Pope's toe! One squeezes a sip of solace, however, 
 from the reflection, that predictions in our day are 
 not invariably infallible. 
 
 C. Society is never without a morbid company 
 of members, who are ever busy in making troubles 
 independently of those they were born to, and whose 
 life is an unintermitting " ague-fit of fear." To them 
 " of comfort no man speak," rather " of graves, of 
 worms, and epitaphs" 
 
 E. Monomaniacal forestallers of grief, who insist 
 that msufficient for the day is the evil thereof; are
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 over-exquisite in casting " the fashion of uncertain 
 evils ; " * and receive " comfort like cold porridge." f 
 'Tis lamentable that in despite of " saint, sage, and 
 sophist," and the painful schooling of Experience, the 
 votaries and victims of " squint Suspicion" are so 
 many. But you were observing that 
 
 C. These, if they discern or fancy they discern a 
 cloud on the horizon's verge, though it be no bigger 
 than a man's hand, foretel a certain and an immediate 
 covering of the entire firmament. Nay, there are 
 minds so strangely constituted, that they will peer 
 many times (if necessary) into the dim distance, in 
 quest of that shadowy omen at which, having seen, 
 they profess to " sorrow as men without hope." The 
 force of prejudice is immense; and " he who would 
 leap over the hedges of custom had need be well 
 mounted."* It is Prejudice which views unwillingly 
 the movement going on in the Church a movement 
 almost entirely defensible by the churchman's charter, 
 the Book of Common Prayer, and yet inveighed 
 against as a symptom fraught with danger. Supple- 
 mentary and whimsical appendages to the prescribed 
 Order may be condemnable, especially if adjuncts to 
 ceremonies themselves non-essential and sometime 
 * Comus. f Tempest, ii. 1. J Aaron Hill.
 
 COLLOQUY II. 123 
 
 disused. Of the thousand tongues of Rumour many 
 are set in agitation by ultra-finical precisians; but 
 many others are murmuring over a revival most com- 
 mendable. Against the prejudices of late and present 
 times one might almost as well expect favour for 
 Lucifer as for Laud ; yet Laud must not be " mistaken 
 into vice," or be condemned and dismissed unheard. 
 " Ever since I came in place," he said, at the bar of 
 the house of peers, " I have laboured nothing more 
 than that the external publick worship of God, so 
 much slighted in divers parts of this kingdom, might 
 be preserved, and that with as much decency and 
 uniformity as might be. For I evidently saw that 
 the public neglect of God's service in the outward 
 face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated 
 to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true 
 and inward .worship of God, which, while we live in 
 the body, needs external helps, and all little enough 
 to keep it any vigour." 
 
 E. The effort was indisputably laudable; upon 
 the judiciousness of its manifestation opinions differ. 
 
 C. Those among the clergy who make a principle 
 
 of unity, and who most earnestly strive to enable 
 
 the Church " to realise the daily supervision of her 
 
 children,"* are the most suspected of the priesthood. 
 
 * Bishop of Winchester. j
 
 124 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 I impute no papistical prepossessions where they are 
 vehemently alleged to exist; and when I meet with 
 expressions which the " scandalously nice" adduce as 
 evidence of treachery, I lament the unguardedness 
 of the learned, who frequently excite suspicion in the 
 illiterate, by apparent more than by actual incon- 
 sistencies. The man who is familiar with the history 
 of the Reformation, must disapprove in part; but it 
 arouses the alarm of the ignorant, to hear that event 
 reprobated, with which he has been instructed to 
 connect the rescue of " pure Religion and undefiled" 
 from the prison-house of Popery and the dense at- 
 mosphere of long-accumulating Error. But assuming 
 that favorers of the Popedom nay, that apostates are 
 at this hour subtly striving to re-infuse Romanism 
 into the Anglican faith, by what instrumentality would 
 their design be most effectually accomplished ? Would 
 it be best promoted by intellectual progression or 
 retrogression? Have we of the tiers-etat attained, 
 indubitably, an intellectual vantage-ground superior 
 to Jesuitical jugglery? might not the sly sybil whine 
 into bondage the compliant multitude? The old 
 appliances of persecution and the anathema seem but 
 little calculated for a modern taming process. 
 
 E. Why, as to the mind's retrograde movement
 
 COLLOQUY II. 125 
 
 the old lady in scarlet and her shaven sons would 
 have firstly to close the flood-gates of Literature ; and 
 those literary ushers-in and whippers-in, the book- 
 publishers, could, " ere a man might say, Behold!" 
 whistle together a tolerably deep-mouthed opposition. 
 The meridian might of depraved Rome was co-existent 
 with the midnight of the intellect; it was over slaves, 
 groping slaves, that she held the most arbitrary sway. 
 There is not a layman in England who would more 
 strenuously advocate a proper docility to the Church 
 than would I ; yet, I say it solemnly, may God forbid 
 our relapsing again into a state of mental prosternation, 
 in the imbecility of which it is impossible that He 
 can take pleasure. You mention casuistry and per- 
 secution among the instruments which, in an impro- 
 bable case, the popish priesthood might put in opera- 
 tion. When dissenters, who are never chargeable with 
 obstinate adherence, tractable lambs ! when they meet 
 humble men of the Isaac Ashford* stamp, who are de- 
 termined to walk in the " sober light" of the Church, 
 their designation of such character is bigot. Now 
 with such an innate bigotry towards protestantism 
 our countrymen are, I believe, too deeply imbued, to 
 imbibe venom, while, from the great Halls of spiritual 
 
 * The Parish Register. 
 
 j 2
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Medicine, there issue so many keen discriminators 
 and denouncers of what is base and surreptitious. 
 Then as to persecution it is a system of policy as 
 cruel in its operation as it is eventually fatal to the 
 cause which it is intended to serve. Its very inter- 
 ference in the promotion of theological unity is a 
 sufficient condemnation of the tenets it would advance ; 
 and yet in this particular field of contention, its exer- 
 cise has been at once more sanguinary and self- 
 destructive than in any other sphere. It is an equivocal 
 instrument in the business of salvation, which slays 
 the body because the soul has an objection to be 
 saved by means prescribed for it; as he would be 
 considered a dangerous physician, who should over- 
 come the imbibitious scruples of his patient by the 
 administration of a lasting quietus. The swords of 
 the magistrate and of the minister are of a contrary 
 temperament: allegiance to spiritual authority real 
 soul-coercion enforced by civil power, may possibly 
 be made to assume the semblance of peace but there 
 is no peace. If we ask, What has Force effected for 
 (avowedly) a spiritual Religion, we find a reply in 
 the defeat of the system : and this result was inevitable ; 
 for Barbarism can never be the divinely-accredited 
 representative of Benignity, and a process at which
 
 COLLOQUY II. 127 
 
 our human nature shudders, is little calculated to 
 reconcile our divine. And if we seek to authorise 
 the cruelty of the agents hy the contents of their 
 credential, we find the Potentate's command " Put 
 up thy sword into the sheath ! " and this rebuke of 
 violence to him whose mantle has been claimed as 
 the vest of spiritual supremacy, and whose weapon, 
 in the unrestrained hands of his successors, has since 
 deluged Christendom with gore, in glory of the 
 Restorer of Malchus ! 
 
 C. Ay, the records of Rome are too indelibly 
 stained with characters which have but one expressive 
 meaning through all time, to make the enlargement 
 of her sheep-fold a welcome sight to the world. 
 May Heaven preserve mankind from her maternal 
 mercies ! The effect of distance is to diminish mag- 
 nitude ; and now, in the calm adoption of any creed 
 or tenet, we are forgetful of the fiery trials of faith, 
 when absolute conformity was enforced by torture. 
 Looking back upon this or that crowded scene with 
 an eye which a lack of interest enervates or inter- 
 mediate objects divert, our vision is vague and dim; 
 but let us preserve a special focus and a steady gaze, 
 and our emotions of awe and horror become wellnigh 
 as acute in the distant retrospection of these atrocities, 
 as were theirs who had them in immediate review.
 
 128 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 E. The places which should have illumined the 
 benighted, were themselves ensepulchred in darkness; 
 the declared home of Christianity about whose por- 
 tals, if the heavenly Guest hath indeed her dwelling 
 within, are ever hovering the attendant-angels Cha- 
 rity, Commiseration, and Mercy became an " habi- 
 tation of Cruelty ;" and 
 
 " Victory sickened, ignorant where to rest." * 
 
 Upon human tenderness the tale of her terrible 
 triumphs falls freezingly it acts like ice upon the 
 heart. In a little book, brought to me by my god- 
 daughter many months ago the Nun, was it not, 
 Mary? illustrative of that serious mistake, a monastic 
 life, there occurs a recital of the discipline resorted 
 to in the case of two sisters, whom the powers of 
 darkness had influenced to assert the transcendental 
 authority of scripture over tradition. The narrative 
 is related by one of the victims, and is invested, in 
 many of its details of suffering, with an air of unre- 
 pining sufferance and meekness, truly pathetic. 
 No exaggeration of inflictions, nor show of super- 
 natural endurance, nor sickly suppliance for sympathy, 
 hut a dispassionate revelation, bearing on its surface 
 * Wordsworth.
 
 COLLOQUY II. 129 
 
 and in its secrets the impress of authenticity. A 
 picture which cannot have failed to excite holy pity, 
 is that wherein the exiled nuns are represented in 
 a cell, lit by a sad and solitary lamp, and saving 
 the Presence which no barriers may exclude are 
 visited only by a spectral female attendant, cold as 
 if carved from alabaster. One is bowed with the 
 weight of years and the tyrannies of the holy Mother, 
 and is in sickness, and not far from the strange bosom 
 of Mercy; the other is occupied in administering 
 solace from a purer source than the fountains of 
 traditionary record; and over her dungeon-divinity 
 time elapses unheeded and unknown: 
 
 " Seasons return, but not to them returns 
 Day or the sweet approach of even or morn." 
 
 This loneliness, and ignorance of day and night, 
 suggest an idea of desolation, which, if not divinely 
 redeemed from despair, would thrill through every 
 feeling, as the type of Innocency in eternal abandon- 
 ment : as it is, Humanity, incredulous, inquires if such 
 recited cruelties can ever have been realised by sen- 
 tient beings, and they, too, of the finer-fibred creation J 
 Oh, if the accents of oppression ascend from the 
 prisons of the bound, and if every wrong has its
 
 130 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 regarded cry and its sure avenging, how fearful a 
 retribution must be in reserve for these enormities; 
 perpetrated, too, by zealots, whose stony seclusion 
 could not shut out the worst part of their nature, while 
 it often perverted the best; and whom the incentive 
 of an offended superstition did sometimes transform 
 to furies in furtherance of the CHRISTIAN faith ! 
 
 C. It is not the least of many and great privi- 
 leges peculiar to the age in which we live, that 
 dread no longer interferes in exercises spiritual ; that 
 the scruples of Conscience are respected; and innu- 
 merable vagaries, which it would be difficult to affiliate 
 to Conscience, are tolerated on the mere assumption 
 of that honored but hacknied patronymic. But this 
 privilege of exemption from dread, in which all 
 classes may and do participate, operates, I apprehend, 
 but feebly, as a stimulant to general thankfulness. 
 A very large portion of the episcopalian community are 
 deficient in this feeling, and " see no beauty, that they 
 should desire" their Church, for her tolerancy to the 
 turbulent, and for that soothing strain of hope, which 
 refuses to " shut the gates of Mercy," where more 
 denunciatory creeds would, sometimes savagely, en- 
 throne Despair. As it regards the non-conforming 
 body, it is not easy to conceive that thankfulness could
 
 COLLOQUY II. 131 
 
 very keenly exist in connection with the ubiquity of 
 scruple and morbid sensitiveness of conscience which 
 prevailed of late. The immunities permitted to sec- 
 tarianism by the conciliatory spirit of past ages, and 
 rightly esteemed by their immediate recipients as 
 privileges, are declared by their clearer-minded suc- 
 cessors to be mockeries partial ameliorations serving 
 only to render all restraint intolerable. A little while 
 ago how many malcontents made it their occupation 
 to recruit and marshal out a ludicrous squad of civil 
 and religious grievances scarce-apparent pustules at 
 the worst, inflated into loathsome moral tumours! 
 Most-cheered the jack-a-lantern martyr who boldest 
 bared his arm to show his festering (blue-chalk) scars ; 
 
 E. And hoisted, not the revolutionary red-cap nor 
 the mitred cap episcopal, on a pole chequered with six- 
 teen hundred isms, but an " old hat with the humour 
 of forty times forty fancies prick't in't." A dull trope, 
 this, and interruptive ; but Will must have his way. 
 
 (7. The blaze of modern liberalism confuses old- 
 established ideas of freedom, and manifests that 
 to be tyranny, which not long since was toleration. 
 They who had been accustomed to regard Conscience 
 as the inflexible reprover of moral obliquity, were 
 bewildered at the contrariety of its developments.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 In the dissentient religious world (with one honorable 
 exception,) the strife had ceased to be for correctness 
 of creeds the absorbing aim was closeness of con- 
 federacy ; and advancing into the political boundary, 
 (it was a " narrow bank" and scarcely perceptible that 
 separated the two spheres,) the lamb of spiritual 
 meekness and the lion of avowed republicanism might 
 be seen in most affectionate salutation. The war-cry 
 of the heterogeneous host has, however, died away 
 in the distance; and to the defeated and dispersed 
 tribes is left the sorry and, let us hope, the salutary 
 reminiscence, of an inglorious and . 
 
 " Vaulting ambition, which o'erleapt itself." 
 
 " Whatever," said E. with much seriousness, " may 
 be the defalcation of others' gratitude for the peace 
 which now attends the outward practice of Religion, 
 our duty is clear. Although by casual discussion 
 frequently entrain^, it does not agreeably consort with 
 my disposition, to recur to scenes in human history in 
 which the actors have played unseemly parts ; but I 
 derive the charm of music from the story of good deeds. 
 You, who have sternly reprehended the indiscriminate 
 enlistment and chameleon-livery of Conscience, might 
 frown were I to arrogate her sacred sanction to an
 
 COLLOQUY II. 133 
 
 objection I entertain against entering, myself, into 
 the survey and the scrutiny of depraved human 
 character. I would hardly dare to dignify this un- 
 willingness by the designation of " conscientious;" but 
 it is nevertheless strengthened by grave admonitions, 
 murmured in Reason's ear, and fortified by this R- 
 flexion Morale of Mme. Deshoulieres : 
 
 " Toujours vains, toujours faux, toujours pleins d'injustices, 
 
 Nous crions dans tous nos discours 
 Centre les passions, les foiblesses, les vices, 
 
 Ou nous succombons tous les jours." 
 
 I have often thought upon a saying of Horace Wai- 
 pole age, reverting to a design of Horace Walpole 
 jeune; it not only illustrates aptly, but touchingly, 
 the sharp and summary judgment of character which 
 the young form; the calm and clement adjudication 
 of the old. " In my youth," he says, " I thought of 
 writing a satire on mankind ; but now, in my age, I 
 think I should write an apology for them. Several 
 worthy men, whom I know, fall into such unexpected 
 situations, that to me, who know these situations, their 
 conduct is matter of compassion and not of blame." 
 Besides, conscious of our passions and their propen- 
 sities, w e rush into a position we should sedulously 
 avoid, in arraigning before ourselves, at a tribunal
 
 134 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 whose pillars are " based on rottenness," our fellow- 
 men, vile though they be : the poor culprit is wont 
 so eagerly to usurp the judgment-seat, and an out- 
 lawed criminal himself proceeds as with clean hands 
 to accuse and to condemn ! 
 
 " And what were we frail creatures as we are 
 If the All-merciful should mete to us 
 With the same rigorous measure wherewithal 
 Sinner to sinner metes?" 
 
 " O, Charity!" continued the good Old Man, with 
 still devouter and abstracted earnestness,"O CHARITY ! 
 thou maiden whose chiefest majesty is in thy meek- 
 ness, who shrinkest from sapphire thrones to preside 
 at the hearths of the humble, and who art the herald 
 of all heavenly things! Celestial Visitant, whose 
 proudest banner is the balm, and whose richest trophy 
 is peace; thou that wert the first-born of the children 
 of Eternal LOVE, and that art the joy of seraphs and 
 the spirits of the saints ; Lover of concord, for ever 
 inspiring with unity the harps of the angel-band, and 
 from " the high and holy place" speaking Peace to the 
 sons of men ! fair Favored One of our Father, GOD, 
 how frail a temple hast thou in our froward hearts ! 
 When, O benign Spirit! when shall that sterile soil 
 become as Eden with the fruits of thy planting?
 
 COLLOQUY II. 135 
 
 How long shall we boast that thou Jutst made thine 
 abode in our breast, and that thou hast therein an 
 altar which is inviolate, and that we are at one with 
 the vast family of the flesh ; and yet so oft awaken to 
 a contest that may not come from thy dwelling, and 
 passions that cannot have kindled in thy sanctuary, 
 and dark distrustfulness not born of thee which tell 
 us bodingly that thou, white-mantled Maid ! are but 
 the rare denizen of our troubled sphere art still too 
 much a stranger to our fallen race. Thou hast tuned 
 thy lyre at the eternal Fount, and its burden is 
 evermore of glad tidings; but when shall thy feet 
 be beautiful upon the mountains, and the mountains 
 be made low, that we all may view thy vesture, and 
 know thee from the phantom we now vainly clasp, 
 by the unsullied love that shall in thought and word 
 for ever rise like crystal sparkles from the pure living 
 spring within us?"
 
 COLLOQUY III. 
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE.
 
 COLLOQUY III. 
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARB. 
 
 " Death makes no conquest of this Conqueror; 
 For now he lives in fame, though not in life." 
 
 Julius Caesar. SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 HAVING attained this stage of intimacy and confidence 
 with the tenant of Ivy Lodge, I thenceforth made a 
 weekly pilgrimage thither, with admirable uniformity. 
 A lawyer's protestation of disinterestedness is so often 
 considered and treated as a matter of levity, that I 
 have long since declined protesting by it, and do not, 
 therefore, assert for the steady constancy of my move- 
 ments that charm which inflexible regularity derives 
 from the evident absence of self-interest. Were I not 
 constrained by the consciousness, that a complaint 
 urged by so impotent a limb as am I, against that
 
 140 CHAPTER V. 
 
 gross moral injustice (unfortunately not an indictable 
 offence,) which the legal body sustains, in the ceaseless 
 suspicion which attaches to the actions and assevera- 
 tions of so overwhelming a majority of its members, 
 I would certainly labor hard to blow the cruel doubt 
 in every censorious and contumelious eye, till the 
 pains and penalties of ophthalmia should have wrought 
 remorse. The moral mischief which has been done by 
 " squint Suspicion" is incalculable ; and the chronicles 
 of the law would, probably, demonstrate its amount 
 more amply and more accurately than those of any 
 other profession not under the immediate cognizance 
 of the police. Faculties cannot be borne for ever 
 meekly, where to the frail bearer is always imputed 
 a brow of bronze ; nor can clearness in office preserve 
 its immaculacy, exposed to the perpetual stigma of 
 collusion. I have been a regretful witness to repeated 
 proofs, that virtue, frequently mistaken for vice, has 
 been vitiated; and I know members of the profession 
 who, had fine feeling not been rendered callous by 
 indiscriminate sinister accusations, might even to this 
 day, on coming designedly in contact with the dinner- 
 table of an unsuspecting country gentleman, have 
 disdained to tax him a non-inviting host for a 
 passing opinion, proffered en mangeant.
 
 CHAPTER V. 141 
 
 I merely hint, currents calamo, at the injustice of 
 returning " Disreputable" as a sentence on lawyers 
 en masse, and leave the matter with the law-officers 
 of the crown ; trusting that a corrective measure may 
 appear feasible, and be announced with the next 
 batch of reforms. 
 
 I 
 
 My Ivy-Lodge days were chronologised by white 
 stones ; oh ! very rosy-fronted were those hebdomadal 
 hours. Five summer-evenings had I wandered about 
 the precincts of the Elder's tranquil habitation, lis- 
 tening at times to panegyric, for which a thousand 
 objects in his path supplied him with as many themes. 
 The effervescence of a thankful heart is always eu- 
 phonious, but old age wondrously mellows its effect, 
 and E. looked the gratitude he spake : his was no rota- 
 tory or conventional phraseology, no goodly outside 
 to vacuity, no odious nasal twang signifying nothing, 
 but an incontrollable effusion emanating from the 
 glad perception of good in everything. Of continuous 
 colloquy we had little, or if he " talked the flowing 
 hour," I was distrait: under skiey influences the 
 luscious Summer insisted on such attentions from eye 
 and ear, that garrulity, nathless its melodious flow, 
 was outrivalled ; and it was a more delightful avoca- 
 
 K2
 
 142 CHAPTER V. 
 
 tion to emulate feminine eulogy, pronounced upon a 
 favorite flower, than to extend a patient hearing to 
 never-wearied senescence, although enthusiastic. And 
 when dear mother Nature threw out Night's vaporous 
 reminder that she must have her twilit drop-scene 
 down awhile on the fair world, to prepare her Pageant 
 of the Constellations, then, within doors, I arrested 
 the commencing Elder upon his own confession, that 
 " Poetry, however sublime, was never so effective 
 alone as when wedded to Music;" so the Godfather 
 resigned himself, in attitude attent a perfect model 
 to talkative sires, simple fathers or baptismal, who 
 have daughters of delicious note resigned himself, 
 I say, a charmed listener to the rich, soul-appealing 
 melodies of Mrs. Hemans ; concords of sweet sound 
 entrancing to old men and children, but exceedingly 
 perturbing to young men and maidens pledged to the 
 principle of celibatic independence. And five nights 
 such nights as make me think the "white-fired 
 maiden" in her dotage now, and her retinue dege- 
 nerating five oriental nights had mantled, firstly 
 with carmine caught from the sun's adieu, and then 
 with the pale hue flooding from the pensive moon, 
 that quiet umbrageous retirement, and the Old Man's 
 voice had been subdominant, heard now and then,
 
 CHAPTER V. 143 
 
 in rapturous comment, in the lull of strains sweet as 
 if wafted over violet-beds, but very variously bur- 
 dened now hopeful, now despondent as the theme 
 of song had sprung forth in bright heart-sunshine or 
 in its sombrous shadows. 
 
 In this transitory condition, however, we know 
 that " nought is lasting;" and mankind are pretty 
 well agreed that enjoyment is lamentably short-lived :. 
 the converse state is not so ephemeral ; indeed, with 
 many there is a woful disproportion between the time 
 given them to laugh in and the time allotted them to 
 mourn. E. seemed strongly of opinion that there 
 was a season for talking as well as a season for singing, 
 and on the sixth evening his conduct portended dis- 
 cussion. A portly volume of Shakspeare was lying 
 open on the table, implying recent perusal of the 
 Winter's Tale : the book had been a costly copy of 
 the Poet; and a juvenile observer, of a liberal turn 
 of mind, might, from its broken back and its innu- 
 merable paper-scrap projections, have instantly in- 
 ferred that the book's supporting-shelf was a dusty- 
 visaged sinecurist. Notwithstanding the fealty which 
 every English man and woman owes the Poet-King, 
 I would just then have declined paying prosaic tribute
 
 144 CHAPTER V. 
 
 to any one (always excepting our right-loyally-re- 
 garded Lady the Queen), and would still have said, 
 
 " Let rich Music's tongue 
 Unfold imagined happiness;" 
 
 but there was a deliberate purpose in the Elder's 
 manner which forbade remonstrance; and looking at 
 and listening to the earnest Ancient, I became quickly 
 reconciled. Would, only, that I could do his style 
 and manner greater justice. 
 
 The Elder, extolling incidentally the exhaustless 
 mines of poetic wealth which modern publication has 
 compressed in waistcoat-pocket editions of Shakspeare 
 and Milton, adverted to the master-minds themselves : 
 
 E. I would shrink abashed from a supposed critical 
 stricture on the works of Shakspeare and Milton; 
 for, making no pretension to a correct judgment, 
 and valuing whatever yields me profitable pleasure 
 or leads to the knowledge of myself, fifty years of 
 admiration of what I approve as " good," have left 
 me neither leisure nor inclination to "argue much 
 of evil." But to my uninstructed eye there appears 
 a pervading characteristic in the productions of each 
 of these illustrious minds, wherein, despite occasional 
 aberrancy, we recognise Shakspeare as to this world
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 145 
 
 its proper oracle, and Milton as the oracle of other 
 worlds to this. The one, in his delineation of men, 
 seems to have ascended on an eagle's wing, and with 
 stronger than an eagle's eye to have scanned the 
 mazy line of human character to its utmost verge, 
 touching, in its remote extremes, the angels who keep 
 and those who kept not their first estate : the other, 
 aiming at " things unattempted," and advancing into 
 spheres untrodden, appears to have sped upon the 
 pinions of a spirit to the centre of the Triune council, 
 and shared in the arcana of the Eternal. Shakspeare 
 unveils the recess of Passion in man, and traces its 
 every gradation, from the depths of the terrible and 
 the vile, to the eminences of the tender and virtuous : 
 Milton assumes a similar sovereignty over spiritual 
 worlds, from the profoundest conclave of the apostate, 
 to the sublimest concourse of the adoring ; in daring 
 ubiquity we find him now an accessary to the designs 
 of heaven, and now a revealer of the dark deliberations 
 of fiends. Neither Shakspeare, in his universe, nor 
 Milton in his, has submitted to limits, or confines, or 
 demarcation; but each reigns in the infinite. And 
 as with their several portraitures of life it was ex- 
 pedient to connect the scenery and circumstance of 
 its exhibition, therefore the visible creation found a
 
 146 CHAPTER V. 
 
 master-limner in the one, and the regions of the 
 glorified and the outcast in the other : and this tracery 
 of subordinate objects illustrates to perfection the 
 loveliness of the seen, and harmonises well with the 
 imagined grandeur of the invisible. 
 
 C. Around the brow of the most popular of that 
 exalted Two, how strenuous and spreading is the 
 disposition to weave fresh laurel! 
 
 E. Displayed, too, contemporaneously with the 
 decadence of the represented drama. The Poet's 
 conceptions come not now, or rarely come, " bodied 
 forth" in approvable personification; and the Poet's 
 page is the almost-exclusive mirror which reflects his 
 greatness. Yet therein lies a magnetic influence 
 precluding the decay of admiration, a sovereign 
 indestructible influence, of potency " in every clime 
 and travel where we may ;" for now are the isles afar 
 allying themselves in confraternity with the proud 
 Isle of his home, to sempiternalise the name and fame 
 of SHAKSPEARE ! Nor must there be a withered leaf 
 in that Bard's coronal, while the earth has a green 
 tree or living flower on its surface, and a living hand 
 to cherish and redeck the chaplet! 
 
 C. Hamlet's ejaculation on his poisoned sire 
 
 " Take him for all 
 I shall not look upon his like again"
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 147 
 
 is now become of every-day appropriation, and is not 
 therefore any longer the especial elegy of departed 
 eminence. But may it not with singular propriety be 
 applied to its author? emphatically of this Poet, can 
 we hope to look upon his like again? 
 
 E. If of this " brief candle," mortal life, the 
 " better part be burnt out,"* probability might oppose 
 the advent of a Shakspeare secundus ; but that same 
 Nature, who " hath framed strange fellows in her 
 time,"f endows no man with authority to predicate 
 from the past the scope or capacities of her future 
 achievements: she caverns the mould of which her 
 fantastic creature man is fabricated, too profoundly in 
 secret, treasures her substance too " curiously, in the 
 lowest parts of the earth," to enable the geologist of 
 character, from the analysation of human clay historic, 
 to chart out learnedly the substrata of forthcoming de- 
 velopments in form of man. However, " no perfection 
 in reversion shall have a praise in present,"* and we 
 may diligently devote our praise to excellency which 
 our eyes have seen and our hands have handled. 
 Yet, the beam of assured belief of heaven, wherewith 
 the merciful Creator sustains the anxious creature, 
 
 * 2 Henry iv. i. 2. f Merchant of Venice, i. 1. 
 
 J Troilus and Cressida, iii. 2.
 
 148 CHAPTER V. 
 
 a beam which shines brightest upon mortality's ex- 
 piring embers, and whose divine consolation and 
 guidance cheered the Poet, inspires us also not 
 with the wavering trust of renowned men of old, with 
 whom a future life was hypothetical, and whose souls' 
 desires for a reunion with seers who had gone before 
 were burdened with misgivings but with " the sure 
 and certain hope" of looking upon himself , in a better 
 country and under a fairer aspect than that, when, 
 
 " Beaten and chopp'd with tamed antiquity,"* 
 
 William Shakspeare, the mortal, bewailed the marring 
 touch of Time. 
 
 C. The human heart which is the " haunt and 
 main region" of every poet's pen, consists of so much 
 which, as Wordsworth asserts, is essential to it and 
 eternal there, and these inseparable and immutable 
 qualities have been so comprehensively and, very 
 frequently, so inimitably treated by Shakspeare, that 
 Nature, as far as we are able to conceive her capacity 
 for illustration, could hardly furnish materials for 
 another mind like his, whose empire should be vast, 
 and yet natural. In its physiological proportions a 
 contracted sphere, in its spiritual attributes a realm 
 * Shakspeare. Poems.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 149 
 
 of undefined dilatability, it might of this moral me- 
 tropolis of poets, the heart, be said, 
 
 " a crooked figure may 
 Attest, in little place, a million;"* 
 
 and Shakspeare seems as if by Nature chosen and 
 commissioned as Delineator General of our race, and 
 thus supremely delegated, to have gone forth un- 
 dauntedly over the expansive and uneven territory 
 of the sentiments and passions of mankind. The 
 Poet has often availed himself of auxiliary aid, and 
 frequently adventures, with no deceptive self-reliance, 
 beyond the boundary of the natural; but within that 
 boundary has he left space for a future Shakspeare ; 
 for one who, like his sovereign self, would be 
 " cabinned, cribbed, confined," in a kind of colony of 
 character; one to whose discursive disposition it would 
 be a natural and uncontrollable necessity to follow 
 in the track of men, wherever Nature dictated ? 
 
 E. Thou art unmindful, O Querist, that Nature, 
 of whom thou speakest as in some parts absolute from 
 the beginning, is, in other parts, most evanescent. 
 Reveal, I adjure thee, before this, our other auditor, 
 after whom it is that well-discerning Will hath, by 
 * Henry v. Chorus.
 
 150 CHAPTER V. 
 
 the mouth of Hamlet, designated Frailty ;* and then, 
 admire the fitness of a feminine appellative for that 
 volatile Dame, whom thy imagination doth mistakenly 
 picture as an antique quakeress, clad in unvarying 
 russet, fashioned in starched propriety, and vested 
 with perdurability. Thy device savoureth too much 
 of demureness, friend! Believe it, Nature, though 
 turned of her six thousandth year, is not a straight- 
 laced, crimp-bodiced grandam, of orders grey; alas 
 for manifold goodmen whom it painfully concerneth, 
 doth she not, lacking that staidness which might be 
 expected iu a mother of millions, doth she not by 
 example countenance, in mothers of units and of tens, 
 an itching after new apparel? Pardon this levity, 
 most grave and reverend Signor, but the excessive 
 gravity of your latter interrogation too much o'er- 
 tasked my imperturbability; but know, that with a 
 personage ycleped Folly, in a play of Ford,f I might 
 truly say, " I love not any whom I laugh not at : pretty 
 strange humour is't not?" and you might properly 
 reply, with a certain Raybright, " To any one that 
 knows you not, it is." You suspect the capability 
 of Nature to furnish illustrative material for another 
 
 * " Frailty, thy name is Woman!" Hamlet, i. 2. 
 t The Sun's Darling, i. 1.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 151 
 
 Shakspeare, the first having so comprehensively dealt 
 with the permanent passions of the mind; yet the 
 process of time, which may not materially alter essen- 
 tial attributes, continually diversifies their develop- 
 ment ; and in the changed aspect we sometimes fail to 
 recognise the individual. The constituent parts of a 
 kaleidoscope are identically the same in each of its 
 fortuitous conformations; but the effect of the least 
 commotion is manifested by a changed figure. The 
 word which better than any other characterises our 
 condition, is progression; and Coriolanus, when he 
 thus accuses a fickle mob, 
 
 " With every minute yon do change a mind,"* 
 
 r supplies the whole world with a text on instability. 
 In these mundane mutations the poets find their 
 " occupation;" and perhaps it is matter for rejoicing 
 that these mutations are not few or far between, sup- 
 posing that Nature were to always have her quiver 
 full of minstrel-children: monotony, Sir, must have 
 made them warble in a flat key ; things would have 
 died in description and looked dusky in song; detail 
 must have engendered ennui by disgusting minuteness. 
 Poor Nature herself would have had to endure an 
 * Coriolanus, i. 1.
 
 152 CHAPTER V. 
 
 inquisition, her inquisitors being her own infants ; and 
 they being often " gravelled for lack of matter,"* the 
 old gentlewoman's hairs must, metaphorically, have 
 all been numbered. What a weary session would 
 impatient man have had, before a faded drop-scene ! 
 But since our lot is cast where all are at once spec- 
 tators of and actors in a revolving panorama, tedium 
 is not; and now, exempted from " dropping buckets 
 into empty wells," or giving superfluous coatings to 
 previously-painted lilies, ceaseless configurations sup- 
 ply fresh materiel for the Poet, who can with reason 
 only murmur when 
 
 " Change grows too changeable without being new." 
 
 The fitful Shelley a " wandering star," sometimes 
 obscure, at others, coruscating with intense brilliancy 
 has written so beautifully on this fertile theme, 
 that, like a sweet, sad strain ./Eolian, sweeps over 
 one's memory his wail upon 
 
 " MUTABILITY. 
 
 " We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; 
 
 How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, 
 Streaking the darkness radiantly ! yet soon 
 
 Night closes round, and they are lost for ever: 
 
 * As You Like it, iv. 1.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 153 
 
 Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings 
 Give various response to each varying blast, 
 
 To whose frail frame no second motion brings 
 One mood or modulation like the last. 
 
 We rest a dream has power to poison sleep: 
 
 We rise one wandering thought pollutes the day: 
 
 We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep, 
 Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away : 
 
 It is the same ! For, be it joy or sorrow, 
 
 The path of its departure still is free: 
 Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow, 
 
 Naught may endure, save Mutability." 
 
 The last line has passed into a proverb, and involves 
 a paradox. But to sail back again into the luminous 
 wreathy wake of the Swan: while circumstance 
 changes, character will change ; and vice versa if man 
 be a thing superior to " the beasts that perish ;" and 
 he to whom the Desert hath its divinity will ever 
 find its " pools filled with water" he who hath 
 received the true afflatus will never fruitlessly invoke 
 the Muse, so long as, day by day, unprecedented feats, 
 fancies, and frailties provoke the exclamation 
 
 " Can such things be, 
 Without our special wonder?"* 
 
 Midway between the creator and the copyist there 
 * Macbeth, iii. 5.
 
 154 CHAPTER V. 
 
 is a ground which Shakspeare nobly occupies : I mean 
 by his creations those of his productions which are 
 altogether or chiefly ideal, and by his copies such as 
 are representations of individual character ; but it is 
 to his art of conformation that I allude as to a central 
 ability; his skill in selecting from the varied soil 
 of humanity, portions of clay of diverse color and 
 consistency, but human nevertheless and therefore 
 congruous, and then fabricating these elements into 
 man or woman with such facile grace and consum- 
 mate verisimilitude, that the ecstasy of "admiration 
 having in a measure subsided we ask, with such 
 surprise as the knowledge of his measureless power 
 to charm permits, 
 
 " What impossible matter will he make easy next?"* 
 
 C. A Quarterly Reviewer has helped us to com- 
 prehend the function to which you allude: he says 
 of the mind of Shakspeare, that it was as " a magic 
 mirror, in which all human nature's possible forms 
 and combinations were present, intuitively and in- 
 herently; not conceived, but as connatural portions 
 of his own humanity." 
 
 E. Would it be just could admiration so consent 
 * Tempest, ii. 1.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 155 
 
 to dwarf the attributes of Koyal William Shakspeare, 
 as to admit, that where he did not create he copied? 
 Was it among women, to the extremest degree " un- 
 certain hard to please," that he found the original 
 complete of witching Rosalind? well, by the way, 
 for the peace of all ye gallants under forty, that 
 Rosalinds are rarce aces ! Was it after " a child of 
 our grandmother Eve, a female ; or for our more sweet 
 understanding, a woman,"* that he drew, in all its 
 ultra-amazonian proportions, the helpmeet of Macbeth? 
 But apart alike from creation and from conformation, 
 and where the Poet may be said to have drawn from 
 a definite design supplied by Nature, even here do 
 we not involuntarily acknowledge, as our eye is 
 arrested at one or other of the master-strokes where- 
 with his pages abound, 
 
 " ft is the witness still of excellency !"t 
 
 C. His pages do, indeed, abound with treasures. 
 It is not with Shakspeare as with others, illustrious 
 in poetic annals, whose gems are comparatively rare 
 and sometimes cumbrously imbedded; in Shakspeare 
 their " sensible, warm motion," is everywhere percep- 
 tible : we have not far to follow the flo wings of his most 
 * Love's Labour Lost, i. 1. f Much Ado about Nothing, ii.3.
 
 156 CHAPTER V. 
 
 potent pen, before the heart pauses with dread or 
 hurries on with delectable emotion. Were ever the 
 glowing offspring of Imagination so profusely gene- 
 rated, and seemingly so inadvertently?. the giving 
 " a local habitation" to a thousand thronging children 
 of his fancy, appears to have no more impoverished 
 his resources than does the ceaseless current of a 
 mountain-spring exhaust its source. It is the question 
 of a celebrated living writer,* in reference to the 
 Poet's mental fecundity, " If Shakspeare had lived 
 till now, could he have exhausted his ideas?" 
 
 E. Of a verity, never, never were orient pearls 
 so much at random strung, as by Immortal William ! 
 How is it that, in speaking of this Giant among the 
 Great, and with voices, too, touched with veneration, 
 we dare to syllable his deathless name, as though we 
 were his comrades or his friends ? Is there witchery 
 in William which John has not? or, as we regard 
 in their works the Poetic Potentates thus severally 
 distinguished, is our attachment to one, impetuous ; 
 to the other, timorous in its advances biassed by 
 known distinctive idiosyncrasies? Necker avowed 
 himself thunderstruck with the familiarity of certain 
 perfumed dilettanti, we may suppose who spoke of 
 * Buhver.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 157 
 
 their Pascal, their Corneille : Pascal, illustrious in the 
 high-priesthood of Piety, was candidate for a more 
 incorruptible crown than the Muses' ; but of a greater 
 than Corneille, I nay we, we British-born, a " band 
 of brothers" in our heart-homage to that Compatriot 
 who hath no compeer we talk of him as of an elder 
 brother, for we feel that his noble nature would have 
 scorned no fellowship which the traits of that same 
 noble nature had prompted in honest bosoms. His 
 pen, the pregnant channel of poetic thought, con- 
 tinually wins you to the Poet, who carries admiration, 
 and affection with it, by coups-de-grace as from a 
 fairy's finger. How the Elf rest his manes ! went 
 in and out too, and circumambulated, and scaled, and 
 descended, and did as he pleased with, that complex 
 and, to the many, inscrutable structure, the Womanly 
 Heart! Needing no guide but his genius, nor any 
 licence but the general commission you just now 
 spoke of, he entered it as a lord his chateau, saun- 
 tered lovingly about its corridors, read many a strange 
 writing on its walls, saw spectacles how varied! 
 in its many chambers, and peering into its penetralium 
 or magazine perceived, or says he did the demoiselle 
 may tell us if he fibs : perceived how puzzling and 
 unimagined is its artillery and modes of action and 
 
 L 2
 
 158 CHAPTER V. 
 
 strategy, and how that wordy weapons, sharp as very 
 swords, are sometimes softer than butter in their secret 
 meaning. Yet, when he follows the current of his own 
 generous heart's impulses, how high sentiment, noble- 
 heartedness, and " the soul of gentleness," pour out, 
 as at flood-gates, into Shakspeare's Conceptions of 
 Woman! He will tickle you, or as many as have 
 not quite forgotten themselves to stone, when he re- 
 moves from the busy hive some dark sliding-panes, and 
 discloses la grande passion in some of its machinations 
 and love is a lugubrious business without laughter; 
 but as he reveals its silent, abstracted, and devouter 
 workings, he will have you do as he himself does, 
 " with gentle hand, touch," for it is an holy thing. 
 And then, knowing with all its lofty virtue its inhe- 
 rent weakness, with what finely barbed and feathered 
 arrows does he besiege the fortress of feminine love ! 
 At this present our colloquial apparatus is hardly 
 enough unstrung for pathos, and we turn in preference 
 to the whirling flight of bluff Harry's blunted cloth- 
 yard. 'Tis said that Dr. Johnson would rather have 
 dispensed with King Will's exhibition of bold King 
 Harry the Fifth, in forma prod; but the lion of 
 Bolt-court sleeps, and inferior animals may therefore 
 more freely disport in " that Kealm of Opinion which
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 159 
 
 no law can reach."* I would not yet exchange that 
 sang froid suit of Harry for a hundred specimens of 
 more rarified sentimentality : 'tis a unique and incom- 
 parable exposition of a brave, burly Briton, who 
 would " die, 'tis true ; but for love, by the Lord, no !" 
 Certes, after Will's crayon that Conqueror out of his 
 corslet is " the best king of good-fellows ;" and many 
 thanks to the Warwickshire Wizard for a peep at 
 fond-heartedness under " a stubborn outside and 
 aspect of iron." 
 
 " I speak to tbee plain soldier. And while thou liv'st, dear Kate, 
 take a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy; for he perforce must 
 do thee right, because he .hath not the gift to woo in other places : 
 for these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into 
 ladies' favours they do always reason themselves out again. What! 
 a speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad; a good leg will 
 fall ; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a 
 curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will 
 wax hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon, or, 
 rather, the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright, and never 
 changes, but keeps his course truly. And what say'st thou then to 
 my love? Speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee." 
 
 Kate asks her royal father's master a natural question : 
 " Is it possible dat I should love the enemy of France?" 
 
 and, for her patriotism alone, deserved better things 
 * Bulwer.
 
 160 CHAPTER V. 
 
 from Hal's hands than this indigestible morceau of 
 perplexity : 
 
 " No; it is not possible that you should love the enemy of France, 
 Kate : but in loving me you should love the friend of France; for I 
 love France so well, that I will not part with a village of it; I will 
 have it all mine; and, Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, 
 then yours is France, and you are mine." 
 
 Then Katherine la plus belle: 
 
 " I cannot tell vat is dot." 
 
 And when, at last, the " divine deesse" finds the plain 
 soldier irresistible, and surrenders, provided " it shall 
 please le roy son pere" Harry Plantagenet's portrait- 
 painter displays a conquering sovereign's smile with 
 great significancy : 
 " Nay, it will please him well, Kate; it shall please him, Kate." 
 
 To return again to Shakspeare .general. Never 
 was there a pioneer who marched by a less circuitous 
 route to the heart's core, or with equal facility recorded 
 its mazy workings and windings serpentine. He 
 possessed a passport a singular privilege of entree 
 of permanent validity, in virtue of which he dived to 
 the springs of human action, though they were deeper 
 by fathoms than the love of Rosalind;* and though 
 a host of heart-interpreters have sounded and reported 
 
 * As You Like it, iv. 3.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAXSPEARE. 161 
 
 these hidden springs, whose reports have often been 
 enveloped in obscurity well-nigh profound as the 
 springs themselves, yet list to mighty Will, and you 
 have their most lucid exposition, deepest meaning, 
 truest import. Familiar with the world within world, 
 man, as with the hornbook of his infancy, 
 
 " Turn him to any cause of policy, 
 The gordian knot of it he will unloose 
 Familiar as his garter." 
 
 You alluded to the multiplicity of poetical beauties 
 which distinguish the page of Shakspeare, and to the 
 inadvertency with which they are dispersed. Nu- 
 merically, they are, indeed, a lovely legion; and in 
 their careless, unstudied disposition, resemble 
 
 " a forest-bank in Spring, 
 All flushed with violets and anemones." 
 
 Are there any stores like unto Will's, from which 
 admirers, entering with a cacoethes excerpendi, return 
 so laden with goodly proofs of Genius, Fancy, Wis- 
 dom ? Open the massy volume of that 
 
 " Dear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame," 
 
 and over every of its prolific pages may we not each 
 eagerly exclaim, with Fortinbras, 
 
 " I have some rights of memory in this kingdom!" * 
 
 * Hamlet, last scene.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 It is not possible satisfactorily to specialise beauty, 
 where, as in that teeming treasure-house, the Works 
 of Shakspeare, its developments are innumerable as 
 to the eye of childhood appear the stars of heaven. 
 The casual quotation of passages from his works I 
 dislike, though Coleridge, in asserting Shakspeare's 
 unrivalled excellence, stated that " proof positive" 
 of that pre-eminency would be afforded by such a 
 criterion: but the plan is objectionable; if the gem be 
 estimable it should retain its author's setting. I 
 tolerate no vagrancy here, (continued E. laughingly, 
 laying his hand on the volume before him,) not even 
 vagrant admiration: nay, I would conceal air-guns 
 among these priceless leaves, that should explode 
 upon fingers filching for Excerpta. Seriously (you 
 may say to me, as Goneril to her poor old father, 
 
 " As you are old and reverend, you should be wise*") 
 
 seriously, then, is it satisfactory to turn Memory 
 adrift here, like a cockle-boat on a shoreless sea ? is it 
 not better far to sail leisurely round these flowery 
 coral rocks, to float slowly and admiringly over 
 beds of gleaming pearl? 
 
 C. While your faculty of speech is recruiting 
 * King Lear, i. 4.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 163 
 
 strength, I frankly plead guilty of trespassing and 
 poaching, against the statute you would establish. 
 The Ivy Lodge quota of luxurious leisure is not, be 
 it remembered, common to many; and in that one 
 volume there is, to those to whom reading is a relax- 
 ation from the toil of life, " the labor of an age in 
 piled" leaves. A casual spoil of yesterday I found 
 in an expression of Goneril's father : 
 
 " O, how this mother swells toward my heart! 
 Hysterica passio ! down, thou climbing sorrow, 
 Thy element's below !"* 
 
 In this exclamation there is a remarkable example 
 of the rhetorical figure, prosopopoeia : 
 
 " DOWN, THOU CLIMBING SORROW!" 
 
 It would be difficult to adduce many instances in our 
 tongue of personification more terse and emphatic; 
 yet on the Poet's page it occurs but as an ordinary 
 ebullition of the passionate Lear ; there is no flourish 
 of trumpets in its -neighbourhood, announcing that a 
 king was about to make a right royal use of language. 
 But the utter absence of oratorical ostentation is one 
 especial characteristic of this voluminous author. 
 * King Lear, ii. 4.
 
 164 CHAPTER V. 
 
 E. O! what ineffable modesty may be beholden 
 here, in union with transcendent majesty! what 
 wondrous ownership of almost superhuman genius, 
 and entire abstinency from pretension; the giant's 
 strength, exercised with girlish gentleness. Heard 
 you ever this Poet, who, if inexhaustible versatility 
 of mind might be allowed to justify self-complacency, 
 might have lorded it as the Emperor of Egotists 
 yet where he himself may be suspected of the parole, 
 heard you ever a prelude or coda to a passage how- 
 soever grand or brilliant, which could be detected in 
 resolving into " I am Sir Oracle?" Is not the tenor 
 of the Poet's personal plea, 
 
 " Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts :" 
 "Was he not speaking for himself, when " admired 
 Miranda" accounted modesty the jewel in her dower? 
 Mark, and inwardly digest, this speaking picture from 
 the Winter's Tale, of feeling too intense for words: 
 the king Leontes receives intelligence of his long-lost 
 daughter, and the scene is with the king and an 
 attached lord. 
 
 " There was speech in their dumbness language in their very 
 gesture : they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed or one 
 destroyed : A notable passion of wonder appeared in them ; but the 
 wisest beholder, who knew no more than seeing, could not say if 
 the importance were joy or sorrow ; but in the extremity of the one 
 it must needs be."
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 165 
 
 The allusion to a cause of wonderment so grand as 
 the loss or rescue of a world, sheds an halo of solemnity 
 over this picture, which, as it essays to portray the 
 intensity of paternal emotions, does not shock re- 
 ligious feeling by irreverent misplacement. But let 
 us turn from the painting to the artist. Has he 
 reserved this description for the pomp of royal reci- 
 tation? has he allotted it to the humblest even of 
 his heroes ? Nay, it comes from one of the dramatist's 
 third-class personce, a gentleman; one of the true 
 Shaksperian school, though, who is not " loth to cast 
 away his speech, having taken great pains to con it,"* 
 but who prefaces this unlabored and exquisite recital 
 with the apologetical assurance, 
 
 " I make a broken delivery of the business." 
 
 C. The patient endurance of Hermione, queen 
 of Leontes, in that same play, has always appeared to 
 me an admirable exemplification of a noble woman's 
 deportment under the keenest anguish known to virtue 
 the suspicion of its fidelity. In seasons when in- 
 tense feelings rush into the heart like converging and 
 convulsive waves, drowning its utterance, the eye 
 frequently supplies a timely conduit from the swelling 
 
 * Twelfth-Night, i. v.
 
 166 CHAPTER V. 
 
 flood. No " holy moisture," however, relaxes the 
 tense, tearless sufferings of Hermione; and in the 
 place of that fluent relief to and eloquent advocate of 
 speechless Sorrow, we have the moving protestation 
 of vilified Innocency: 
 
 " Good my lords, 
 
 I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
 Commonly are, the want of which vain dew 
 Perchance shall dry your pities ; but I have 
 That honourable grief lodged HERE, which burns 
 Worse than tears drown /"* 
 
 E. A seeming echo from the inmost hall of Grief ! 
 but of grief so uninterpretable, that in listening to 
 those excellent accents of an injured Woman's woe, 
 we may be said to incline our ear but to a parable. 
 The misery of Hermione is of no oral kind ; it must 
 be borne incommunicably because it cannot be told: 
 and as it is the privilege of woman's nature to be 
 susceptible of a finer because more sinless order of 
 joy than man's, is not more poignant woe, alas! its 
 contingent penalty? It is an occasional effect of 
 the excess of sorrow to torpify the mind's emotions ; 
 and we owe to Maturin this graphic delineation of 
 such an effect: 
 
 * Winter's Tale, ii. 2.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 167 
 
 " Her cheek of youth was beautiful, 
 Till withering sorrow blanch'd the bright rose there: 
 But Grief did lay his icy finger on it, 
 And chill'd her to a cold and joyless statue." 
 
 But in Hermione there is a conflict of strong passions 
 which prevents her acute anguish from lapsing into 
 lethargy. For it is the agony of one grand affection 
 which soonest subsides into stupor; the violence 
 of an isolated passion which, from a state of perilous 
 perturbation, declines to passiveness: in Hermione 
 it is not solely the scorned wife who suffers wrong ; it 
 is also the loving mother, from whom her babe is torn, 
 and she left desolate in her degradation. And well 
 might her unweeping bosom burn with its parching 
 burthen of " honorable grief!" sad spectacle to the 
 imagination, a woman's breast made thus a battle- 
 field for conflicting calamities subjected, not to the 
 rapid outrages of a dismantling march, but to the 
 scorching fury of a lasting strife ! 
 
 C. Although few of us resemble Geneveve* in 
 
 preferring songs whose burden is grievous rather than 
 
 joyous, there is a grandeur in the grief of Hermione 
 
 which we contemplate admiringly, as the enthusiastic 
 
 * fn Coleridge's lines on " Love."
 
 168 CHAPTER V. 
 
 artist the fascinating features of a chef-d'oeuvre. It is, 
 in truth, a study, the character of Hermione, of Sorrow 
 majestic in mould and symmetry : how different in 
 the sanctity of her distress is this cruelly-divorced wife, 
 to the clamorous widow Constance ! Hermione long- 
 ing for her father's presence in her tribulation, " for 
 pity, not revenge ;" Constance, in boisterous impre- 
 cation 
 
 E. Call the expression of that ardent Mother's 
 heart vehement, not boisterous. Count it pragmatical 
 if you will, but I interpose an objection to " clamour " 
 also, as descriptive of the energy of an anguished 
 mother's love and it is from anguished love that the 
 fervor, sometimes the fearful fervor, of Constance 
 derives its prime impetus. Ah ! that maternal instinct, 
 which dwells in many mothers as a profound affection 
 seldom seen in strife, is in Constance developed in 
 the throe and paroxysm of quick passion; her heart 
 is as it were a volcano, whence, mingling with the 
 anathemas of indignant wrong, her mother's love 
 gushes like terrific torrents of lava, and you wonder 
 that her bosom is not burned by its indwelling fire. 
 O, but a mystery of mysteries is, in the abstract, a 
 Mother's love ! of many human feelings unfathomable,
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 169 
 
 the most fathomless. Well affirms one who knew its 
 intensity, 
 
 " There is none 
 
 In all this cold and hollow world no fount 
 Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within 
 A Mother's heart !"* 
 
 I protest that in all the copious chronicles which tell 
 us of the heart's purest sensations and sympathies, I 
 hear no low but thrilling tones of 
 
 " The still, sad music of Humanity," 
 
 which move me more mightily than does this Beauty 
 of History, told, I fancy, with greater pathos in the 
 French tongue than in ours : its brief exordium like- 
 wise justifies recital: 
 
 " Quelle plume pourroit peindre toutes les scenes 
 de douleur ou de joie qui se passent dans le sein 
 d'une mere! Qui pourroit decrire ses tendres sol- 
 licitudes pour 1'objet de sa tendresse; ses allarmes, 
 ses agitations, lorsqu'elle est en danger de le perdre ; 
 son desespoir lorsqu'elle 1'a perdu? La femme d'un 
 noble Venitien, ayant vu mourir son fils unique, 
 s'abandonnoit aux plus cruelles douleurs : un religieux 
 tachoit de la consoler. ' Souvenez-vous,' lui disoit-il, 
 
 * Mrs. Hemans.
 
 170 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ' du patriarchs Abraham, a qui Dieu commanda de 
 plonger lui-meme le poignard dans le sein de son fils, 
 et qui obeit, sans murmurer. ' Ah ! mon reverend 
 pere,' re"pondit-elle, ' Dieu n'auroit jamais commande 
 ce sacrifice a une mere!"' 
 
 C. Nor would any but a mother's heart have 
 suggested the impossibility of God's requiring such 
 a sacrifice. How many tender tales are told of ma- 
 ternal love, the most unquenchable and unselfish of 
 the affections; and often how unrequited is it by the 
 object of its solicitude solicitude which, in its quality 
 of long-sufferance, is of all human properties the near- 
 est of kin to the divine attributes of pitying patience 
 and freeness to forgive; to the marvellous tenacity of 
 maternal above all other tenderness it belongs, to live 
 on through despisal and rejection and long acquaint- 
 ance with grief. Shakspeare, in Lear, has made the 
 maddened king invoke a malediction upon Goneril, 
 which, dire in its import, affords proof of the un- 
 bounded degree in which the Poet was conversant 
 with the anatomy of the moral feelings, and with their 
 respective vulnerability to the shafts of Calamity : 
 
 " Turn all her mother's pains and benefits 
 To laughter and contempt; that she may feel 
 How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
 To have a thankless child !"
 
 A WORD EN PASSANT UPON MRS. HEMANS. 171 
 
 Of those who have most touchingly depicted the 
 heaven-moulded lineaments of maternal love, con- 
 spicuous is the Poetess whose affirmation of a mother's 
 heart being the sole earthly fount of deathless love 
 you just now repeated. " Unused albeit to the melt- 
 ing mood,"* I remember well, that on first reading 
 her lines entitled " Flowers and Music in a Room of 
 Sickness," 
 
 E. " Build there, carpenter; the air is sweet !"f 
 
 C. moist symptoms of " my mother came into 
 
 mine eyes," and " made me play the woman."+ " It 
 is impossible," remarked an eloquent preacher whom 
 I recently heard, " it is impossible to possess without 
 grief, if not without passion;" and it does indeed 
 appear inevitable to the abode of pure Love, if im- 
 petuous, that Sorrow also should have joint possession. 
 No light or easy yoke was that of the Affections to 
 this most passible poetess, with whose lay of love 
 there ever mingled an " under-music of lament :" the 
 tears of her love and sorrow " flow, into one another 
 like crystal rivers," which bear along an ark magni- 
 ficent, from whence proceeds awhile the voice of 
 repining, anon of resignation, and then of rapt anti- 
 cipation. Her allusions to the land which " Sorrow 
 
 * Othello, v. 2. f Troilus and Cressida, iii. 2. I Hen. viii. iii. 2.
 
 172 CHAPTER V. 
 
 and Death may not enter," are, for the most part, 
 glowing images of beatitude ; and her spirit's com- 
 munings with its Source, though differently reported, 
 have much of the impressive and august grandeur of 
 the Night Thoughts. You will remember Lilian, 
 checking the hopeful Mother when she would cheer 
 her child with the promise of again gladly " going 
 forth with the day-spring:" 
 
 " Hope it not ! 
 
 Dream it no more, my mother! there are things 
 Known but to God and to the parting soul 
 Which feels his thrilling summons." 
 
 Over many of her paintings there is the mingled 
 gorgeousness and sadness of an autumnal eve. There 
 is a melancholy interest in the meditation of those 
 " mantling shadows" that in their density sometimes 
 shut out from her sight Faith's beckoning finger and 
 Hope's radiant smile : true, in the eternal field of stars 
 the brightest planet may be temporarily eclipsed ; but 
 a vision like hers, divinely fostered, could not long be 
 darkened by the April-cloud of Life or the Winter- 
 cloud of Death; and as she advanced nearer to the 
 Everduring Spring, it is the gladness of a triumph to 
 know that 
 
 " hour by hour her soul's dissolving shroud, 
 Melted to radiance like a silvery cloud."
 
 A PASSING COMMENT UPON YOUNG. 173 
 
 E. The Muse awarded to Mrs. Hemans a plume 
 from the loveliest of the birds of Paradise, before the 
 plumage had suffered by the Fall; but how those 
 deep, melodious tones of hers, were ever echoing the 
 requiem of Innocence, departing from the stricken 
 scene of her dethronement, when entered 
 
 " Sin into the world, and all our woe." 
 
 Now, however, have she and Sorrow sundered their 
 alliance, and her lyre hath forgotten its " broken 
 music" since the freed Minstrel attained the apothe- 
 osis of her brilliant earthly song 
 
 " Where fiery passion- clouds have no abode, 
 And the sky's temple-arch o'erflows with GOD."* 
 
 You just now mentioned the Night Thoughts, in 
 remarking upon one of the rich veins in the mine 
 of melody bequeathed to us by Mrs. Hemans I mean 
 that elevated tone in which she dilates on Life, and 
 Death, and Immortality. Reverting for a moment to 
 Young, how impressively has that deep Thinker on 
 those tremendous themes portrayed that momentous 
 junction of life with death, to the realisation of which 
 each one, in his own person, is surely but reluctantly 
 
 * Despondency and Aspiration. 
 
 J
 
 174 CHAPTER V. 
 
 advancing. Among much that may be turgid and 
 bombastic in the Thoughts of Young, there are also 
 startling outbursts of language, wherein the heaven- 
 aspiring soul speaks vernacularly, ebullitions of the 
 overwrought and struggling spirit, which have no 
 sympathy with the parade of words that may precede 
 and follow, and which must not suffer deterioration 
 by the suspicion of such a sympathy: it would be 
 unjust to the Poet, and unprofitable to ourselves, to 
 confound those fruitful oases with the quagmires by 
 which they are not seldom surrounded. For my own 
 part, I only perceive the Poet in these significant 
 places only recognise his voice when oppressed and 
 dwarfish faculties seem to have been long grappling 
 with gigantic meaning, and to have broken suddenly 
 into almost-superhuman utterance. His grand con- 
 ceptions wrestle in manacles as it were, till their 
 moment of mental manumission, and then the Poet's 
 spirit really " speaks with his tongue." I adverted to 
 Young's delineation of the " union redoutable de la 
 mort et de la vie."* We may survey many galleries 
 of poetic and prosaic pictures without lighting upon 
 a representation of man going down to silence and 
 the dust, more graphic than this: 
 
 * Madame de Stael.
 
 A PASSING COMMENT UPON YOUNG. 175 
 
 " Life's little stage is a small eminence, 
 Inch-high the grave above that home of man 
 Where dwells the multitude: we gaze around, 
 We read their monuments we sigh 
 And while we sigh we sink, and are what we deplore; 
 Lamenting or lamented all our lot." 
 
 There is no waste of canvas or color here but how 
 effective is the painting! 
 
 In the Night Thoughts of Young, the Poet often 
 contemplates and sometimes confronts the Last Enemy ; 
 and over the pages which record this spectral inter- 
 course there hovers a weird influence a charnel- 
 house effect a gaunt semi-reality of the sable Foe, 
 which, if it be all but unsubstantial shadow, does never- 
 theless " feelingly persuade us what we are."* Young 
 summons " spirits from the vasty deep," and, more 
 potent than Glendower,f they come at his bidding, 
 and at their approach we involuntarily " commune 
 with our hearts, and are still." Many other Poets 
 have likewise reported ghostly meditation upon death 
 as conditional, and ghostly converse with Death as 
 personal; and in Shakspeare who not only pursued 
 the vicissitudes of life to the grave and gate of death, 
 but returned with the spirit to assert its wrongs 
 in his unfailing phrase-book of all our human feelings, 
 * As You Like it, ii. 1. % \ Henry iv. iii. \,
 
 176 CHAPTER V. 
 
 we find frequent and earnest conjectures upon that 
 condition to which we approximate, whose secrets 
 man learns only when he ceases to be mortal. And 
 these conjectures are conceived in various terms of 
 doubt or definite expectancy, correspondent to the 
 degree in which vague surmise or assured faith pre- 
 vailed in the individual conjecturing. Yet, whether 
 the soul be left to wander through an uncharted 
 universe at the dictate of its untaught, voluntary im- 
 pulses, or whether it be guided by precepts which 
 cannot err, and which for ever point to a resting-place 
 encircled by rivers of joy, yet does the immortal 
 soul, a conscious Renegade from Innocency, recoil 
 from its last Retreat: 
 
 " The wide, th' unbounded prospect lays before us, 
 But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it."* 
 
 Dread instinct, which trembles at the barrier that 
 separates us from bliss ; but dread beneficently per- 
 petuated, to restrain the religious from impatience, 
 the rash from precipitancy. Alas! alas! were not 
 man's Creator his Controller also, how many unpre- 
 pared creatures would, in fanatic or romantic fervour, 
 have hurried from the hallucinations or danced from 
 * Cato. Addison.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAK.SPEARE. 177 
 
 the delights of this world, to the instant and inter- 
 minable destiny of the next! 
 
 C. (After a pause.) The famous soliloquy in 
 Hamlet is, probably, Shakspeare's grandest ideal of 
 the Divine Instinct, contemplating the withdrawal 
 of its corporeal temple of the Soul, in hushed inex- 
 plicable wonderment at what may follow the dread 
 sundering-stroke of Death: 
 
 " To die ; to sleep 
 No more ! and by a sleep to say we end 
 The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks 
 That flesh is heir to 'tis a consummation 
 Devoutly to be wish'd. To die to sleep : 
 To sleep ! perchance to dream ! Ay, there's the rub : 
 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 
 When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
 Must give us pause !" 
 
 But all such questionings are most definitively an- 
 swered at the bar of Conscience, on the challenge of 
 Truth ; and Shakspeare has arraigned at that tribunal 
 crimes so various in magnitude, and reported mental 
 conflicts so multifarious, with a pen of such personify- 
 ing power, that in entering upon the subject with 
 him, " the world is all before us," and 
 
 E. Therefore will we choose a momentary place 
 for parlance not rest, for in the soil couches an
 
 178 CHAPTER V. 
 
 earthquake only a momentary contemplation of one 
 conscience in revolt murderous Macbeth's. When 
 I think of the thronged hades of spectral horrors 
 whereby the Poet has illustrated Macbeth's mind, I 
 am sensible of an inclination to the perpendicular in 
 " each particular hair" of the scanty remnant left to 
 me; yet start not thou. meek Maiden! for knowing 
 not " the doctrine of ill-doing,"* little canst thou 
 comprehend the torture that e'en here treads hard on 
 Guilt; unimaginable to thy timidity is the cowardice 
 begot by Crime. 
 
 " One cried, ' God'bless us!' and ' Amen!' the other, 
 As they had seen rne with these hangman's-hands: 
 
 I could not say ' Amen,' 
 When they did say ' God bless us !' 
 
 LADY MACBETH. Consider it not so deeply. 
 
 MACB. But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen?' " 
 
 Ah ! Mr. C., were all our designs invariably referred 
 to the court of equity that sits within; were the 
 representative of Justice untampered with, and its 
 decrees made absolute in our actions, soon would shoals 
 of a certain species of fish by some naturalists called 
 the land-shark offend by stagnancy the air at West- 
 * Winter's Tale, i. 2.
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 179 
 
 minster and elsewhere. Mourning, ye gowned gentry ! 
 your occupation gone, are there many who, in grievous 
 destitution of chattels, might righteously compute as 
 their own, both 
 
 " Their robe and their integrity to heaven?" 
 
 Now were you to forswear Ivy Lodge for ever, in 
 dudgeon, or as the penalty of its occupier's prolixity, 
 I could not forbear mentioning a colloquy in Measure 
 for Measure, between majestic Isabella and her more 
 craven brother Claudio: the circumstances are her 
 dishonor, or the alternative, his loss of life. " The 
 dread of something after death" unmans him, and he 
 quails in shuddering hesitancy between .opposing 
 causes; before him are shadowy horrors; behind, 
 the urgent, lofty, and indignant honor of his sister. 
 " Death," murmurs the reluctant sacrifice, 
 
 " Death is a fearful thing ! 
 ISABELLA. And shamed life a hateful. 
 
 CLAUDIO. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; 
 
 To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; 
 
 This sensible, warm motion to become 
 
 A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit 
 
 To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
 
 In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice ;
 
 180 CHAPTER V. 
 
 To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, 
 And blown with restless violence round about 
 The pendant world ; or to be worse than worst 
 Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts 
 Imagine howling! 'tis too horrible! 
 The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
 That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
 Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
 To what we fear of death !" 
 
 The garrulous Old Man identified himself so per- 
 fectly with the shrinking Claudio in the recital of this 
 fine passage, that when he resumed his original 
 character I fell back on the Sun's Darling (from 
 which he had previously quoted,) for an exclamation 
 of Raybright 
 
 " Your eyes amazed me first, but now mine ears 
 Feel your tongue's charm !" 
 
 E. Nay, to great Will the creator be the praise, 
 none to the mere earthen vessel. But now, having 
 dwelt at tolerable or, haply, intolerable length, on 
 the dread of death and the timidity of wisdom, turn 
 we to what my friend Folly might have laughed at as 
 " the bravery of ignorance." Know firstly, then, 
 that urchinless myself, I have the honor to be on 
 excellent terms with half-a-dozcn of the rosiest rogues 
 you ever smiled to look at, the property respectively
 
 CHAPTER V. 181 
 
 of three humble neighbours. The hour has some 
 time gone since the imagery alone of grace and 
 beauty had power to captivate, when I feasted after 
 the regimen of Robbie Burns, " the admiring a fine 
 woman ;" and long hath the sage maximist, William of 
 immortal memory, convinced me that goodness is the 
 essential essence of loveliness " Virtue of beauty." 
 And with these changed feelings travelling farther 
 from the East (sic Wordsworth,) into the fading 
 light of near-spent day, I find a new pleasure in the 
 frank, fend heart the " spritefulness, fair cheeks, 
 and full eyes of childhood." It would cheer you in 
 a December distress to see the ruddy fronts of the 
 fellows of whom I spoke, to whom I let out joy on 
 short leases by a word in season, a penny never out 
 of season, and an approving pat on the head ; and how 
 pitiable the pale, precocious lads in town appear, to 
 these, my jocund younkers! The mother of one of 
 them a reckless, super-rosy rebel, rising five told 
 me the other day, that the child had been to witness 
 the funeral of a person of excessive corpulency, and 
 came home with a serious look unusual. A resolu- 
 tion suggested by the ponderosity of the dead man, 
 and the hour of his interment, was brooding in him, 
 and, when duly matured, burst in a request to his
 
 182 CHAPTER V. 
 
 mother, that he might not be buried in the afternoon 
 of a winter-day in case he shoulcTnt get to heaven 
 before dark! 
 
 The sixth stroke towards ten was sounding, when 
 E.'s veteran retainer announced the vehicle in which 
 his daughter-in-baptism was accustomed to migrate 
 to and from Ivy Lodge. There was a striking con- 
 trast in the physiognomical aspects of the Elder and 
 his servant; for while the former was habitually 
 mirthful, there was a settled sedateness in the face 
 of the latter which remained unruffled, either by 
 smile or frown, under the raillery of his voluble but 
 kind superior. His gesture, too, was desperately 
 methodical; evincing none of that submission to im- 
 pulse which ever animated the demeanor of his master. 
 On that declining plane of our mortal term, where- 
 from, when man brings his years to an end, he 
 slides into the grave, it was hard to say which of the 
 two was foremost; but if the domestic were " under 
 authority," he did not appear to derive contentment 
 in the especial circumstance of contiguity with a 
 clime in which distinctions cease in the prospect 
 of a situation without servitude, or such as is perfect 
 freedom. If his were a gravity impressed by con-
 
 CHAPTER V. 183 
 
 templation of the grave and a thoughtless man would 
 not long have sojourned with E. the object of his 
 contemplation must have been hung with branches of 
 yew and cypress, to which he was advancing through 
 a vale of tears ; to the Elder, in whose tone when con- 
 versing upon " the inevitable hour" there was neither 
 timor nor presumptious confidence, the narrow-house 
 seemed garlanded more than sadly closed in with 
 evergreen. This was the outline of his argument: 
 " It is not meet that guests-expectant of a Great 
 King, such as is He who claims our souls' allegiance 
 that children journeying to the home of a Father, 
 who waits to welcome them by a better name than 
 sons should march mournfully to their eternal man- 
 sions ; and though we lay our bodies down to moulder 
 for a while in the vestibule of the Sovereign's court 
 
 \^s 
 
 at the threshold of the home of spirits hath not One, 
 mighty to save, prepared at infinite cost a pathway for 
 the disembodied divinity, by which it mounts through 
 the else trackless space to its celestial father-land? 
 The dust importunes us in the pleadings of natural 
 alliance, and our voices catch a gloomy tone from its 
 importunity; while we, meantime forgetful that we 
 are but temporary aliens from angelic fellowship, sad- 
 den the hours of our exile, by suspending our harps
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 upon the willows, instead of sounding them to songs 
 of thankfulness for that measureless gift of promise 
 life in the land of Love whereof, to the grateful, the 
 earnest of possession is anticipated, through the inspi- 
 ration of Heaven's prime legate, Hope! " Why," 
 then, " should tears be in the old man's eye ? 
 
 " Why should we, then, with an untoward mind, 
 
 And in the weakness of humanity, 
 
 From natural wisdom turn our hearts away, 
 
 To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears, 
 
 And, feeding on disquiet, thus disturb 
 
 The calm of nature with our restless thoughts?"* 
 
 The stroke was on six, I said, when Mary was 
 favored with an injunction to move: whereupon E. 
 rejoined, 
 
 Now fie, say I, upon thy pestilent punctuality, 
 punctilious Ben! who, nathless that our pates have 
 whitened in company, hast no consideration for my 
 peace of mind positively none! Harkee, Benjamin 
 the inflexible ! since Mr. C., in unappreciable kindness 
 to thy grim-visaged grandson, has chosen to be my 
 bonny half-bairn's charioteer, I suspect thou hast, 
 in gratitude to him propelled the movements of the 
 clocks, sir. Now it contenteth the responsible tenant 
 
 * The Excursion. Wordsworth.
 
 CHAPTER V. 187 
 
 of the Lodge to keep up with the age nay, Ben, to 
 jog along a little in the rear: but say, O "Watchman 
 set in alabaster ! what of the night ? 
 
 Benjamin replies, and makes his exit; and the 
 Elder changes his key : 
 
 Within those stolid and impassive outworks there 
 beats a brave heart and warm; and if Benjamin were 
 taken from me, then indeed should I be bereaved. 
 If there are two living creatures who understand 
 each other better than do Ben and I, it would gratify 
 my curiosity to see them. My pleasantry passes by 
 him, as you observe, like an idle wind ; and though it 
 may secretly affright his staid propriety, it never dis- 
 turbs his serenity. Once only did he ever dubiously 
 regard me; it was when, in gardening operations, I 
 declared myself almost a proselyte to the Words- 
 worthian theory of a sentient principle in plants : at 
 what he thought and called the monstrous " faith, 
 
 " that every flower 
 Enjoys the air it breathes ; 
 
 infidelity, graven as in adamant, was so perspicuously 
 the expression of his physiognomy, that, rather than 
 endanger the issue of a writ De lunatico, at the suit 
 of my servants, I suffer Benjamin to remain in un-
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 molested herbal heathenism. But we are deserting 
 our Idol of the evening, without one praiseful or 
 valedictory farewell. Be thine, O honored WILLIAM 
 SHAKSPEARE ! a lofty throne where all are kings ! 
 anon of thee, Monarch of the Muses' Sons! And 
 bless thee, darling Child, Mary avourneen! Look 
 now, the sky is one wide smile, but chastened, for 
 the glittering orbs are in adoration, could we but 
 hear them. Or rather, is it not the Boundary of the 
 Blest we see above us ? and what we count as shining 
 stars, are they not angels' eyes bright, but full of 
 pity as they gaze on a scene which the presence 
 of their GOD does not gladden? Ay, therein lies the 
 secret of the pensiveness of Night! Surely at this 
 moment is God beautifying and hallowing the world 
 with his blessing ; and living things are breathing 
 scarcely breathing is the silent Earth as conscious 
 of the effluence of Heaven. A fond farewell, sweet 
 Mary ! 
 
 " Nyrnph, in thy orisons 
 Be all my sins remembered !"
 
 COLLOQUY IV. 
 
 CONCERNING, CHIEFLY, 
 
 "THE BUND OLD MAN, AND HIS IMMORTAL STORY 
 OF A LOST PARADISE."
 
 COLLOQUY IV. 
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 
 
 " I am become A NAME : 
 I am a part of all that I have met: 
 Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 
 Gleams that untravelFd world, whose margin fades 
 For ever and for ever when I move." TENNYSON. 
 
 IT would be a mode of procedure quite un-English, 
 to enter upon several consecutive colloquies without 
 commenting on the state of the weather. Moreover 
 when, without violating Truth to gratify Patriotism, 
 a compliment can be paid to the climate of his 
 country, it is a Briton's duty to do so; for foreign 
 calumnies upon our native skies are permitted to 
 provoke undue contumely also from a people incon- 
 tinently prone to grumble among themselves at much 
 that invigorates their individual constitution and na- 
 tional. Touching that basely-traduced atmospherical 
 production, called English weather, we owe an im- 
 
 N2
 
 192 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 mense amount of thanksgiving to that more dauntless 
 class of Nature's minstrels, who, leaving gentler poets 
 to sound their pecans to the praise of stars and zephyrs, 
 proclaim the sterner merits of hail, snow, wind, storm, 
 and vapour. And, chiefly because eccentric and half- 
 anomalous, among this " dauntless" band, let us elect 
 the mild Cowper, for himself and clan, as the recipient 
 of our gratulations. It is pleasure, slightly tinged 
 with pity, to accompany the valiant valetudinarian 
 bold in seclusion, timid in the shock of men while 
 he scourges the " pleasant vices" of the herd, which 
 he, " a stricken deer," had quitted ; right comfortable 
 is it to see him putting upon his country a commanding 
 aspect which he could not put upon himself; and 
 to hear him thus venting the healthy vigor of his 
 English heart, before one of the gloomiest of national 
 pictures Though thy c]ime 
 
 Be fickle, and thy year most part deformed 
 With dripping rains, or withered by a frost, 
 I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies 
 And fields without a flower, for warmer France 
 With all her vines, nor for Ausonia's groves 
 Of golden fruitage and her myrtle bowers." 
 
 Now in the creed of one at least (and of the least) 
 of his compatriots, of few pleasanter sensations is this 
 cold hut of human clay susceptible, than when the
 
 CHAPTER VI. 193 
 
 genial sun melts all the heart within it into a gaitt so 
 diffusive, that after inundating all its environs with 
 its flood of joy, it extends a lavish flow of compassion 
 to those misjudging masses abroad, who imagine the 
 Indomitable Isle to be enveloped in perpetual brouil- 
 lards. If Variety be " the very spice of life," as 
 some have chosen to denominate it, then life in 
 England is surely highly flavoured, elementally: still 
 there are who complain fastidiously that the element 
 is not to their taste ; and the aerial ragout is taken 
 with especially- wry faces by nervous elderlings subject 
 a Vcnnuyeuse maladie, ce de conserver la santd par tin 
 trop grand regime* In the course of a brief pro- 
 fessional career, I have advocated more dispiriting 
 causes than that which now, without con-si-de-ra-tion 
 of any kind, I have undertaken on behalf of the 
 climate of my country. Addressing, of course, a dis- 
 criminating jury, I contend, of course with deference, 
 that to an English subject on whose amiable tem- 
 perament the evidence of sociality has a soothing 
 effect, and who (perchance not caring " to unsphere 
 the spirit of Plato,") may, in the lower walks of prac- 
 tical philosophy, be placidly making the best of his 
 condition at all times and in all places, to such an 
 * La Rochefoucauld.
 
 194 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 one it cannot be merely reconciliatory, it is more a 
 matter of active rejoicing, that the Four Seasons 
 which preside over his country's year, and exercise 
 extensive influence on his country's weal, should 
 present, as they do, a truly edifying example of 
 good fellowship in their intercourse with each other. 
 Now this disposition is rarely found in a limited 
 coterie, where separate interests strongly prevail, and 
 jealousy is prompt to rise at officious intermeddling. 
 Our Seasons maintain a most cordial intimacy, ex- 
 changing visits en deshabille,' and that lively move- 
 ment of barometrical mercury at which a maledictory 
 man might rail, the complacent jury I have the honor 
 to address would delight in, as an indubitable token 
 that one of the subdominant triad was passing com- 
 pliments with the regnant Season. Where, too, in 
 this " low-thoughted " sphere, a small number of 
 functionaries attain alternatively a chief and brief 
 authority, their individual period of pre-eminency is 
 very nicely marked: our British Seasons scorn a 
 duration of presidency so accurately defined; there 
 is a noble free-and-easiness in each one's entrance 
 upon empire, and exit from it, that expands the ideas 
 to reflect upon. And in this their habit of frequent 
 intervisitation, the more sanguine of the panel before
 
 CHAPTER VI. 195 
 
 which I am privileged to plead, will immediately 
 recognise the interest which the entire Quaternity 
 take in the affairs of Earth. Blessings in this present 
 condition of existence are wisely qualified with evil 
 wholesomely bittered, no doubt and we continue to 
 lament in sorrow as the sparks fly upwards ; so that, 
 were it absurdly unreasonable, it is conformable to 
 very ancient custom, to regret, that when the volatile 
 Harbinger of welcome Father Christmas looks abroad 
 unexpectedly, (and he does, allowedly, give the rein 
 rather freely to Caprice,) there should be a cramping 
 influence in his eye, which now denudes shrubs, &c. 
 when a family's birthright might be had for a blanket ; 
 and now creates a panic on the banks, at which even 
 hardy snowdrops gasp " t-r-o-p fort /" and go off in 
 convulsions, which staggers itinerant melodists in 
 mid-air, excites a general shudder among nestlings 
 whose mothers are from home, and hurries many a 
 newly-perfected chrysalis to a bourne from whence 
 no butterfly returns. The prior of these effects, 
 brought about by the veteran Winter's visitings to the 
 mellow matron Autumn, has a beneficial counter- 
 operation, opening the heart to Charity, and reminding 
 the benevolent in high places, that in lower places 
 the large family of Penury will soon look longingly
 
 196 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 for wonted " little acts of love ;" and if, in the libe- 
 rality of his nature, he acts as proxy for Spring while 
 yet an infant, who can resent his courtesy? Howbeit, 
 in social reciprocity the Rulers of the British Year 
 exercise dominion : by-and-by (is not pertness com- 
 mon to the very, very pretty?) the bright-eyed Spring 
 bids mimic defiance to her bald-pated Predecessor, 
 who (made crusty perhaps by her jocose excesses,) 
 blows bitingly upon her cheek of smiles, sometimes 
 even to their scattering; and, later, (is there a beat- 
 ing heart which such solicitude affects not?) how 
 often do we perceive the ardent Summer adventuring 
 into the realm of retiring Autumn, to bless with one 
 more kiss the Earth's frail offspring, ere Autumn 
 confide them in their death to be sepultured in snowy 
 cearments by the hand of Winter. 
 
 The loving Summer retired from active duty in 
 1841 with blushing honors thick upon her. A fiat 
 had gone forth, benedictory to the harvest and the 
 store, and she had responded cheerily to His bene- 
 volent will whose ministress she is : the burdened fields 
 therefore stood so thick with corn, that the churl 
 might have found their rejoicing contagious, as by 
 hill-side and lowland the ripening grain bent its 
 b.urnished head to the soft breeze. It was making
 
 CHAPTER VI. 197 
 
 glad the heart of man, and kept time to its low con- 
 gratulatory chant in these gentle undulations, as at 
 sweet music, lovely Lady, you may have swayed your 
 own fair form, impulsively. O, WORDSWORTH ! chief 
 among the wise who proclaim a sentient attribute in 
 whatsoever the Inscrutable hath endowed with life, 
 a glorifying creed is thine, and is not visionary. 
 Conscious, by the demonstrations of science, that we 
 are in contact with fecund animation, though to the 
 eye invisible, is it Wisdom which contemns the pro- 
 bability that we are dwellers in a vocal universe, 
 because upon our drowsied sense no audible accents 
 fall ? If the eye be veiled from the perception of an 
 animated, why may not the ear be deafened to an 
 articulate world ? Constructed and capacitated as we 
 now are, the Eternal " hath done wisely to conceal" 
 from this, our orbed observatory, a view as much too 
 vivid for our comfort as for our comprehension; for 
 how much greater latitude of emotion should we 
 require above that which we possess, if to the little 
 microcosm, man, the vast and busy creation were 
 suddenly manifested in all its marvellous operations. 
 But this acquisition of intelligence is wisely reserved 
 for a period when awe and wonder shall be excited 
 by many mighty discoveries, beside those pertaining
 
 198 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 to our terrestrial sojourn: yet, among those dis- 
 coveries, thy faith, persevering Interpreter of the 
 Invisible and Inaudible! shall, doubtlessly, approve 
 its demonstrator and defender to have possessed a 
 vision clarified above his contemporaries, a mind 
 whose ideality was less a baseless fabric of the fancy 
 than the rudiments and outline of a grand reality, 
 which the rolling away of cataract and cloud from 
 human sight shall leave disclosed, in the fulness and 
 perfection of a divine development. 
 
 Towards the close of an Autumn day, (of which 
 digression has so procrastinated the description, that 
 now I decline it altogether,) the Elder in a rustic, 
 ivy-covered garden-seat, was luxuriating in the light 
 of a setting sun, the quivering song of the more wake- 
 ful or belated of the feathered quire, and the company 
 of rosy-tinted but well-nigh wearied flowers. 
 
 " Ah!" said he, on observing me, " is not this a 
 season and a scene in which, if ever, we may imagine 
 the primal state of our first progenitors, when, seated 
 in a sinless sanctuary, and sheltered by their Maker's 
 smile, they watched this wondrous receding of Day 
 and] solemn approach of Night ? _ But I was gazing 
 slothfully when I saw you 
 
 " Thought was not in enjoyment it expired"
 
 CHAPTER VI. 199 
 
 as I sat imbibing the still spirit of the spectacle 
 for it is eminently one of those, whereof 
 
 " The colours and the forms are unto us 
 An appetite a feeling and a love 
 Which have no need of a remoter charm 
 By thought supplied, or any interest 
 Unborrow'd from the eye." 
 
 I expressed regret that, by obtruding, I had broken 
 the spell which had bound him in so blissful a state 
 of bondage. 
 
 E. Save your regrettings for a more deserving 
 occasion: I prefer quick feelings to supine; silent 
 felicity engenders indolence of thought, and that 
 which is now voluptuousness, presently degenerates 
 to vapidity. How potent are external influences 
 upon the mind so various, too, in their effects, that 
 the inner world of the feelings makes its diurnal 
 revolution, and exhibits a different phase at morn, 
 and noon, and eve, and night. "When I go out in the 
 fresh vigor of the dawn, and am in health, I feel 
 to this day something of the exultation of my early 
 life, when Care went not up with me at morn into the 
 high places, and every ecstatic throb of the heart, 
 could it have spoken, would have 
 
 " Bless'd GOD for the mountains!"
 
 00 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 " Mornings are mysteries," says an old poet:* their 
 effect of light and air stirred up electrically the whole 
 inert and latent joy within me, and my mood was wildly 
 thankful ; the wildness has somewhat abated, owing 
 to " auld acquaintance" with him of whom (pointing to 
 his forehead,) these indentures witness, aided by the 
 circumstance of having here no hills to climb ; yet my 
 out-door morning feelings could not, even now, be 
 called serene. 
 
 " It is very different in this holy hour of eve, when 
 the West summons every eye to witness this gorgeous 
 pageantry of the Sun's descent, and Earth regards 
 her life-giver's departure in admiration mute; and 
 the sadness of a farewell prevails ; for living things 
 look anxiously upon their source of life, and seem to 
 dread his going down, as if there were a danger of 
 his not returning. We feel no predominant passion 
 now to * bless God for the mountains ;' our paramount 
 praise is for the hope of glory; and, that yielded, in 
 sober gratitude for all this merciful manifestation of 
 Power and Wisdom, we pour forth the full heart of 
 adoration in strains like these, too majestically-moving 
 for my befitting utterance during the abandon of the 
 morn : 
 
 * Henry Vaughan.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 201 
 
 ' These are thy glorious works, Parent of good ! 
 
 Almighty ! thine this universal frame, 
 
 Thus wondrous fair ; Thyself how wondrous then ! 
 
 Unspeakable, who sitt'st above these heav'ns 
 
 To us invisible, or dimly seen 
 
 In these thy lowest works ; yet these declare 
 
 Thy goodness beyond thought, and pow'r divine.' " 
 
 The Old Man's voice discoursed eloquent music, 
 but he looked unutterable meaning : " the sweet face 
 of the Night" had solemnised his manner, and he 
 retained unwonted gravity: his varieties of feeling 
 were exceedingly remote, but were always expressive 
 and never extravagant; they were not "piteous 
 revolutions." It seemed as if the hymn from which 
 he had quoted in the garden had supplied him ad- 
 ventitiously with a text whereupon to descant; for on 
 adjourning to the interior he opened the Paradise 
 Lost, and commenced devoutly: 
 
 E. Entering on this Poem we feel, or ought to 
 feel, that we are in sacred precincts, and that at its 
 elevated threshold we should put away from us the 
 defilement of mean associations. Resigning ourselves 
 to an atlantean and adventurous Guide, we are carried 
 to the black and sulphurous abyss of anarchy, are 
 wafted through infinite space, and ascend, " by de- 
 grees magnificent, beyond the wall of heaven."
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 But the way, which is sometimes drear and dark, is 
 at other times labyrinthine and obscure; and well it 
 is if, where we cannot move by sight, we firmly pro- 
 ceed by faith ; for lore which the Omniscient withheld 
 from " holy men of old," He has not in these latter days 
 communicated ; and therefore Milton, in the process 
 of an argument, anticipatory of man's creation and 
 historic of his fall, has found himself in occasional 
 embarrassment in " vindicating" the Eternal. And 
 necessarily so ; for His thoughts are not our thoughts, 
 and who hath been His counsellor? In the Father's 
 address to the Son, for instance, contemplating the 
 seduction of our Sire by satanic guile, the Poet is in one 
 of those inscrutable involutions of " foreknowledge, 
 will, and fate," which Inspiration has not elucidated, 
 and at which, in this world, Reason must gaze if it 
 insist on gazing as through a glass darkly. And to 
 me it has ever seemed an awful provocation to the 
 All-wise to lay bare His arm, when captious human 
 Reason would dictate to the Deity the larger degree 
 to which, for that poor querulous Reason's satisfaction, 
 it would have Him lay bare His Mind. Now that 
 the original terms of obedience have been revoked 
 by rebellion, our present terms of faith follow as from 
 intelligible premises, and are based on the partial
 
 CHAPTER VI. 201 
 
 concealment of the plan of Providence; for there 
 could be no exercise of credence if all that concerns 
 our hope and trust were manifest. Yet how ample 
 the foundation laid for the superstructure of our 
 faith, would we not cumber it with our gainsayings ! 
 Beset by the machinations of a mighty Foe, are we not 
 bidden to confide boldly in a more puissant Friend? 
 
 " O, but man proud man! 
 Most ignorant of what he's most assured," 
 
 protests ! cavils with his Creator ! The tenant of an 
 hour, from his tabernacle of corruption, engages in 
 controversy with the Architect and Pervader of the 
 universe impugns the Mind of which his loftier 
 part is now but a polluted essence ! Oh ! disclaiming 
 impious comparison, next among marvels to the love 
 of GOD, is the presumption of the outcast, man. 
 
 " The abstract contemplation of a lost paradise 
 incites to a fruitless lament for felicity we never 
 knew, which, however, gives way to a profound 
 contentment, when we gather under survey of our 
 pining souls the reinforcements provided by our Re- 
 ligion, which, ordinarily, we permit to remain too 
 much in ineffective reserve; we conceal in secret, 
 inanimate ambush, the invincibly-accoutred legion
 
 204 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 whose rightful post is in the van of our daily conflict. 
 In the strife we have hourly to sustain, we draw not 
 largely enough on our almighty Ally, who, though 
 we too oft forget, remembers ever that we are but 
 dust: and considering that our hearts' instinctive 
 craving is for a consolation they cannot find in the 
 world's corrupted cisterns, it is curious they should 
 leave comparatively forsaken the fountain which flows 
 with the only efficient solace for the sinking spirit. 
 Marshalling the array of evidence which Heaven has 
 unrolled before the ken of humanity, the mind erects 
 itself on an impregnable rampart, from whence it 
 placidly regards the confusions and perplexities of 
 life, and arms its hopes with weapons which, wrought 
 in a celestial armoury, scatter this world's dishearten- 
 ments swiftly as at the sword of Michael the rebel 
 angels fled. I delight in the assertion, and in its 
 reiteration, that ' there is nothing so reasonable as 
 Religion :' assuredly there is nothing so protective, 
 for the feeble being whose reliance it is, ' gathers a 
 force and faith under him, which nature of itself 
 could never attain; '* there is nothing so consolatory, 
 for ' it creates new hopes when all earthly hopes 
 failj'f there is nothing so ennobling, for the cease- 
 * Lord Bacon. f Sir Humphrey Davy.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 205 
 
 less employment of the religious man is the ' fitting 
 up his mind and preparing it for a glorious abode ;' * 
 and in reference to an effect seldom insisted on, 'you 
 may depend upon it religion is, in its essence, the 
 most gentlemanly thing in the world: it will alone 
 gentilize, if unmixed with cant, and I know nothing 
 else that will, alone. 'f 
 
 " I sometimes think, that in the dread Day of Award 
 Silence will for a moment seal the lips of the redeemed, 
 while, with sublimated glance, they survey the various 
 pathways whereby the ardent seekers after Truth 
 have attained their goal, and what impediments they 
 have battled with and beaten, and dispiritings sur- 
 mounted : but silence may endure but for a moment ! 
 the amazing Love that ransomed, and righteous 
 Judgment that adjudicates, shall awaken in Heaven's 
 * new possessors' a spontaneous and accordant shout, 
 so mighty, that through the realm of GOD their rapture 
 shall drown in its loud resonance the minstrelsy that 
 ceases never to magnify the Most High . For, methinks, 
 the harp and lute of those who never knew distrust 
 of soul or sorrow of heart cannot rival the voices 
 which triumph shall animate; the blessings of those 
 whose high estate has shut out woe, must be overborne 
 * Goldsmith. t Coleridge.
 
 206 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 by theirs to whom the transition is from anguish to 
 bliss; the adoration of those to whom Justice has 
 never been * invisible, or dimly seen,' shall certainly 
 be overwhelmed in their acclamations who, once, it 
 may be, dubious, shall view the All-adorable in the 
 refulgent sanctity of His most perfect * vindication.' 
 
 " I know of no scepticism or scruples from certain 
 apparent incongruities which meditative men have 
 told me debar them from a devout acceptation of the 
 creed on which our souls' hopes are founded; that 
 infinite Perfection, armed with a controlling power, 
 is yet permissive of the propagation of Evil; that 
 Purity, although it abhors and denounces, coerces not. 
 I am not confounded by the sufferings of the virtuous, 
 the sorrows of the good, the seeming exemption of 
 the vile, the ostensible ease of the indifferent, the 
 occasional perplexity of the inquiring. These are 
 incidents contingent with, and partly constituting, 
 the probationary process by which, through privation 
 and discouragement, we are re-fitted for Paradise. 
 I have found my questionings of possibility most 
 prone to rise, over the chronicles of God's compassion : 
 His power and His providential bounty are properties 
 both visible and tangible ; but that THE BRIGHTNESS 
 OF His GLORY should have assumed our nature, and
 
 CHAPTER VI. 207 
 
 in it have endured rejection from those whom He 
 came to ransom; that in virulence and violence He 
 should yet have summoned no awe-struck legions 
 from the realms of light, to avenge the indignities 
 their celestial Chief was enduring at the hands of 
 men, in order that he might snatch them as brands 
 from the burning; that though the penalty of the 
 prodigious enterprise was a sustenance of the Curse, 
 under which he who bore it must yield his heart's 
 blood, now in protracted passion through the imper- 
 ceptible pore, and then in sacrificial agony through 
 the gaping wound; that immaculate and infinite 
 Compassion, without demeaning the divinity, should 
 taste of death in its most degraded form, that earth's 
 grovelling ingrate might be exalted among ' the en- 
 throned gods in sainted seats,' is an exaction upon 
 the faith of a contemplative mind that might disturb 
 it with incredulity, were the records less trustworthy 
 which relate, to selfish men, the mystical vastness of 
 the divine sympathy. 
 
 " One especial moral springs from the meditation 
 of this marvellous oblation of Love there can be no 
 sympathy in heaven with the self-sufficient. From 
 the hour of that most daring insurrection in Thine 
 own abode, has it not been seen, that,
 
 208 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 * JVIerciful Heaven T 
 
 Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt,. 
 Splitt'st the unwedgable and gnarled oak 
 Than the soft myrtle ?'* 
 
 " I have perambulated far from the Poem, in all 
 this; but serious thoughts flow naturally from its 
 solemn theme, and forcibly to divert or counteract 
 their current is ill beseeming a man who cannot be 
 far distant from ' an abiding city, a place in another 
 country, where he must rest or else be restless for 
 ever.'f Let us however enter, for a little while, this 
 Lost Paradise, at whose exterior we have thus lin- 
 gered. 
 
 " Yet, pausing for a brief moment at its entrance, 
 is it not beyond expression interesting, to review, 
 through the medium of truthful history and apocry- 
 phal tradition, the process by which this stupendous 
 poetic pyramid was reared a structure so unapproach- 
 able in the grandeur of its. symmetry, that the solitary 
 achievements of others imposing when solitarily 
 surveyed appear insignificant if placed in juxta- 
 position with it. There exists an indestructible cluster 
 of the habitations of Poesy, distinguished by various 
 charms; but they shrink into shadow when viewed 
 
 * Measure for Measure. Shakspeare. t Taylor.
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 209 
 
 by an eye which the contemplation of dimensions so 
 vast has distended and enlarged. ' It is not the great- 
 est of heroic poems, only because it is not the first J 
 says Dr. Johnson; but stands it not unparalleled in 
 its sublimity ? From what we know of Milton's self- 
 dependency, I fancy there was never a Poet who, 
 conscious of having consummated a great work, of 
 which many co-operating causes might tend to mar 
 the reputation at the period of its completion, con- 
 fided so assuredly in ultimate appreciation, as did 
 this illustrious man. The contrast between Milton 
 and Shakspeare in this respect, is remarkable: the 
 latter sensitively shrinks from posthumous notoriety; 
 and in his poems almost painfully protests against 
 being made a candidate for the plaudits of posterity : 
 
 " O if (I say) you look upon this verse, 
 When I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
 Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, 
 Lest the wise world mock." 
 
 And again, 
 
 " O, lest your true love may seem false in this, 
 Thai you for love speak well of me untrue, 
 My name be buried where my body is, 
 And live no more to shame nor me nor you. 
 For I am shamed by that which I bring forth." 
 
 If thou hast ears to hear, O Shade of Shakspeare,'
 
 210 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 know that ' the wise world ' persists in a contrary 
 notion. But ' the blind Old Man/ whose intrepidity 
 urged him beyond ' the flaming bounds of place and 
 time,' knew no distrust in his reliance on succeeding 
 ages. He had carved for himself a shrine around 
 which Genius in the years to come should wander 
 with suspended breathings; had built for himself, 
 and consciously, a 'live-long monument;' had fore- 
 sepulchred himself in the reverent remembrance of 
 posterity; had graven in the Roll of the Renowned 
 the name of e MILTON,' in characters which the failure 
 of intelligence might obscure, but which the flight 
 of Time could not efface. And so I speak of him 
 as moved by ' fond hopes of glory,' upheld by the 
 conviction that he had left to future ages a fame they 
 ' would not willingly let die,' he could move on to- 
 wards Death with the serene dignity of a mighty man 
 from whom Prejudice had withholden cotemporaneous 
 approbation, but whom the Past had taught to regard 
 that present approbation as subsidiary. For him, as 
 with the Great in every generation, 
 
 ' Enough, if something from his hand had power 
 To live, and act, and serve the future hour;' 
 
 and a guarantee for the durability of his fame might
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 
 
 be found in the theme he had chosen ; for man's 
 interest in it was ' infused at the creation of the kind/ 
 and for ever will it closely ' come home to men's 
 business and bosoms;' long as a sentient being, con- 
 versant with the Poet's language and the light of 
 letters, mourns in this lower world his alienation from 
 a better, so long will that sublime story be reverently 
 perused, which treats 
 
 ' Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit 
 Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought Death into the world and all our woe, 
 With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
 Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.' 
 
 " The Poet's theme involves our grandest interests, 
 and his illustration of it caught inspiration from its 
 grandeur. As he conceived and prosecuted its ' argu- 
 ment,' a matter of universal moment was removed so 
 far beyond the sphere in which human reason and 
 imagination are wont to dilate, that had it not been 
 sustained by a gigantic intellect, the proud essay 
 would have provoked reproach; he explored regions 
 so distant in their latitude and character from this 
 * dim spot which men call Earth,' assumed a cog- 
 nizance of beings between whom and us so great a 
 gulf is fixed, that had his design been undevout, his
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 temerity were of the order of Prometheus. To * vin- 
 dicate' the Infinite to the finite is the high office of 
 sacred ambassadors, effected best by the pure sim- 
 plicity of His word; but here we witness the Deity 
 vindicated to the child of dust, by a basement and 
 partial outwork of corroborated truth, built upon and 
 filled in by a fancy which, though fallen and fallible, 
 was abashed to no arrestive degree by the conscious- 
 ness of frailty confined within no boundary of being; 
 wiser than Uriel, nigh to God than Satan, chief 
 in hell : with buoyancy to soar to the sublimest turret 
 of the pavilion of Heaven's King, with gravamen to 
 descend to the profoundest mine of dark confederate 
 fiends, with elasticity to expand over all space ; above, 
 in more than Sinai-like proximity with The Presence 
 in whose radiance the angels veil; beneath, in dread 
 vicinity with the Arch-rebel at whose voice ' the 
 hollow deep of hell resounds.' These are associations 
 that enter into Milton's justification of GOD, itself 
 'justified only by success.'*" 
 
 C. Numerous are the opinions that take pos- 
 session of our minds without a substantial title, and 
 (probably from getting into company with our pre- 
 judices,) become exceedingly difficult to dislodge. 
 * Johnson.
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 213 
 
 One of such has accustomed me to attribute to the 
 blindness of Milton more than his commentators have 
 attributed, of the sublimity and profundity of the 
 Paradise Lost. Next to the extinction of" the heaven- 
 lighted lamp" of reason, the saddest sensual depriva- 
 tion known to man is generally esteemed to be the 
 loss of sight : the absence of no other sense appeals so 
 movingly to our common sympathy ; there is no pathos 
 like the plea of the blind. But if we estimate the 
 mind as our chief endowment, and esteem its culture 
 as our chief concern, we shall perceive how different 
 are the degrees of misfortune dependent on the period 
 at which the faculties of the mind's principal agent are 
 suspended. The eloquent lamentations of Milton in 
 his " irrecoverable darkness," both in his Great Poem 
 and in Samson, dissolve the heart by their intense 
 and pervading plaintiveness : in his sonnet to Cyriac 
 Skinner the spirit of complaint retires before the 
 spirit of resigned submission to " Heaven's hand and 
 will," and takes even a tone of triumph from self- 
 approving (and somewhat " stern) exaltedness of zeal"* 
 in " Liberty's defence." But the visual viaduct to 
 Milton's mighty mind was not obstructed until vast 
 resources had been conveyed by that channel to a 
 * Prisoner of Chillon. Byron.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 most capacious reservoir. The veil fell upon his eye 
 at a period when sight, as an auxiliary to the mind, 
 had performed, and well performed, its function; 
 Wisdom was not " shut out " at that main entrance, 
 till after long and laborious aggrandisement had so 
 profusely stored the intellectual treasury with mul- 
 tifarious gems, that there needed a respite from ac- 
 cumulation. When, therefore, night came, it afforded 
 a season for the assortment, review, and exposition 
 of the treasures that had been amassed by the in- 
 dustry of the day. What augmentation of grandeur 
 the Poet's conceptions acquired by the mental ab- 
 stractedness resulting from his blindness to what 
 particular degree the pinions of his fancy were in- 
 vigorated by his ocular privation may excite con- 
 jecture, to no very satisfactory ascertainment: yet, 
 that his imagination received a new energy to its eagle 
 wing derived a portion of the vigor of its towering 
 flight and impetus of its descent, from very inability 
 to expend its strength in a visible and comparatively 
 circumscribed sphere, I am disposed to be largely 
 credulous. 
 
 E. Political and religious feuds had lamentably 
 distorted and exacerbated the judgments of those who 
 were contemporaries with the Poet; and where the
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 215 
 
 practice on all hands was crimination and retort, the 
 Charity which " endureth all things" could point ap- 
 provingly to few. In all communities there are, it is 
 to be feared, a numerous class of persons exceedingly 
 keen in discerning the judicial dispensations of Pro- 
 vidence, as they affect their fellow-creatures, and in 
 construing the divine intention in the infliction of 
 each calamity or apparent evil. I have heard the 
 soi-disant humble, the self-satisfied pure-in-heart, 
 most odious oracles in the interpretation of affliction. 
 Not to wander from the Poet, however, and touching 
 your remarks concerning the beneficial influence of 
 his blindness upon the character of his conceptions, 
 I remember a noble burst of his indignation at an 
 insinuation of his enemies, that his great deprivation 
 was a mark of the divine displeasure. " If the choice 
 were necessary," he declares, " I would prefer my 
 blindness to yours : yours is a cloud spread over the 
 mind, which darkens both the light of reason and of 
 conscience ; mine keeps from my view only the colored 
 surfaces of things, while it leaves me at liberty to 
 contemplate the beauty and stability of virtue and of 
 truth. There is, as the Apostle has remarked, a way 
 to strength through weakness. Let me then be the 
 most feeble creature alive, as long as that feebleness
 
 16 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and 
 immortal spirit; as long as in that obscurity in which 
 I am enveloped the light of the divine presence more 
 clearly shines !" * The Poet appears in this to favor 
 the supposition that his physical deprivation was not 
 at least detrimental to his intellectual faculties. 
 
 (7. Beneficial rather than detrimental, and greatly 
 beneficial. The man of might was alone with his 
 far-reaching and cyclopsedic mind, by a cause pro- 
 foundly sorrowful placed in fortunate isolation. I am 
 surprised that Dr. Johnson should have appropriated 
 so inconsiderable an amount of probable effect to a 
 circumstance almost compelling the exercise of the 
 imagination the exploration of the fancy, and in- 
 citing to more adventurous enterprises a mind so ill 
 at ease in inactivity as was Milton's. Campbell, too, 
 alludes to his blindness in no tone of sanguine belief 
 that " darkness aided intellectual thought :"j speaking 
 of the " congenial impressions" made on Milton in 
 Italy, by the frescos of Angelo and the pictures of 
 Raphael, he says they may " possibly have been re- 
 called in the formation of Milton's great poem, when 
 his eyes were shut upon the world, and when he 
 looked inwardly for ' godlike shapes and forms.' ' 
 * Second Defence for the People of England.
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 217 
 
 But Sir Egerton Brydges is bolder, and asserts, that 
 " his outward blindness did but strengthen his inward 
 light. Perhaps (he adds,) but for this blindness his 
 creative faculties had not been sufficiently concen- 
 trated to produce his great poem. He was now shut 
 out from worldly distractions, and the day was as the 
 covering calm of night to him." 
 
 E. The calm of night, indeed, but not that 
 night whose fetters bind down our bodies in salutary 
 and soothing restraint, till " Morn's rosy hand unbars 
 the gates of light," and we go forth athirst again for 
 the elixir which Nature divinely and diffusely pours, 
 like a rich baptismal unction on the early brow of 
 Day. Alas! fruitless to him the upland walk for 
 " unimpeded commerce with the sun," as 
 
 " Morn, her rosy steps in th' eastern clime 
 Advancing, sow'd the earth with orient pearl;" 
 
 before him Night sat for ever on her ebon throne he 
 kindled no more at the rapture of the reawakening 
 world; to him all uninfectious now " the cheerful ways 
 of men," the wild mirth of children, the glad face of 
 Nature, the regal sun and radiated cloud, 
 
 C. Pardon me for thinking that you breathe a 
 rather " browner horror" over the scene than belongs
 
 218 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 to it reasonably. You forget the willingness of his 
 submission to a " feebleness" that did not militate with 
 mental vigor, and his own testimony that, so far from 
 paralysing or prostrating the energies of his mind, it 
 caused an influx of diviner light. The alone loss 
 of sight (deranging no intellectual faculty or function) 
 would in any case revive Memory, and in Milton's, 
 if it did not lend sportive vivacity to Fancy, it urged 
 it into the illimitable, and undoubtedly aided his con- 
 ceptions of the incorporeal. 
 
 E. Ay, but vivid as were Memory and Fancy, 
 the very vividness with which they reminded him of 
 what had once been rapture, must have made still 
 sadder the remembrance of " a glory that had passed 
 away" from him, in this life, for ever. Although in 
 reference to his blindness he may occasionally 
 
 " have writ the style of gods, 
 And made a pish at sufferance," 
 
 I have no doubt his really-acquiescent mood was 
 transitory, and soon disturbed by the irksomeness of 
 that enduring eclipse which veiled from him 
 
 " the silent looks of happy things." 
 The sorrowing sympathy we feel for Milton in his
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 219 
 
 affliction, is a far profounder feeling than that spon- 
 taneous pity which ever stirs in presence of the blind ; 
 of him above all men it may be emphatically said, that 
 
 his heart knew its own bitterness in privation, as, in the 
 
 
 bodying forth of his sublime imaginings, no stranger 
 
 might intermeddle with its joy. In my opinion 
 you touch his " ark of grief" too presumptuously. 
 There was little in Milton in awful and magnificent 
 Milton that was held in common with others ; there 
 might be a sameness of material elements, there was 
 evidently the same liability to " all adversities which 
 happen to the body;" but as it regards men, he "stood 
 
 " Among them but not of them, in a shroud 
 Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.'* 
 
 Your especial idol has said of this remoteness from 
 the crowd, 
 
 " Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;"* 
 
 and it is this intellectual isolation that excites, in me, 
 a disposition towards intense regretfulness before 
 the imaginary spectacle of the blind Poet. For, to 
 thousands in similar exclusion from the visible world, 
 the "drop serene" that shuts out light, only enthrones 
 * Wordsworth.
 
 220 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 lethargy; their hearts possess ability to make to 
 themselves an humble heaven with very scant appli- 
 ances ; their eye, even in the day of its power, might 
 have been an " idle orb," as far as in capacity of a 
 spy, subserving the mind it reconnoitred the visible 
 in order to store and to fortify the intellectual. But 
 to the unquenched orb of Milton, the silent symbol- 
 language of Nature was most stirring and significant ; 
 he " heard a voice" where others could not, and saw 
 wonders in the waste places: the calm languor that 
 to others " idlesse might seem," had, for him, " its 
 morality." By how many is the changing scenery 
 in which they live and move regarded with lack- 
 lustre eye; seeing, they see not: so that seed-time 
 and harvest return, and the early and the latter rain, 
 to them it is all one, whether Nature array herself in 
 flowered chintz or in the floral sheen of spring-time ; 
 whether she o'erarch their daily path with dim vapor 
 or with the witching cobalt sky and mother-o'-pearly 
 cloud; whether rude Boreas rumble through the 
 lofty and long-drawn aisles of her temple their daily 
 walk, or whether the vast sunlit nave be inundated 
 with commingling song; all one is it, whether she 
 do all but arrest them per vi, in garden or field or by 
 wayside, to coax them into more cheerful contentment
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 
 
 by pleasant stories, all of promise daily-perfecting 
 promise ; or whether she be attired in the half- 
 mourning magnificence of her autumnal apparel, 
 when promise has ripened into full fruition. But 
 for him of whom we speak, these transformations had 
 a potent charm; and when came 
 
 " The sweet season that bud and bloome forth brings," 
 
 he would have it to be " stubbornness" not to go out 
 and be eye-witness of the general joy. Profound, I 
 believe, and permanent, was the plaint of Milton 
 while under the enduring cloud. 
 
 C. Wordsworth is known to be no admirer of 
 Gray; yet, although I reverence the dicta of the 
 great living Master, I cannot find an encomiastic 
 tribute to Milton to rival the brilliant allusion in the 
 Progress of Poesy, left us by that " consummate 
 master of poetic diction:" 
 
 " Nor second he, that rode sublime 
 
 Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, 
 
 The secrets of the abyss to spy ; 
 
 He passed the flaming bounds of place and time: 
 
 The living throne, the sapphire blaze, 
 
 Where angels tremble while they gaze, 
 
 He saw, but blasted with excess of light, 
 
 Closed his eyes in endless night." 
 
 JS. There is something Miltonic in that noble
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 motet pity that so grand a swell should so soon die 
 away! But as it relates to the hero the Rider on 
 seraph-wings, is it not a moving piece of mental 
 imagery, capable of metamorphoses stranger in their 
 reality than are many of the wonders of romance, 
 that blind Old Man, in modest apparel seated beside 
 his lowly portal, in all the pitiable impotency of his 
 infirmity ; "on evil days fallen, with dangers com- 
 passed, in darkness and solitude ;" and then, (marvel- 
 lous contrast between corporeal imbecility and mental 
 puissance!) to view him as withdrawn from contact 
 with the stir and toil of men and strife of " evil 
 tongues/' as having entered into synods of gods, and 
 with intellect expanded by archangelic intercourse, 
 to hear him on his descent reporting " things invisible 
 to mortal sight:" nor uninteresting is it to reflect 
 by what casual instrumentality were recorded 
 
 " The visions which arose without a sleep."* 
 
 I humbly think, however an error, perhaps, of " the 
 voluntary taste of common intellect," as opineth Sir 
 Egerton Brydges that the current of the Poet's 
 august conceptions is sometimes prejudicially effected 
 by extraneous supplies ; the main fluxion is troubled 
 * Lament of Tasso. Byron.
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 
 
 by the tributary streams that at frequent intervals 
 flow into it from the Pierian springs, 
 
 " which rush, 
 No rill, but rather an o'erflowing flood."* 
 
 Turning, as we have done, from Shakspeare to Mil- 
 ton, from effusions, literally effusions of simplicity, 
 to a production distinguished for scholarship, the 
 transition is doubtlessly unfavorable to Milton, as it 
 regards general effectiveness. Ministers of Prudence 
 defend us from less reverently contemplating the 
 edifice of a wise master-builder, because of our 
 inability to construe all its artistical points; and in 
 the spacious arena of the Epic, as in a vast bazaar 
 here crescent, there meandering a Gleaner of 
 gems from many climes, a Pearl-diver from his very 
 youth, might well dazzle weak eyes and confuse feeble 
 faculties, when his merchandise disposed in due 
 array he should invite the curious to inspect its 
 gorgeous profusion. But then, the magically -moving 
 naivete of that greater Pet of Nature's, whom she 
 cradled by " lucid Avon," tossed in infancy and 
 juvenescence like a large-armed, honest, doating nurse 
 whose fondlings arc of terrific fervor ; who taught the 
 
 * Cowper's Translation of Milton's Latin Poem to his Father. 
 
 p2
 
 224 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 chiel to take notes in strange situations for a darling 
 of hers, and, when he attained his prime, so dowered 
 him, that the scarce second Scion of whom we have 
 discoursed, avers, in homage to his Senior, that kings, 
 for a tomb like " my Shakspeare's," might long to die. 
 I think I have previously mentioned to you a vene- 
 rable friend, who, with a love of poetry of which Age 
 has not chilled the ardency, is, strangely, little " moved 
 by concord of sweet sounds," and trusts (in his own 
 quaint expression,) " to find that heaven is something 
 better than a large orchestra." His appreciation of 
 " glorious, untutored Will, and mighty, scholastic 
 John," is genuinely British. " That ostentatious dis- 
 play of scholarship that seizing upon every occasion 
 to let the world know how well he was acquainted 
 with all the realms of Art and Science, of classic and 
 romantic lore, which is continually visible in Milton 
 is not at all to my taste (says he); but Willie's ' sweet 
 neglect' of artistical embellishment the ease with 
 which his pen transfixes ideal images of grace and 
 beauty, without casting carefully about for ' florid 
 prose or honied rhyme,' and yet so frequently ex- 
 quisite where seemingly unstudied are features that 
 when the eye looks upon, it loves" He who thus 
 opineth was with me a few days since : he is a logician,
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 
 
 and has a habit of demanding "proof" upon assertion, 
 which makes it advisable, before introducing to him 
 an hypothesis, to ascertain that it has legs to stand on. 
 During a cursory discussion upon Milton, I meekly 
 ventured to hint how fair a field might Moore have 
 found in Paradise, prior to our Ancestors' ejectment : 
 the pen that reported the Loves of the Angels, would 
 not its current have crystallised, and flowed in iris- 
 hues, as it told of the Garden, when, as with the 
 yet-lingering pressure of the Creator's hand, it was 
 pronounced " good," and was blissful as are all things 
 which are born of GOD. 'Twas an evening lovely as 
 that we just now witnessed, when my ancient ally was 
 with me ; and the beautiful time so forcibly suggested 
 the primeval vesper-hour, ere Danger frowned through 
 the darkness to agitate Dread, and when, by gentle 
 graduation brooded over by the silver-winged Silence, 
 the young world sunk, in the languor of long hap- 
 piness to rest, in order to recruit its capacity of 
 enjoyment for the repletion of the morrow; in all 
 the grandeur of its serenity, the time, I say, so much 
 impressed me, that when my companion left, unused, 
 albeit, to "spend my prodigal wits in bootless rhymes," 
 I could not abstain from lamely chasing the idea of
 
 THE APPROACH OF NIGHT IN EDEN. 
 
 To tranquil Use the ecstatic Hours, 
 A soothing umber-shade was given, 
 Which Day eterne hath not in heaven 
 Nor lent to Earth, unless that powers 
 Not infinite might wearied be 
 By o'er-prolonged felicity. 
 But who may paint what accents tell 
 The infant Sun's sublime farewell ? 
 The splendor of day were palor now 
 To the fulgency of his fiery brow, 
 As like a god, with radiance drest, 
 Whose glory gilds his couch of rest, 
 He sunk within the crimsoned West. 
 
 And now, the ruddy day-beams fleetly failing, 
 
 Night falls on Eden as a spirit's wing, 
 Fresh fragrance all th' odorous bowers exhaling, 
 
 Inspiring which their quires forget to sing : 
 The shadow spreads a soft narcotic shield 
 And flowers breathe, in downy slumber sealed ; 
 Fair children all, yet one supremely sweet, 
 
 With whom, on wakening from its first repose, 
 An amorous Sunbeam, raptured, chanced to meet, 
 
 And kissed the blushing flowret to a Rose.
 
 NIGHT IN EDEN. 
 
 And streamlets rilled a softer tune 
 As o'er their ripples shed the Moon 
 A paler, scarce less lucid ray, 
 Than that which burnished them by day ; 
 And while each bliss-o'erburdened sense 
 Was hushed in quietude intense, 
 There issued from a viewless clime, 
 Such strains as when, in quires sublime, 
 To gushing harps, the ardent hymn 
 Bursts from the bright-eyed cherubim ; 
 While high above and from afar 
 Streamed melody from many a star: 
 O, had those stars been Luna's daughters, 
 They might have paused in their career 
 Perchance have left their stellar sphere 
 To linger over Eden's waters, 
 Where, mirrored, shone each pearly gem 
 That glistened in Night's diadem, 
 
 Each lovely in the bright emblazoned sky 
 As Vestal fair to Beauty's crown aspiring, 
 
 Seen by the light of her own jetty eye, 
 
 Ere dimmed by tears or too devout admiring. 
 
 Night reigned : soft Zephyrs that by day- 
 Did now in sportive dalliance stray 
 Where'er a new Perfume had birth, 
 Would then in fragrance flee away 
 To tempt the mighty Sea to play.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The exulting Main, in giant mirth 
 And joyous unison with Earth, 
 Tossed high, in ecstasy, his spray. 
 But Rapture lulled itself to rest 
 When Phoebus Paradise had blest, 
 And Eden donned her night-array; 
 Then hushed grew Ocean, placid Sleep 
 In starlit slumber stilled the Deep. 
 
 'Twas an exquisite hour, that reign of Night, 
 
 So blissful and dreamy in its delight 
 
 That Earth might have longed for none other light ; 
 Yet silence seemed a state forlorn 
 When, from the roseate East, the Morn 
 Roused, and redecked, that vernal scene 
 To vivid joy, in sparkling sheen ; 
 Till Eden wore so glad a smile, 
 It might e'en seraphim beguile. 
 
 C. The notion of the stars being daughters of 
 the moon, would hardly pass unscathed by the good- 
 humoured satire of your logical friend, I should think; 
 nor would you escape censure from le beau sexe, for 
 the imputation of vanity conveyed under a figure (you 
 will excuse my candour,) rather difficult of digestion.
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 229 
 
 E. When I " showed" to the quaint comrade of 
 my youth this " wandering"* of my old age, he fixed 
 on that identical figure for jocular criticism, remarking, 
 " Your making the moon a mother of the stars suggests 
 the application of a popular phrase to comets, if you 
 include them in the number of Luna's children; and 
 nothing can be easier to conceive, than the virtuous 
 astonishment of the better-behaved members of the 
 starry family at the wild ways of their erratic sisters. 
 I fancy I see the pale and prudish planets, looking 
 at a comet in its disorderly courses, like a maid from 
 the backwoods beholding the passing of a rail-train 
 half-frighted, half-amazed; and senses so rarified as 
 yours are, might, I dare say, hear the cold virgins, 
 as the blazing comet swept rudely by them, making 
 inquiries as to the moon-mother's knowledge of its 
 whereabouts." And then I was ungratefully attacked 
 by the bairn whose rearing I have superintended from 
 babyhood, (and whose quibble you curiously re-echo,) 
 touching the offensive insinuation of vanity aux dames. 
 But I am able to repel your accusation, that the 
 figure is outre, unless you similarly impeach great 
 
 * " O! where have I been all this time? how tended, 
 That none, for pity, show'd me how I wandered?" 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher.
 
 230 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Milton: for in his paraphrase of the hundred and 
 thirty-sixth psalm, he mentions with the Creator's 
 
 works, 
 
 " The horned moon that shines by night, 
 Among her spangled sisters bright :" 
 
 and when you consider how, with " inaudible and 
 noiseless step" she moves and watches, with more 
 than a sister's patience, through the long night-hours, 
 and enters (no respecter of persons, like her GOD !) 
 through the tiniest lattice, so it be cleanly and un- 
 curtained, and in sweet stealth advances till she kiss 
 the face of the sleeping, leaving him bright dreams 
 as her blessing ; and how she passes away again, but 
 lingeringly oh! very lingeringly, to shine on other 
 slumbers, until that dazzling " god who brings the 
 Day, mounts up," and dissipates the visionary spell 
 in its silvery structure too etherial to exist in the red, 
 rapturous riot of the rousing Morn : all this assiduity 
 and solicitude of Madame la Lune, Sir Censor, you will 
 admit to be more maternal than sisterly; so, unless 
 your hardihood would cast a stone at John Milton, 
 retract the charge of monstrosity in my describing 
 the moon as a mother of many lovely daughters. 
 
 C. Mrs. Hemans would have made a glowing 
 picture of the Garden, before the arch-tempter had
 
 TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 
 
 wrought his work there, and ere our father trembled 
 at the voice of GOD. The scene is better suited for 
 the description of an imaginative and noble-natured 
 woman, than it is for man; for although woman is, 
 with man, " fallen from her high estate," inasmuch 
 as she is exempted far more than man from the 
 knowledge of evil, and is far more conversant with 
 " whatsoever things are pure," her qualifications to 
 imagine a condition of innocence, are manifestly 
 superior to his. In her Despondency and Aspiration, 
 the highly-gifted Mrs. Hemans has poured out a 
 torrent of brilliant conceptions a guarantee of her 
 power to have made a most luxuriant and living 
 landscape of Eden, in the flush of its first perfection. 
 E. When I read that Poem, I considered that, 
 resplendent as is its language, great must have been 
 the injury inflicted on her thoughts, by subjection to 
 the proces-verbal necessary before the presentation of 
 an Idea to the public. But tolerate this one last 
 remark who may calculate the crippling effect of 
 reducing to words the imagery of the wonderful and 
 mighty mind of MILTON ? Is it debatable, think you, 
 would it be by any one contested, that the author 
 of the Paradise Lost, having no equal in the sub- 
 limity of his conceptions, had ever an equal sufferer
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 from the deficiencies of language adequate to their 
 incorporation and expression though Speech to him 
 was like a deep-toned shell,* struck by a prophet's 
 hand; he was omnipotent over numbers. But the 
 mean mind in motion is still meaner when it records 
 that motion. Language and speech may communicate 
 much that stirs within ; they may interpret ideas whose 
 outlines are defined conceptions which dwell within 
 compass : but when the imagination hurries into the 
 far depths of a starry sky, or dives into the stirless 
 mysteries of its own being, or rises in conjecture to 
 the sphere of its ultimate destiny then Thought is 
 lost in the chaos of its own creations. For speech, 
 potent prerogative as it is, hath no part in the subtler 
 and intenser emotions which prevail, when the soul 
 holdeth holy-day beyond the barriers of earth, and 
 feels (heavenliest perception !) its affinity with a king- 
 dom and kindred higher and holier than itself. But 
 this rare, stirring sense of royalty has no audible 
 articulation, nor may the after-mind, subdued and 
 sunken, translate its visionary creation : all that sur- 
 vives the deluge of divine light is known but as the 
 shadowy phantasms of a dream as a bright and 
 beautiful illusion, which a breath destroyed ! 
 
 * Gray's Ode The Death of Hoel.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 
 
 " SPIRIT-STIRRING THOMAS CAKLYLE has fancifully balanced our 
 Indian Empire against our WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE. Of course 
 his loyal heart heaved the Empire aboon the beam. Descending 
 from Men to Words, which could we Englanders best dispense 
 with our Colonies, or the word HOME?" E. 
 
 IN the month of September in every year invariably, 
 the Old Man, winsome Lady! with whom thou hast 
 thus far borne, was wont to abandon Ivy Lodge, and, 
 during the presidency-in-chief of the harvest-moon, 
 to sojourn at the place of his birth : occasionally also 
 in merry May his salutary face was turned thither- 
 wards. Attendant on " these accustomed annual 
 rounds," there were " partings" at the Lodge, not 
 by any means " sudden," or of that romantic fervency 
 which a bold poetic figure describes as pressing the 
 heart's life out, but full enough of pathos to dim the
 
 236 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Elder's eye. E. accounted for such emotions, and 
 justified what sterner systems of flesh and blood 
 might designate as weakness or effeminacy, by the 
 argument that these autumnal visitations were made 
 in serious rather than in holiday meaning ; that Time, 
 with seemingly-increasing celerity, was conducting 
 him into close proximity with that critical withdraw- 
 ing-gate by which all Earth's human company retire, 
 after visits varying in duration, but by authoritative 
 premonition announced and by accumulating evidence 
 approved to terminate about the threescore-and-tenth 
 year, elude as we may the fatal beck of humankind's 
 gaunt Scene-shifter ; and that when, as the ancient of 
 years, he returned to the spot from whence was 
 dated his beginning of days, he moved, though not 
 with heavy heart, " as though his steps were tow'rds 
 a tomb," for when his little life should be rounded 
 by its second sleep, it was there, in his own familiar 
 sod, that he desired to be laid down. 
 
 Of the Elder's feathered dependents two especial 
 favorites, the Queen Dowager and Sir Fred, were 
 chosen to accompany him into country quarters, a 
 measure adopted not so much from E.'s passion for 
 music as to avert their self-inflicted martyrdom in the 
 cause of abstinency a suicidal zeal in which, or
 
 CHAPTER VII. 237 
 
 desperate chagrin at his absence, had once nearly 
 reduced them to barebones during an autumnal re- 
 cess of the rightful Purveyor. The impassive Ben- 
 jamin was indispensable as compagnon de toy age, so 
 that he also migrated; and while the rural sojourn 
 lasted, the guardianship of the Lodge was delegated 
 to a trusty old official who first entered the service 
 in the year 10 (eighteen prior centuries understood); 
 and when the pro tern, governor had lent respectful 
 audience to E.'s last iteration of injunctions, de totis 
 rebus et quibusdam aliis, he sustained in his steward- 
 ship a burden of responsibility, compared Avith which 
 Lord Ashburton's was a bagatelle, when he undertook 
 the business of the boundary-question and the ticklish 
 task of pacifying noisy brother Jonathan. 
 
 A green valley bosoming an old grey temple down 
 in the fertile south of Hants, was the scene whereon 
 E.'s eyes first opened to a world very " unintelligible" 
 to infants and philosophers. A sentiment planted 
 by invisible agency, and fostered by unseen dew that 
 gathers at the dawn of sentiency, stimulates in after- 
 life, even in the sordid, a complacent regard for the 
 spot of his first unconscious debut in the character 
 of Mewler and Puker in a nurse's arms ; relaxing to 
 the risible muscles of the most austere is the reflection, 
 
 Q
 
 238 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 that he surmounts the actual hearth where his infan- 
 tine riotings were rocked into repose, which Colic, 
 not Care, invaded then; or that he paces, with the 
 step of manly vigor, the sphere of his early enterprises 
 in the critical art of self-dependent locomotion. 
 Firmly, indeed, is the ligature which binds man to 
 his birthplace woven into the curious fabric of the 
 heart's affections; strongly twined must it be there 
 with the " silver cord," to resist unbrokenly all 
 subsequent idolatries to abide ineradicable by Time, 
 and maintain its prominent relief through all his 
 motley augmentation of devices. Faith is avowedly 
 fantastical in many of its propositions ; but certainly 
 that article cannot be deemed a fantasy which con- 
 tends, that mankind are marked by local as well as 
 by ancestral lineaments ; that from the place in which 
 " careless childhood strayed," as from a metaphysical 
 matrix, we deduce to our moral constitution a con- 
 formity or semi-conformity to its distinctive features. 
 It is the intellectual character receiving its idiosyn- 
 crasy in secret, as did the physical frame its members ; 
 the imperceptible fashioning of its faculties " yet 
 being imperfect" or " when as yet there was none of 
 them." The tokens of this local lineality may remain 
 undeveloped for years : If in early life we start into
 
 CHAPTER VII. g39 
 
 scenic extremes if the embryo-man be hurried, 
 while yet a child, from the hamlet to a city, and 
 thrust into the hot throng, then its long-continued 
 pressure is of resistless power: nor only of power 
 upon the character in that peculiarly-elastic period, 
 but also on caution-and-cavil-bound maturity the 
 influence successfully works, subjugating by sheer 
 incessancy of operation; for we are wisely made of 
 plastic clay, of which Circumstance (always under 
 omniscient control) is the potter ; and in the constantly- 
 revolving crucible of Custom the sternest stuff is 
 shapen into a fitness for its uses. But the hour 
 arrives to many, (and especially about the period of 
 the first of two momentous crises, when the frivolities 
 of youth are found distasteful and the earnest Man is 
 consolidating,) that in half-active, half-involuntary 
 retrospection, the thinking being, in his review of 
 bygone times and scenes, is reminded by Memory 
 that mental resurrectionist of many sensations quick- 
 ened in a season which, if it were careless, was 
 sometimes visited by Thought in its vagrancy ; and as 
 he grows increasingly intent upon the hours when an 
 holiday made a light heart, and a light heart was 
 happiness, a host of long-dormant emotions revive 
 emotions too dreamy for clear, comprehensible recog- 
 
 Q2
 
 240 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 nition, which swam along the young heart's current, 
 like fleecy clouds that float about the sun pleasant 
 then to feel in their sphere, as are the fleecy clouds to 
 look at, when in amber-and-carmine glory they linger 
 in the western heavens, steeped in the splendor of 
 the day-god's exit. And if in infancy it were the 
 lot of such reflective being to be " nursed at happy 
 distance" from the jaundiced atmosphere of dense 
 cities, he may remember how the waterfall seduced 
 him from the sport, to sit and gaze at its prismatic 
 flow ; and how the echoes of mirth seemed a sound 
 profane in the sanctity of an old wood's silence; or 
 how, on the steep hill's summit and awearied, he laid 
 himself down and would have slept, but that his eye 
 was attracted heavenwards, and all incapable of com- 
 prehending the spell which kept him wakeful, he 
 there in charmed recumbency acknowledged 
 
 " The witchery of the soft blue sky." 
 
 When, a week after E.'s arrival, I followed him 
 to the home of his childhood, and mingled with its 
 many charms, I felt this faith in the moulding influ- 
 ence of familiar scenery substantiated; for in his 
 Waller-like affection for " harmony, and grace, and 
 gentlest beauty," it was easy to recognise the taste
 
 CHAPTER VII. 241 
 
 and disposition which Nature unthwarted would, as 
 a matter of course, foster to their full growth and 
 strength, through the medium primarily of contact 
 of habitual gazing upon and heart-intercourse with 
 the surpassing loveliness encinctured in that tranquil 
 vale itself to be regarded by such as look earnestly 
 into this vast Illustrated Volume, the World we live 
 in, as a vignette, elaborately wrought and purposed 
 to display how sweet a smile animates all features 
 despite the digital-on-lip monition of Silence when 
 Beauty, on mountain or in valley, hath mutual occu- 
 pancy with Quietude. And tracing, with the Old 
 Man, the free hills over which his foot-of-youth had 
 sprung lustily, the deep glades, stream-intersected 
 fields, and verdant woods now robing in their autum- 
 nal vestment, it was without the range of possibilities 
 to resist a certain contagion engendered by his en- 
 thusiastic pride in his birthplace. 
 
 More than six thousand souls are said to locate in 
 the bosom and about the extremities of that fair valley, 
 before whose charms, had he by chance confronted 
 them, Lorraine would surely have set up his easel; 
 the Laureate, could he yet see them and create 
 associations, would not leave Tintern Abbey Revisited 
 in its pr-eminency among home-touches, for of this
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 " green pastoral landscape/' as of that, a noble time- 
 worn Abbey is the primal grace; and could it come 
 in the halcyon hues of sweet eventide under survey 
 of Sir Christopher North, the world might rejoice in 
 a supplementary Recreation, and his lustrous picture 
 of Windermere at Sunset not longer live alone in its 
 glory. 
 
 As to mine Ancient, pricle in the natural beauties 
 of this Valley-of-the-Test was tantamount to a passion; 
 and it was not unamusing to note his prurient impa- 
 tience for a candidate whom to initiate and accompany 
 in his " noviciate of delight." So it was hastily upon 
 the clearance of that comfortablest of all repasts, the 
 matutinal, that we sallied forth towards his former 
 " daily walks and ancient neighbourhood." Really 
 that day, apart from the pleasures of our reconnoitre, 
 and on the score of its intrinsic merits, throws over 
 the reminiscence of a gorgeous reality a charm not 
 inferior to the couleur-de-rose effect striven for by 
 poet-painters of Luxury and the East. Patient living 
 and moving long before under such frequency of 
 misrepresentation as God's meek sky is subject to in 
 British Babylon, and groping (so to say) in heaven's 
 light seen under double disparagement exterior 
 dimness brought about by sombrous vapors, inter-
 
 CHAPTER VII. 243 
 
 changed officially with denseness from interior cob- 
 web, in charitable semi-political superstition conserved 
 from crushing besom of destruction through years 
 of multiplying spider-film on film; patient abiding 
 under comparative eclipse might have predisposed 
 us, beneath that bright-blue, bare-breasted sky, to 
 somewhat fraternise in feeling with an old man, 
 fabricator of our primeval pantalons, who, awhile 
 blinded by removable cataract, on first scarce-reaccess 
 of light exclaimed, " A thousand suns ! " Yet in 
 good truth might that day of exploitation have been 
 given and accepted in its entireness as a Septembral 
 master-piece, a day whose respirations, one would 
 fancy, were sufficiently redolent with rich autumnal 
 odours to have embalmed, and so in some manner 
 have preserved, its loveliness. Beauty of which even 
 eloquence could make but faint praise, and fragrance, 
 not to be syllabled, rising up from Earth, as incense 
 from an altar co-extensive with, and impregnating, 
 the wide firmament, afforded no unsuitable support 
 to that theory of the day's self-embalming ; but an old 
 enactment and innumerable precedents were adverse, 
 and the flushed Hours predestined victims of Con- 
 sumption looked round them and yielded-up the 
 ghost, after the manner of a long line of predecessors.
 
 244 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 That very estimable item in the details of a sound 
 constitution freedom of debate, is often exercised 
 without reference to equitable or even reasonable 
 duration ; and for our own part we have greater confi- 
 dence that good would accrue from a fair debating- 
 society sort of restriction upon talk, especially wild 
 political talk, than from political suffrage sidled into 
 ballot-boxes. Rambling regenerators, advocating 
 short parliaments, could not consistently oppose a 
 system for abbreviating speeches ; else, with an influx 
 from the league, a weary yarn of verbiage, wrought 
 by half-a-dozen orators, might stretch its suffocating 
 length over an entire session. Not to lose my own 
 loquacious Guide by wandering into the arid wastes 
 of political oratory, nor to class his with the vain 
 babblings of the disaffected, it is expedient at once to 
 observe, that throughout his garrulous guidance few 
 pauses admitted further remark from the object guided 
 than a consenting " yea," to eulogy passed upon 
 ubiquitous loveliness. Taciturn never, here, upon 
 his natal soil, E. took to himself the part of commen- 
 tator-in-chief as a right, allowed by human sense of 
 becomingness and animal. The proclamation of Morn 
 by another herald on this individual chanticleer's 
 rightful stercoraceous pinnacle could such infringe-
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 245 
 
 ment be tolerated by Propriety or the lawful pos- 
 sessor ? 
 
 We have left the Elder's abode, and are passing 
 through a churchyard the northern front of a noble 
 pile before us, in all the impressiveness of antiquity 
 and stateliness of cathedral proportions. 
 
 " But pause we not now," said E. " for more than 
 momentary admiration of this holy temple, which 
 imposes reverent contemplation for its use-sake, and 
 to which Time lends a solemnising grandeur, like 
 plaintive holy melody at sun-decline to a radiant 
 sabbath-eve. Though there rest above its massive 
 sanctity " the clear blue air of Peace," yet the glad 
 Morning-Sun smiles on its walls with a power which 
 makes the time exultative, and one's temper in tur- 
 bulent unison with the time: an altogether calmer 
 hour therefore for survey there the serene eve for 
 the silent shrine, to which our spirits rather than our 
 bodies go, touched with " a sense sublime" that the 
 Spirit which pervades all places is there more pal- 
 pably, and that in the air we breathe within those 
 hallowed precincts there mingles an empyrean unc- 
 tion. Hold our weakness in derision, ye whose 
 strong minds esteem as superstitious a pious regard 
 for consecrated walls think scorn of the pleasant
 
 246 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 land to which our hearts wing their way in this 
 " idolatry ;" but not more innocuous were ponderous 
 artillery levelled at a flight of fairies, than are your 
 " wise saws" spent at the root of healthful Supposition. 
 Affections withal, whose name is Legion, rise up in 
 rhythmic and prosaic argument, protesting against 
 your devastating ideal worlds whose bliss commoves 
 the deep inner fount of Ecstasy, and liberates emotions 
 uninterpretable in the cold idioms of this working 
 world. 
 
 " Call * The Counterpart of Paradise' a title un- 
 merited by this place present, and the offering of a 
 pair of turtledoves shall not appease our righteous 
 indignation. Nor am I prepared to permit the Curse 
 to have cast its shadow over the scene to which I 
 refer thy comparisons. Here, by this pathway in each 
 day trodden by every intermediate step between the 
 totterings of infancy and old age, here pealed, in 
 May, from the fascinated foliage of this wayside tree, 
 most musical, most melancholy tones, to the original 
 of which, when struck in Eden by the primal nightin- 
 gale, our mother Eve might charmedly have listened, 
 and by her grandbairns-male be not upbraided for 
 bidding her goodman Adam suspend his soft discourse, 
 while the sweetest of the feathered kind poured out
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 247 
 
 his amorous plaint to the loveliest of the floral. Here, 
 though on both hands are habitations, here cease- 
 lessly he chanted through the still night-watches, 
 yon mimic waterfall and he twin rufflers of ' the 
 raven-down of Darkness' as it swelled whelmingly, 
 that nightingale-soprano, upon the low water-bass, 
 carrying divine illusions into the dreams of the in- 
 nocent sleeping within the circle of his song. He, 
 of lovely lays the lavish melodist, metes out his min- 
 strelsy listless to the praises of our kind and the 
 reproaches of his own, and, from slumber broken by 
 his ear-piercing song, uprouses the lithe lark 
 
 " Companion of the Morning-star at dawn, 
 And of the dawn co-herald ; 
 
 minstrel scarce second in our love, for he, right bonnie 
 bird, mounts with no fretful note through the grey 
 humid ether to mingle his matinsong with the music 
 of the spheres, where, high in heaven, he sees, far 
 down in the fulgent East, the crimson heralds of the 
 King of Day, long ere the monarch dawns upon our 
 world though he, too, sovereign Sol, moves at this 
 season with no sluggard-step towards us : nor may we 
 marvel much at his celerity ; the Earth, all-glorious 
 in adornments, like a loving bride awaits his presence
 
 248 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 for consummation of happiness ; and much good would 
 it do fair dames and ' gentlemen in England, then a- 
 bed,' to come out and see how the fine old Fire-King 
 frowns away the beleaguered clouds that interpose 
 'twixt him and the bride he is rising royally to bless, 
 till the outspread profusion of her charms is all un- 
 veiled, and at her ten thousand sparkling recognitions 
 of her lord, his frown relaxes to a smile, that, in its 
 infectious power to gladden, makes the beholder's 
 blood dash jocundly against its veiny channels, like 
 jetty spray which, when merry winds kiss trippingly 
 his sunny waves, old Ocean throws about in the reck- 
 lessness of mirth, not ire. 
 
 " A stream of water, and where ' scaly colonies' 
 are known to abound, as in the Test here its in- 
 separable agitators in human shape, belaboring its 
 innocent surface. The pursuit of Walton, nathless 
 the persuasives of Sir Christopher, and Izaak's own 
 plaintive desire 
 
 " To angle on, and hope to have 
 A quiet passage to the grave," 
 
 has had no pleasure for me, since, of auld lang syne, 
 I heard Andrew Marvell weeping his slain fawn, 
 sovereign Shakspeare correcting the notion prevalent
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 249 
 
 as to petty corporal pangs, and saw (for it is a thing 
 to see,) Pope's picture of confiding Meekness in the 
 form of a lamb, vainly spending its last look of fond- 
 ness upon Ruthlessness in the form of man, and 
 warmed at the furnaces of fine human feeling that 
 glow about the pages of Cowper. These, and other 
 hearings, seeings, and feelings, have jointly originated 
 one strong sentiment, sunk deeply into our sense of 
 humanity, no fugitive chord of appeal to Pity, but 
 an abiding principle, rendering it more than mere 
 squeamish affectation of tenderness which reprobates, 
 when followed for voluntary pastime, the sports that 
 have their consummation in the agonies of God's 
 creatures. 
 
 " Another stream, branching from the copious 
 Test in main-flow and streamlets the Nile to our 
 valley's fertility, chief giver of ' glory to the grass.' 
 A landscape, however fair its form, if it want the 
 fertilising feature of a broad river and its subsidiaries, 
 in sun or moonlight seen like luminous meandering 
 veins, is comparatively but as a vision of dry bones, 
 or comely frame wanting the flowing heart. And yet 
 another stream ! source of the clatter of this brawling 
 mill: like a place imperial, under occasional aspects, 
 how placid the head, how foamy and contentious the
 
 250 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 tail. By-and-by we will amble along the upward 
 bank, for right dear to us is water-side walking, save 
 when that stealthiest of isms, Rheumatism, assumes a 
 menacing attitude on the stream's margin, and clouds, 
 " black with breeding thunder" or heavily-laden with 
 Caledonian mist, fresh from the north and dusky as 
 colliers, are discharging their embargoes. Standing, 
 in the lull of care, on an " enamelled bank," a lucid 
 stream is a spectacle so beguiling to both eye and 
 mind, that, unfelt, the fancy winds its way into the 
 heart that it is stedfast in its bright serenity ; nor till 
 the heavens lower or a rude wind ruffles its radiant 
 tranquillity does the conviction return, that in glory 
 or in gloom it is passing, perpetually passing away : 
 ever, ever eloquent as a Maximist to mortal man ; 
 for in how many delicious moods, and mostly when 
 " life has seemed a thing divine," have we forgotten 
 its incessant fluxion; and peaceful in perchance a 
 perilous oblivion, might still have forgotten, had not 
 a cloud overshadowed our comfort, and sent out its 
 monitory voice ' Onwards ! unretreatingly onwards, 
 to the ocean in which all waters meet!' 
 
 " Not more seemingly-stirless is yon blue veil, 
 through which all angels of good taste must pleasedly 
 be peering in a morn like this not more waveless
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 251 
 
 that cerulean drapery which hides from us their 
 happy faces, than to this moment was the element 
 here in its upper flow. Our heart, though slackened 
 in its paces, resumes its wonted speed at smiles, seen 
 in the looks of happy things or human face divine; 
 and therefore is it now a welcome incident, the advent 
 of that sportive Zephyr, who hath found his way to 
 the Sunbeams here, and, like new-encountering mates 
 emboldened by the indulgent Mother's known con- 
 sent, merrily they gambol on the stream's bosom. 
 'Twas like the acumen of Edmund the Gentle to feel 
 that even a bower of bliss were incomplete without 
 
 ' The gentle warbling wind, low answering to all ;' 
 
 and in ' that sweet isle where Venus keeps her court,' 
 ' glorious John' Dryden, with a like discretion, re- 
 quires the ingredient of ' a fanning wind,' in concert 
 with the ' purling streams,' to constitute an effective 
 lullaby to Iphigenia. These ripples, which seem to 
 rise in response to ' the warbling wind,' give a hap- 
 pier look to the stream's face than it wears in sad or 
 shining stillness: Water, in bright day or ' starry 
 night, is beautiful and fair,' even in calm so is the 
 sleeping face of Beauty, though before the closed eye 
 there flit no dreamy visions of heaven's bliss to dimple
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 the cheek so is a garden before sunrise, with its 
 flowers yet ' full of the dew of heaven as a lamb's 
 fleece;' but when the sun rises, the dew that hung 
 like tears upon the leaves and flowers, glows on 
 them like a garniture of stars as if, having no duty 
 in the Night-queen's service while the Day-king was 
 in the ascendant, her starry retinue had abandoned 
 belt and wain and milky way, to celestialise terres- 
 trial flower-beds. Accept, however, ' the glory and 
 the gleam' to be verily but luminous dew, the dew- 
 drops' debt to the sun's ray is as Beauty's to the 
 riante Joy. 
 
 " We say, in soberness not surpassed by Father 
 Mathew, Fie upon all pharisaical assumption, but the 
 man or woman who scoffs at the oral attribute of 
 flowers, is a subject for devout pity. The Laureate 
 (long life to him !) as High-priest of the True Faith, 
 would not be unwilling to receive the names of and 
 ofler his prayers for the would-be credulous for the 
 obdurate, peradventure, his sighs. Surely as many 
 of us as are concerned in making meet use of our five 
 senses, are ' in bonds' to the Poets chiefly to such 
 as trace for us the bold or delicate anatomy and life 
 of things, to see, as Cowley mellifluously sings, 
 
 ' how prettily they smile, 
 And hear how prettily they talk.'
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 253 
 
 What barren infidelity now in the idea, that the 
 perfume borne 
 
 ' Upon the gentle wing of this calm-breathing wind,' 
 
 was caught from taciturn children of Flora in that 
 miller's garden. Tush! no fragrance this of voice- 
 less flowers. There were love-confessions in course 
 of murmuring among them when the breeze came 
 by, and having loitered to listen to their amours, 
 'tis their odorous secrets that he is babbling about. 
 Plaintive-pleasaunt Robert Herrick sets all scruples 
 against the reasonableness of this belief at rest for 
 ever : the stifF-neckedst sceptic must, tearfully it may 
 be, confess himself chastened and improved by these 
 few words of his to weeping Primroses : 
 
 ' Speak, whimp'ring younglings, and make known 
 The reason why 
 Ye droop and weep. 
 Is it for want of sleep 
 Or childish lullabie? 
 Or, that ye have not seen as yet 
 The violet? 
 Or brought a kisse 
 From that sweetheart to this? 
 No, no: this sorrow, shown 
 
 By your teares shed, 
 Wo'd have this lecture read, 
 That things of greatest, so of meanest, worth, 
 Conceived with grief are, and with teares brought forth.'
 
 254 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Robert Herrick's flowers have mostly * paly faces,' 
 and a habit of dropping dolefully their heads and 
 sighing deeply in their discourse; few of them look 
 up with that innocent pertness of eye, which, when 
 it accosts you, would gaze you into good humor 
 though you had just heard of a depression of the 
 stocks monetary not floral. But pensive Robert 
 goes among the gay ephemeral things like the thought- 
 ful tender-hearted Pastor of a parish among his 
 little ones, who, while he would not have them one 
 whit less happy, but rather say, with amiable Bowles, 
 ' Sport on ! ' moralises upon their mirth, mindful that 
 their young hearts are born to sorrow, and seeing, 
 with his instructed eye, 
 
 ' what Grief must nurture for the sky, 
 What Death must fashion for eternity.' 
 
 Yet is Robert's language, in speaking to or of the 
 flowers such as tender fathers use to their wee things, 
 and such as only true love prompts; so may the 
 Amaranth have for ever lost its mournful significancy 
 to the immortal, Robert Herrick. 
 
 " "What with the loud hum of this exulting bee, 
 who has thrice flown foul of our phiz at a broadside, 
 honey-burdened no doubt to very blindness what
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 255 
 
 with his stentorian murmur and the shrill uproar on 
 both hands of these bacchanals in clover, ycleped 
 grasshoppers, we are positively in danger of losing 
 the supreme satisfaction of hearing ourself. A brief 
 hint apropos, in thy ear, O absolute Abstainer from 
 inebriating beverages, touching a contrary propensity 
 of that determined habitue of dewy lily-bells, the 
 ' humdrum grasshopper.' In ourself, an attachment 
 to a liquid which thou anathematisest, is too matured 
 a weed to be eradicated nor are the spectacles yet 
 invented by means of which, with the narrative of a 
 certain marriage in Cana in memory, we could discern 
 the poison lurking in temperate administrations of a 
 certain creature-comfort, whose property it is to make 
 the heart glad. Yet, barring our prejudices, which 
 are ultra in this matter, and conceding that a counte- 
 nance by the grape made cheerful may be condem- 
 nable, and that there may be a chaster virtue in 
 tealeaves, we commend to thy proselytising efforts 
 the grasshopper family, consisting as it does of deil- 
 may-care kind of gentry, who are said by Abraham 
 Cowley and Richard Lovelace (both unexceptionable 
 authorities,) to drink immoderately and voild at this 
 moment a debauchee, in whom the poppy is evidently 
 at work, taking double bounds in dissolute despera- 
 
 R 2
 
 256 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 tion. Cowley, if our memory be not misty (as it 
 commonly is till our after-dinner tumbler verges a 
 second time towards a vacuum), the aforesaid Abra- 
 ham denominates the wine consumed in this shameless 
 wight's potations, as ' Dewy Morning's,' which Dame 
 Nature, illicitly, and with no fear of excisemen before 
 her eyes, pours into yellow-cups and blue-bottles in 
 such extravagant profusion, that every green field is 
 in effect a carte blanche to the thirsty grasshopper. 
 The testimony of Lovelace is still more conclusive, 
 and affirms the dewbibber to be addicted to a novel 
 and rather poetic bonne bouche; he, Richard Love- 
 lace, deponeth the accused to be ' drunk every night 
 with a delicious tear ! ' and finding no palliation for a 
 line of conduct so abandoned, we commit the profli- 
 gate to the consideration of the tents. 
 
 " We have mounted this Green-hill at various 
 paces and in various moods, at intervals since '80, 
 and should esteem it no venial sin to pursue our 
 upward march without turning at this point to 
 admire. Test this Valley-of-the-Test by Cowper's 
 standard of beauty, and the scene approves itself a 
 champion as to its charms, since, daily viewed, it 
 daily pleases. Let the dew have had its dazzling 
 hour with the daybeams, and ' bright Phoebus in his
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 257 
 
 strength' have routed incipient chills which harbour 
 in the heather a little after dawn, and then let any or 
 all in whom is a heart of love to God's works sit 
 here upon this hillside; and not by dint of devout 
 invocation to Fancy to waft the soul forth on light 
 wings into ether that obliterates the real, but by rapt 
 silent survey of the placid face of this actual landscape, 
 should he or they confess, on the breaking of the 
 spell, how perfectly had been steeped in oblivion the 
 consciousness of mutability how entirely they felt, 
 now that feeling had returned to them, 
 
 ' As if the moving time had been 
 
 A thing AS stedfast as the scene 
 
 On which they gazed themselves away.' 
 
 To more than one artist have we propounded this 
 question, What needs this scene to render it con- 
 summate? and the limners, like echoes, have each 
 responded, ' What!' And many a time too have 
 we thought, that of the accumulated graces gathered 
 in yon amphitheatre 'twould be only considerate to 
 forewarn spring, summer, and autumn travellers, to 
 scenic enchantment susceptive, ere, speeding from 
 the West, they are whirled from the ambush of that 
 highway-line of trees into the scene's sudden glory,
 
 58 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 where all Nature's works are perfect and where Man's 
 chiefest work is his best work an habitation for his 
 GOD! The sheltering hills see how they throw 
 their circling arms around that lowland loveliness, 
 and how themselves, at base and side and summit, 
 are studded with trees, dense in their foliage as clouds 
 that cradle storms summer-storms, having red light- 
 nings in their retinue, which burnish their cloudy 
 cradle; for touched is all that leafy pride with the 
 first tint of the golden autumnal dye, the forest's 
 hectic-flush which beautifies but surely precedes 
 Decay. And gazing even charmedly fleetly upon 
 the sense of sight steals languor, from yonder lucid 
 streams which at this eminence are neither heard nor 
 seen to flow, and from the fields that lay out there in 
 most expansive idlesse, and from the prostrate herd 
 infected by the prevailing paresse : and drowsily now 
 upon the ear falls the far-off melody of the invisible 
 lark, who rises from his home with a heart too full 
 of thankful song to abide his nest's limits, and (saving 
 our exhausting self,) pours out the sole articulate 
 annunciation of life in heaven above or on the earth 
 beneath. And the very air and light seem in conspi- 
 racy with things below to close our thoughts from 
 every sphere save that in which at ' this still season
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 259 
 
 of repose and peace' we are contented dwellers ; and 
 so might the influence operate, and we forget our 
 high inheritance and cease to aspire, were it not for 
 the homily, to the heart, not ear, addressed by yon 
 grey sanctuary, towering beyond all structures secular 
 into ' the deep, blue, glorious heavens,' symbolising 
 a nobler ' house not made with hands, eternal,' which 
 our longing souls look to gain by some bright starry 
 pathway through the bewitching azure ; 
 
 ' Why else so often doth the searching eye 
 Roam through the scope of sky? ' 
 
 " Thanks to the priestly influence of yonder holy 
 pile, which recalls us from a state of too-entire 
 contentment with the ravishments of earth to a re- 
 membrance of ' the royalties of heaven;' and again 
 we say, Welcome to uninterrupted enjoyment of his 
 freedom from weak prejudice, is the sturdy soul who 
 smiles in scorn at the doctrine that especial sanctity 
 is in the place where God descends to commune with 
 His contrite ones. O! to our heart of hearts, linked 
 is that shrine, not only by high hopes of glory which 
 kindle highest there, but by indestructible bonds 
 originating with rite of baptism, bridal, burial, and 
 twined about our better thoughts by the invisible
 
 260 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 hand of Memory. We side with those who maintain 
 the faith that Poetry, as from a central and perennial 
 fount, flows right through the Universal Heart 
 though in very various effusion; and often is its cur- 
 rent impeded, nor seldom altogether polluted and 
 turned awry. There is exceeding danger of such 
 impediment to or perversion of this genial bosom- 
 flow, where Schism of a captious kind prevails: the 
 healthy current in the veins and natural charities in 
 the heart are apt to suffer sometimes to utter sub- 
 mersion by the atribilious swamp, fed and frowned 
 over by Contumacy; yet, disclaiming glamoury, 
 willingly would we challenge a scorner whose bosom's 
 feelings are not wholly petrified, to remain insensible 
 to the influence of the place, when, at evensong, within 
 those walls, the eloquent and earnest Priest, whose 
 main theme is his Master's mercy, allures to brighter 
 worlds his listening flock, himself oppressed at times 
 with the benign burden of his message. For while 
 he urges on the world-worn to aspire after those ever- 
 blissful seats whose ( omnipotently-guarded battle- 
 ments Sorrow can never scale,' the deep crimson 
 radiance of the setting sun pours in at many an 
 eminent ingress, as if in visible attestation of his 
 verbal portraiture : 'tis as a shechinah or halo from
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 261 
 
 ' the living throne and sapphire blaze,' and lends 
 indescribable power to the persuasions of our Faith 
 to which, while the spirit listens, strongly it stirs 
 to put on etherial panoply, and launch away on that 
 resplendent flood, and float on the rich undulations 
 of angelic song, to the clime of Perfect and Perpetual 
 Joy. 
 
 " We have no sympathy with field-preaching, and 
 shudder to see the sword of the Spirit so profanely 
 handled that its rude usage incites to ribaldry ; and 
 if you are called, in justification, to witness proofs of 
 an effectual home-thrust, a miserable spectacle con- 
 fronts you of laceration and contortion, and Reason 
 goaded to the verge of idiocy or black abysm of 
 despair. But out-of-door perception should quicken 
 well-attempered praise; then ought to stir ' the 
 feeling infinite:' and certain pens with whose poetic 
 flow there mingles cogent theology, might interestingly 
 perhaps suasively maintain a gentle controversy 
 with our church-divines, alleging that all this obvious 
 creation by Chateaubriand called ' the imagination 
 of the Deity rendered visible ;' by Carlyle, ' the 
 visible Thought of GOD' might advisedly be more 
 frequently enlarged upon, and the recital of the Great 
 Spirit's claims to our allegiance be more efficiently
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 enforced by winning demonstrations that, though 
 humankind be dull and disaffected, a host of things 
 around us to our humiliation if we felt aright 
 reflect back Heaven's goodness in the beauty and 
 deep joy of gratitude. Meseems a mild teacher, him- 
 self impressed, might so clarify the dim eye and 
 attune the drowsy ear, that Love, born of Rapture, 
 should spread its wings for delighted upward flight, 
 at a thousand novel impulses. For ever open are the 
 pages of this vast Volume of the Universe, and yet 
 how few discern that they are richly illuminated with 
 elaborate initials traced by the finger of the Lofty One ? 
 From the incessantly-reiterated doctrinal terms of the 
 Deity one finds refreshing alterative pasture in the 
 company of endearing Bishop Taylor : not that he is 
 unmindful of the priest's imperative part, but that 
 he so oft enlists Nature as an auxiliary in his minis- 
 trations. How the having promise of the life which 
 now is, and that which is to come, throws its joyous 
 lambent light over the page that bears this passage : 
 'I am fallen into the hands of publicans and 
 sequestrators, and they have taken all from me. 
 What now ? Let me look about me. They have left 
 me sun, and moon, and fire, and water; a loving wife, 
 and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve ;
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 263 
 
 and I can still discourse, and unless I list they have 
 not taken away my merry countenance, and my 
 cheerful spirit, and a good conscience : they have still 
 left me the providence of God, and all the promises 
 of the gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of 
 heaven, and my charity to them too : and still I sleep, 
 and digest, and eat, and drink ; I read and meditate ; 
 I can walk in my neighbours' pleasant fields, and see 
 the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all 
 that in which God delights that is, in virtue and 
 wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself.' 
 Thus pious Jeremy: and, O well-judging Lady 
 Blessington, seeing that in your case a bishopric is 
 out of the question, we canonised you with peculiar 
 pomp in the hour we knew your faith, that ' The 
 poetry of our lives is like our religion kept apart 
 from our thoughts : neither influence us as they ought. 
 We should be wiser and happier if, instead of se- 
 cluding them in some secret shrine in our hearts, we 
 suffered, their humanising qualities to temper our 
 habitual words and actions.' 
 
 " And now, ' beneath the branches high ' of this 
 brave oak, the doctrine that
 
 264 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ' Here ye may sleep 
 
 In the moss so deep 
 While the sun is so warm and so weary, 
 
 And sweetly awake 
 
 As the sun through the brake 
 Bids the fauvette and white-throat sing cheery,' 
 
 is no cunningly-devised fable of Mary helpmeet of 
 William Howitt, but a sound of good tidings, inge- 
 nuously proclaimed by one of Nature's Own heralds, 
 wooing worn mankind to partake of rest and of 
 refreshing, without money and without price. And, 
 like The Boundless in His Benevolence, the arms of 
 Nature are ever opened widest to the world-wearied. 
 Still the Poet being the * Consecrator,' as truly says 
 John Cameron still, Nature's guests have need of 
 such enlightenment as poets shed upon the bounty 
 and the beauty of her hospitality appreciating which, 
 the participator, though he be a peasant, feels, while 
 there is 
 
 ' A grandeur in the beatings of his heart,' 
 
 that he occupies a temple, whose flooring is the 
 variegated^earth and whose canopy is the sheltering 
 wing of GOD. True that an unwitting wayfarer might 
 repose here, and in somnolence forget his cares and 
 his fatigue ; such solace hath ' tired nature's sweet
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 265 
 
 Restorer' for all but the crime-imbrued; but, unin- 
 structed by the Poet, he would lie down without 
 perceiving of how elaborate a texture is this couch 
 of mossy greensward more efflorescent than a regal 
 bridal-bed ; and would cast but a careless look aloft, 
 content that his slumber would be sheltered from 
 rays, too fervent, haply, for sky-facing sleepers, but 
 which Sol, who is lending his countenance to the 
 ungarnered crops, could not consistently cool down, 
 though the consequence were here and there an ague. 
 He, the uninitated tarrier, would not and could not 
 scan these curtains with an admiring eye, perceiving 
 how, as to fashion, from supports in multiform device 
 of branch and bough, are suspended festoons of foliage 
 of dear Nature's own fantastic and delightful hanging; 
 neither, as to hue, could he critically remark the 
 exceeding richness of this drapery of sky-surmounted 
 green in all its manifold varieties of shade here, in- 
 tensely deep, secluded from the sun ; there transparent, 
 in immediate recipiency of his rays: nor perchance 
 might he smile to mark though a misanthrope could 
 hardly avert his eyes from this joy that, as if defying 
 expulsion, the stray beams will peep through and 
 play about on sward and sleeper. Nor would he 
 notice how the playful breeze nestles in the branches ;
 
 266 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 it does not care to bustle through them, you per- 
 ceive, but delights to dally there; without doubt 
 blabbing a wily whisperer ! the love-gossip of yon- 
 der gardens for all God's creatures like to hear of 
 love, and see now in what glad commotion is the old 
 tree's crown,, and how each several leaf sparkles as 
 though it were a pendent oscillating emerald ! "We 
 are enamoured of life, we repeat, and would rather, 
 in the flush of morn, see foliage in motion than when 
 immobile. In leafy fluctuation too the birds catch a 
 vivid impulse; an ecstasy electrifies each tiny wing, 
 preventing comfort in quiescence, either on tipsy 
 treetop or in the bright yellow broom; and if the 
 breeze, as it brings along the flower-scents, be a 
 wee bit frolicsome, the more wealthily will the bonny 
 sky-rangers charter it with sounds of song, till the 
 vagrant zephyr speeds onwards like a viewless argosy, 
 whose ocean is the firmament, and whose freight is 
 mirthful music and perfume. 
 
 " O ENGLAND! e'en now in this thy palmy day, 
 when wars and rumors of wars have died away upon 
 thine ear e'en now, as when the garden yielded up 
 its Queen to be a battle-badge, are all thy children 
 kind and natural? No more may adverse factions 
 jeopardise thy monarch's crown and pleasant is it to
 
 THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE. 267 
 
 an old man's heart to body thee forth among nations 
 as a Forest King, fearful in provocation, but on whom 
 the Una of our love and loyalty confidingly and 
 caressingly may lay her hand: yet to despoliating 
 Commerce are thy silvan scenes becoming rapidly 
 defenceless prey. "Who, now, in the cherished terri- 
 tory of his ancestral home, may bid effective defiance 
 to the huge crushing Juggernaut of thy idolisation, 
 and say as with authority, Here shall thy wheels be 
 stayed ! The empire of Art is too fast subverting the 
 world of Nature Innocency is being swallowed up 
 by Invention' the perpetual hills do bow: ' were we 
 in sighing mood, a syllogism here how conclusively 
 showing cause ! But the evil shall not come in our 
 days ! The murmuring rills that harbour hereabouts 
 the Naiads of our dreams, shall not ruthlessly be 
 blotted out, nor the woodbine wall of the Sylphs* 
 haunt be broken down by semi-barbaric intrusionists 
 in our time ; nor will we further mourn for whafmay 
 be but ' false alarms of Fear,' but rather shout, 
 
 " O ENGLAND! ' little body with a mighty heart!' 
 as felt in the halcyon contentment and profuse love- 
 liness of this, one of that heart's most sweet recesses, 
 to the pilgrim of complacent mind and of contracted 
 will, still teeming with delight are thy many * primrose
 
 268 CONCLUSION. 
 
 meadow-paths and hamlets low.' Not that thou hast 
 therein to gratify the voluptuary, or stir the lover of 
 extremes in nature ; no rolling storm, whose thunders 
 shake the soul, nor ruling calm whose luxury etiolates ; 
 no dizzy alp nor darkling depth : and yet full glorious 
 art thou, England! By thy surface-treasures seen in 
 minstered city, in luxuriant hamlet, in majestic wood : 
 by thy struggles with and trophies won from 
 Thraldom; by the palace-homes of thine enfeebled 
 Brave; by thy many halls of Charity; by thy love of 
 Honor; by thy very ether, which cannot nourish 
 slaves : by the magnitude of thy power, which is all 
 but infinite, and by thy docility to due control, which 
 is all but perfect. Yet these are but the fruits of that 
 primary glory of which yon hoary holy pile maketh 
 proclamation and saith, The Faith which dignifies 
 thy Sons!" 
 
 PRINTED AT LORDAN'S ROMSEY PRESS.