wakens the sleeping echoes. How strangely dim and confused on the water the fantastic frostwork imagery, yet more steadfastly hanging there than ever hung the banks of summer! For all one sheet of ice, now clear as the Glass of Glamoury in which that Lord of old beheld his Geraldine-is Windermere, the heaven-loving and the heaven-beloved. Not a wavelet murmurs in all her bays, from the silvan Brathay to where the southern straits narrow into a river-now chained too the Leven on his silvan course towards that perilous Estuary afar off raging on its wreck-strewn sands. The frost came after the last fall of snow-and not a single flake ever touched that surface; and now that you no longer miss the green twinkling of the large July leaves, does not imagination love those motionless frozen forests, cold but not dead, serene but not sullen, inspirative in the strangeness of their appareling of wild thoughts about the scenery of foreign climes, far away among the regions of the North, where Nature works her wonders aloof from human eyes, and that wild architect Frost, during the absence of the sun, employs his night of months in building and dissolving his ice-palaces, magnificent beyond the reach of any power set to work at the bidding of earth's crowned and sceptred kings? All at once a hundred houses, high up among the hills, seem on fire. The setting sun has smitten them, and the snow-tracts are illuminated by harmless conflagrations. Their windows are all lighted up by a lurid splendour, in its strong suddenness sublime. But look, look we beseech you, at the sun-the sunset-the sunset region

--and all that kindred and corresponding heaven, effulgent where a minute ago lay in its cold glitter the blue bosom of the lake. Who knows the laws of light and the perpetual miracle of their operation? God-not thou. The snow-mountains are white no more, but gorgeous in their colouring as the clouds. Lo! Pavey- Ark-magnificent range of cliffs-seeming to come forward, while you gaze!-How it glows with a rosy light, as if a flush of flowers decked the precipice in that delicate splendour! Langdale-Pikes, methinks, are tinged with finest purple, and the thought of violets is with us as we gaze on the tinted bosom of the mountains dearest to the setting sun. But that long broad slip of orange-coloured sky is yellowing with its reflection almost all the rest of our Alps-all but yon stranger-the summit of some mountain belonging to another region-ay-the Great Gabel-silent now as sleep-when last we clomb his cliffs, thundering in the mists of all his cataracts. his shroud he stands pallid like a ghost. Beyond the reach of the setting sun he lours in his exclusion from the rejoicing light, and imagination personifying his solitary vastness into forsaken life, pities the doom of the forlorn Giant. Ha! just as the eye of day is about to shut, one smile seems sent afar to that lonesome mountain, and a crown of crimson encompasses his forehead.

In

On which of the two sunsets art thou now gazing? Thou who art to our old loving eyes so like the "mountain nymph, sweet Liberty?" On the sunset in the heaven--or the sunset in the lake? The divine truth is-O Daughter of our Age!-that both sunsets are but

visions of our own spirits. Again both are gone from the outward world—and nought remains but a forbidding frown of the cold bleak snow. But imperishable in thy imagination will both sunsets be—and though it will sometimes retire into the recesses of thy memory, and lie there among the unsuspected treasures of forgotten imagery that have been unconsciously accumulating there since first those gentle eyes of thine had perfect vision given to their depths-yet mysteriously brought back from vanishment by some one single silent thought, to which power has been yielded over that bright portion of the Past, will both of them sometimes reappear to thee in solitude-or haply when in the very heart of life. And then surely a few tears will fall for sake of him-then no more seen-by whose side thou stoodest, when that double sunset enlarged thy sense of beauty, and made thee in thy father's eyes the sweetest-bestand brightest poetess-whose whole life is musical inspiration-ode, elegy, and hymn, sung not in words but in looks-sigh-breathed or speechlessly distilled in tears flowing from feelings the farthest in this world from grief.

So much, though but little, for the beautiful-with, perhaps, a tinge of the sublime. Are the two emotions different and distinct-thinkst thou, O! metaphysical critic of the gruesome countenance or modifications of one and the same? 'Tis a puzzling question—and we, Sphinx, might wait till doomsday, before you, dipus, could solve the enigma. Certainly a Rose is one thing and Mount Etna is another-an antelope and an ele

VOL. II.

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phant-an insect and a man-of-war, both sailing in the sun-a little lucid well in which the fairies bathe, and the Polar Sea in which Leviathan is "wallowing unwieldy, enormous in his gait"-the jewelled finger of a virgin bride, and grim Saturn with his ring—the upward eye of a kneeling saint, and a comet, "that from his horrid hair shakes pestilence and war.” But let the rose bloom on the mouldering ruins of the palace of some great king among the temples of Balbec or Syrian Tadmor-and in its beauty, methinks, 'twill be also sublime. See the antelope bounding across a raging chasm -up among the region of eternal snows on Mont Blanc —and deny it, if you please—but assuredly we think that there is sublimity in the fearless flight of that beautiful creature, to whom nature grudged not wings, but gave instead the power of plumes to her small delicate limbs, unfractured by alighting among the pointed rocks. All alone, by your single solitary self, in some wide, lifeless desert, could you deny sublimity to the unlooked-for hum of the tiniest insect, or to the sudden shiver of the beauty of his gauze-wings? Not you, indeed. Stooping down to quench your thirst in that little lucid well where the fairies bathe, what if you saw the image of the evening star shining in some strange subterranean world? We suspect that you would hold in your breath, and swear devoutly that it was sublime. Dead on the very evening of her marriage day is that virgin bride whose delicacy was so beautiful-and as she lies in her white wedding garments that serve for a shroud -that emblem of eternity and of eternal love, the ring,

upon her finger-with its encased star shining brightly now that her eyes, once stars, are closed-would, methinks, be sublime to all Christian hearts. In comparison with all these beautiful sublimities, Mount Etna, the elephant, the man-of-war, Leviathan swimming the ocean-stream, Saturn with his ring, and with his horrid hair the comet-might be all less than nothings. Therefore beauty and sublimity are twin-feelings-one and the same birth-seldom inseparable ;-if you still doubt it, become a fire-worshipper, and sing your morning and evening orisons to the rising and the setting sun.