like into a still more mysterious night! Long
as a Midsummer Day is, it has gone by like a
Heron's flight. The sun is setting!—and let
him set. without being scribbled upon by
Christopher North. We took a pen-and-ink
sketch of him in a "Day on Windermere."
Poor nature is much to be pitied among paint-
ers and poets. They are perpetually falling
into
"Such perusal of her face

As they would draw it."
And often must she be sick of the Curious Im-
pertinents. But a Curious Impertinent are
not we-if ever there was one beneath the
skies, a devout worshipper of Nature; and
though we often seem to heed not her shrine-
it stands in our imagination, like a temple in a
perpetual Sabbath.

ashamed of him-in a way absolutely disgraceful to a person of his time of life. Having picked a quarrel with the Sun-his benefactor, nay, his father-what else could he expect but that that enlightened Christian would altogether withhold his countenance from so undutiful and ungrateful a child, and leave him to travel along the mire and beneath the clouds? For some weeks Summer was sulky-and sullenly scorned to shed a tear. His eyes were like ice. By and by, like a great school-boy, he began to whine and whimper-and when he found that would not do, he blubbered like the booby of the lowest form. Still the Sun would not look on him— or if he did, 'twas with a sudden and short half-scowl that froze the ingrate's blood. At last the Summer grew contrite, and the Sun forgiving; the one burst out into a flood of It was poetically and piously said by the tears, the other into a flood of light. In sim- Ettrick Shepherd, at a Noctes, that there is no ple words, the Summer wept and the Sun such thing in nature as bad weather. Take smiled-and for one broken month there was Summer, which early in our soliloquy we a perpetual alternation of rain and radiance! abused in good set terms. Its weather was How beautiful is penitence! How beautiful broken, but not bad; and much various beauty forgiveness! For one week the Summer was and sublimity is involved in the epithet restored to his pristine peace and old luxuri- broken," when applied to the "season of the ance, and the desert blossomed like the rose. year." Common-place people, especially townTherefore ask we the Summer's pardon for dwellers, who flit into the country for a few thanking Heaven that he was dead. Would months, have a silly and absurd idea of Sumthat he were alive again, and buried not for mer, which all the atmospherical phenomena ever beneath the yellow forest leaves! O thou fail to drive out of their foolish fancies. They first, faint, fair, finest tinge of dawning Light insist on its remaining with us for half a year that streaks the still-sleeping yet just-waking at least, and on its being dressed in its Sunface of the morn, Light and no-Light, a sha- day's best every day in the week as long as dowy Something, that as we gaze is felt to be they continue in country quarters. The Sun growing into an emotion that must be either must rise, like a labourer, at the very earliest Innocence or Beauty, or both blending together hour, shine all day, and go to bed late, else into devotion before Deity, once more duly they treat him contumeliously, and declare visible in the divine colouring that forebodes that he is not worth his meat. Should he reanother day to mortal life-before Thee what tire occasionally behind a cloud, which it seems holy bliss to kneel upon the greensward in most natural and reasonable for one to do who some forest glade, while every leaf is a-tremble lives so much in the public eye, why a whole with dewdrops, and the happy little birds are watering-place, uplifting a face of dissatisfied beginning to twitter, yet motionless among the expostulation to heaven, exclaims, "Where is boughs before Thee to kneel as at a shrine, the Sun ? Are we never to have any Sun ?" and breathe deeper and deeper-as the lustre They also insist that there shall be no rain of waxeth purer and purer, brighter and more more than an hour's duration in the daytime, bright, till range after range arise of crimson but that it shall all fall by night. Yet when clouds in altitude sublime, and breast above the Sun does exert himself, as if at their bidbreast expands of yellow woods softly glitter-ding, and is shining, as he supposes, to their ing in their far-spread magnificence-then heart's content, up go a hundred green parasols what holy bliss to breathe deeper and deeper in his face, enough to startle the celestial unto Him who holds in the hollow of his hand the heavens and the earth, our high but most humble orisons! But now it is Day, and broad awake seems the whole joyful world. The clouds-lustrous no more-are all anchored on the sky, white as fleets waiting for the wind. Time is not felt-and one might dream that the Day was to endure for ever. Yet the great river rolls on in the light-and why will he leave those lovely inland woods for the naked shores? Why-responds some voice-hurry we on our lives-impetuous and passionate far more than he with all his cataracts as if anxious to forsake the regions of the upper day for the dim place from which we yet recoil in fear-the dim place which imagination sometimes seems to see even through the sunshine, beyond the bourne of this our unintelligible being, stretching sea

steeds in his chariot. A broken summer for us. Now and then a few continuous daysperhaps a whole week-but, if that be denied, now and then,

"Like angel visits, few and far between," one single Day-blue-spread over heaven, green-spread over earth-no cloud above, no shade below, save that dove-coloured marble lying motionless like the mansions of peace, and that pensive gloom that falls from some old castle or venerable wood-the stillness of a sleeping joy, to our heart profounder than that of death, in the air, in the sky, and resting on our mighty mother's undisturbed breastno lowing on the hills, no bleating on the braes

-the rivers almost silent as lochs, and the lochs, just visible in their aerial purity, float ing dream-like between earth and sky, imbued with the beauty of both, and seeming to belong

to either, as the heart melts to human tenderness, or beyond all mortal loves the imagination soars! Such days seem now to us-as memory and imagination half restore and half create the past into such weather as may have shone over the bridal morn of our first parents in Paradise-to have been frequent-nay, to have lasted all the Summer long-when our boyhood was bright from the hands of God. Each of those days was in itself a life! Yet all those sunny lives melted into one Summer -and all those Summers formed one continuous bliss. Storms and snows vanished out of our ideal year; and then morning, noon, and night, wherever we breathed, we felt, what now we but know, the inmost meaning of that profound verse of Virgil the Divine

athwart the sunny mountain gloom, while ever as they descend on earth, lift up the streams along the wilderness louder and louder a choral song. Look now at the heather-and smile whenever henceforth you hear people talk of purple. You have been wont to call a gold guinea or a sovereign yellow-but if you have got one in your pocket, place it on your palm, and in the light of that broom is it not a dirty brown? You have an emerald ring on your finger-but how gray it looks beside the green of those brackens, that pasture, that wood! Purple, yellow, and green, you have now seen, sir, for the first time in your life. Widening and widening over your head, all the while you have been gazing on the heather, the broom, the bracken, the pastures, and the woods, have the eternal heavens been preparing for you a vision of the sacred Blue. Is not that an Indigo Divine? Or, if you scorn that mercantile and manufacturing image, steal that blue from the sky, and let the lady of your love tinge but her eyelids with one touch, and a saintlier beauty will be in her upward looks as she beseeches Heaven to bless thee in her prayers! Set slowly-slowly-slowly-O Sun of Suns! as may be allowed by the laws of Nature. For not long after Thou hast sunk

"Devenere locos lætos, et amoena vireta Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas. Largior hic campos æther et lumine vestit Purpureo: solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.” Few-no such days as those seem now ever to be born. Sometimes we indeed gaze through the face into the heart of the sky, and for a moment feel that the ancient glory of the heavens has returned on our dream of life. But to the perfect beatitude of the skies there comes from the soul within us a mournful response, that betokens some wide and deep-behind those mountains into the sea, will that some everlasting change. Joy is not now what joy was of yore; like a fine diamond with a flaw is now Imagination's eye; other motes than those that float through ether cross between its orb and the sun; the "fine gold has become dim," with which morning and evening of old embossed the skies; the dewdrops are not now the pearls once they were, left on

"Flowers, and weeds as beautiful as flowers," by angels' and by fairies' wings; knowledge, custom, experience, fate, fortune, error, vice, and sin, have dulled, and darkened, and deadened all things; and the soul, unable to bring over the Present the ineffable bliss and beauty of the Past, almost swoons to think what a ghastly thunder-gloom may by Providence be reserved for the Future!

celestial ROSY-RED be tabernacled in the heavens!

Meanwhile, three of the dozen showers have so soaked and steeped our old crazy carcass in refreshment, and restoration, and renewal of youth, that we should not be surprised were we to outlive that raven croaking in pure gaieté du cœur on the cliff. Threescore and ten years! Poo-'tis a pitiful span! At a hundred we shall cut capers-for twenty years more keep to the Highland fling-and at the close of other twenty, jig it into the grave to that matchless strathspey, the Reel of Tullochgorum!

Having thus made our peace with last Summer, can we allow the Sun to go down on our wrath towards the AUTUMN, whose back we yet see on the horizon, before he turn about to bow adieu to our hemisphere? Hollo! meet us half way in yonder immense field of potatoes, our worthy season, and among these peacemakers, the Mealies and the Waxies, shall we two smoke together the calumet or cigar of reconciliation. The floods fell, and the folk feared famine. The people whined over the smut in wheat, and pored pale on the Monthly Agricultural Report. Grain grew greener and greener-reapers stood at the crosses of villages, towns, and cities, passing from one to another comfortless quechs of sma' yill, with their straw-bound sickles hanging idle across their shoulders, and with unhiredlooking faces, as ragged as if you were to dream of a Symposium of Scarecrows. Alarmimagination beheld harvest treading on the heels of Christmas,

Nay-nay-things are not altogether so bad with us as this strain-sincere though it be as a stream from the sacred mountains-might seem to declare. We can yet enjoy a broken Summer. It would do your heart good to see us hobbling with our crutch along the Highland hills, sans great-coat or umbrella, in a summer-shower, aiblins cap in hand that our hair may grow, up to the knees in the bonny blooming heather, or clambering, like an old goat, among the cliffs. Nothing so good for gout or rheumatism as to get wet through, while the thermometer keeps ranging between 60° and 70°, three times a-day. What refreshment in the very sound-Soaking! Old bones wax dry-nerves numb-sinews stiff-fleshed frail- and there is a sad drawback on the Whole Duty of Man. But a sweet, soft, sou❜wester blows "caller" on our craziness, and all our pores instinctively open their mouths at the approach of rain. Look but at those dozen downward showers, all denizens of heaven, how black, and blue, and bright they in their glee are streaming, and gleaming

And Britain sadden'd at the long delay!" when, whew! to dash the dismal predictions of foolish and false prophets, came rustling from all the airts, far, far and wide over the rain-drenched kingdom, the great armament of the Autumnal Winds! Groaned the grain,

like that of Joseph, is a coat of many colours Call it patchwork if you choose,

as in sudden resurrection it lifted up its nead, and knew that again the Sun was in Heaven. Death became Life; and the hearts of the hus- "And be yourself the great sublime you draw.” bandmen sang aloud for joy. Like Turks, the Some people look on nature with a milliner's reapers brandished their sickles in the breezy or a mantua-maker's eye-arraying her in light, and every field glittered with Christian furbelows and flounces. But use your own crescents. Auld wives and bits o' weans min- eyes and ours, and from beneath THE SYCAgled on the rig-kilted to the knees, like the MORE let us two, sitting together in amity, comely cummers, and the handsome hizzies, look lovingly on the SPRING. Felt ever your and the lusome lassies wi' their silken snoods heart before, with such an emotion of harmo-among the heather-legged Highlandmen, and nious beauty, the exquisitely delicate distincthe bandy Irishers, brawny all, and with hook, tions of character among the lovely tribes of scythe, or flail, inferior to none of the children trees! That is BELLE ISLE. Earliest to saof men. The scene lies in Scotland-but now, lute the vernal rainbow, with a glow of green too, is England "Merry England" indeed, and gentle as its own, is the lake-loving ALDER, outside passengers on a thousand coaches see whose home, too, is by the flowings of all the stooks rising like stacks, and far and wide, streams. Just one degree fainter in its hue-or | over the tree-speckled champaign, rejoice in shall we rather say brighter-for we feel the the sun-given promise of a glorious harvest- difference without knowing in what it lieshome. Intervenes the rest of two sunny Sab- stands, by the Alder's rounded softness, the spiral baths sent to dry the brows of labour, and give LARCH, all hung over its limber sprays, were you the last ripeness to the overladen stalks that, near enough to admire them, with cones of the top-heavy with aliment, fall over in their yel- Tyrian dye. The stem, white as silver, and lowy whiteness into the fast reaper's hands. smooth as silk, seen so straight in the green Few fields now-but here and there one thin silvan light, and there airily overarching the and greenish, of cold, unclean, or stony soil- coppice with lambent tresses, such as fancy are waving in the shadowy winds; for all are might picture for the mermaid's hair, pleasant cleared, but some stooked stubbles from which as is her life on that Fortunate Isle, is yet the stooks are fast disappearing, as the huge said by us, who vainly attribute our own sadwains seem to halt for a moment, impeded by ness to unsorrowing things-to belong to a the gates they hide, and then, crested perhaps Tree that weeps ;-though a weight of joy it is, with laughing boys and girls, and of exceeding gladness, that thus depresses the BIRCH's pendent beauty, till it droops-as we think-like that of a being overcome with grief! Seen standing all along by themselves, with something of a foreign air and an exotic expression, yet not unwelcome or obtrusive among our indigenous fair forest-trees, twinkling to the touch of every wandering wind, and restless even amidst what seemeth now to be everlasting rest, we cannot choose but admire that somewhat darker grove of columnar Lombardy POPLARS. How comes it that some SYCAMORES So much sooner than others salute the spring? Yonder are some but budding, as if yet the frost lay on the honey-dew that protects the beamy germs. There are others warming into expansion, halfbudded and half-leaved, with a various light of colour visible in that sun-glint distinctly from afar. And in that nook of the still sunnier south, trending eastward, a few are almost in their full summer foliage, and soon will the bees be swarming among their flowers. A HORSE CHESTNUT has a grand oriental air, and like a satrap uplifts his green banner yellowing in the light-that shows he belongs to the line of the Prophet. ELMs are then most magnificent-witness Christ-Church walkwhen they hang overhead in heaven like the chancel of a cathedral. Yet here, too, are they august-and methinks "a dim religious light" is in that vault of branches just vivifying to the Spring, and though almost bare, tinged with a coming hue that erelong will be majestic brightness. Those old ОAкs seem sullen in the sunshine, and slow to put forth their power, like the Spirit of the Land they emblem. But they, too, are relaxing from their wonted sternness-soon will that faint green be a glo

"Down the rough slope the ponderous wagon rings,"
no-not rings-for Beattie, in that admirable
line, lets us hear a cart going out empty in
the morning-but with a cheerful dull sound,
ploughing along the black soil, the clean dirt
almost up to the axletree, and then, as the
wheels, rimmed you might always think with
silver, reach the road, macadamized till it
acts like a railway, how glides along downhill
the moving mountain! And see now, the
growing Stack glittering with a charge of
pitchforks!
The trams fly up from Dobbin's
back, and a shoal of sheaves overflows the
mire. Up they go, tossed from sinewy arms
like feathers, and the Stack grows before
your eyes, fairly proportioned as a beehive,
without line or measure, but shaped by the
look and the feel, true almost as the spring in-
stinct of the nest-building bird. And are we
not heartily ashamed of ourselves, amidst this
general din of working mirthfulness, for
having, but an hour ago, abused the jovial
and generous Autumn, and thanked Heaven
that he was dead? Let us retire into the barn
with Shoosy, and hide our blushes.

Comparisons are odoriferous, and therefore for one paragraph let us compare AUTUMN with SPRING. Suppose ourselves sitting beneath THE SYCAMORE of Windermere! Poets call Spring Green-Mantle-and true it is that the groundwork of his garbis green-even like that of the proud peacock's changeful neck, when the creature treads in the circle of his own splendour, and the scholar who may have forgotten his classics, has yet a dream of Juno and of her watchful Argus with his hundred, his thousand eyes. But the coat of Spring,

rious yellow; and while the gold-laden boughs | one, accompanying that large wood-boat on its stoop boldly to the storms with which they love to dally, bounds not the heart of every Briton to the music of his national anthem,

"Rule, Britannia,

Britannia, rule the waves!"'

The Ash is a manly tree, but "dreigh and dour" in the leafing; and yonder stands an Ash-grove like a forest of ships with bare poles like the docks of Liverpool. Yet like the town of Kilkenny

"It shines well where it stands ;"

slow voyage from Ambleside to Bowness, the metropolitan port of the Queen of the Lakes. The water has lost, you see, its summer sunniness, yet it is as transparent as ever it was in summer; and how close together seem, with their almost meeting shadows, the two opposite shores! But we wish you to look at BELLE ISLE, though we ourselves are almost afraid to do so, so transcendently glorious is the sight

that we know will disturb us with an emotion too deep to be endured. Could you not think that a splendid sunset had fallen down in frag

all a-blaze! The woods are on fire, yet they burn not; beauty subdues while it fosters the flame; and there, as in a many-tented tabernacle, has Colour pitched his royal residence, and reigns in,glory beyond that of any Oriental king. What are all the canopies, and bal

with the richest drapery that ever the skill of Art, that Wizard, drew forth in gorgeous folds from his enchanted loom, if ideally suspended in the air of imagination beside the sun-andstorm-stained furniture of these Palaces of Autumn, framed by the Spirit of the Season, of living and dying umbrage, for his latest de

and the bare gray-blue of the branches, apartments on the Isle called Beautiful, and set it but not repulsive, like some cunning discord in music deepens the harmony of the Isle of Groves. Contrast is one of the finest of all the laws of association, as every philosopher, poet, and peasant kens. At this moment it brings, by the bonds of beauty, though many glades intervene, close beside that pale gray-conies, and galleries of human state, all hung blue, leafless Ash Clump, that bright blackgreen PINE Clan, whose "leaf fadeth never," a glorious Scottish tartan triumphing in the English woods. Though many glades intervene, we said; for thou seest that BELLE ISLE is not all one various flush of wood, but bedropt all over-bedropt and besprinkled with grass-gems, some cloud-shadowed, some tree-light, ere he move in annual migration, with shaded, some mist-bedimmed, and some luminous as small soil-suns, on which as the eye alights, it feels soothed and strengthened, and gifted with a profounder power to see into the mystery of the beauty of nature. But what are those living Hills of snow, or of some substance purer in its brightness even than any snow that fades in one night on the mountaintop! Trees are they-fruit-trees-The WILD CHERRY, that grows stately and wide spreading even as the monarch of the wood-and can that be a load of blossoms! Fairer never grew before poet's eye of old in the fabled Hesperides. See how what we call snow brightens into pink-yet still the whole glory is white, and fadeth not away the purity of the balmy snowblush. Ay, balmy as the bliss breathing from virgin lips, when, moving in the beauty left by her morning prayers, a glad fond daughter steals towards him on the feet of light, and as his arms open to receive and return the bless-return never more! Images, it may be, of ing, lays her innocence with smiles that are almost tears, within her father's bosom.

"As when to those who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow Sabæn odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the blest; with such delay Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league,

Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles."

Shut your eyes-suppose five months gone -and lo! BELLE ISLE in Autumn, like a scene in another hemisphere of our globe. There is a slight frost in the air, in the sky, on the lake, and midday is as still as midnight. But, though still, it is cheerful; for close at hand Robin Redbreast-God bless him!-is warbling on the copestone of that old barn gable; and though Millar-Ground Bay is half a mile off, how distinct the clank of the two oars like

all his Court, to some foreign clime far beyond the seas! No names of trees are remembered —a glorious confusion comprehends in one the whole leafy race-orange, and purple, and scarlet, and crimson, are all seen to be there, and interfused through the silent splendour is aye felt the presence of that terrestrial green, native and unextinguishable in earth's bosom, as that celestial blue is that of the sky. That trance goes by, and the spirit, gradually filled with a stiller delight, takes down all those tents into pieces, and contemplates the encampment with less of imagination, and with more of love. It knows and blesses each one of those many glorious groves, each becoming, as it gazes, less and less glorious, more and more beautiful; till memory revives all the happiest and holiest hours of the Summer and the Spring, and re-peoples the melancholy umbrage with a thousand visions of joy, that may

forms and faces now mouldering in the dust! For as human hearts have felt, and all human lips have declared-melancholy making poets of us all, ay, even prophets-till the pensive air of Autumn has been filled with the music of elegiac and foreboding hymns-as is the Race of Leaves-now old Homer speaks-so is the Race of Men! Nor till time shall have an end, insensate will be any creature endowed "with discourse of reason to those mysterious misgivings, alternating with triumphant aspirations more mysterious still, when the Religion of nature leans in awe on the Religion of God, and we hear the voice of both in such strains as these-the earthly, in its sadness, momentarily deadening the divine:

«But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn?

Oh! when shall it dawn on the night of the grave ?"

SECOND RHAPSODY.

especially while, on turning round your head, you behold a big blockhead of a vulgar bagman, with his coat-tails over his arms, warming his loathsome hideousness at a fire that would roast an ox.

HAVE we not been speaking of all the Seasons as belonging to the masculine gender? They are generally, we believe, in this country, Such are the Seasons! And though we have painted in petticoats, apparently by bagmen, spoken of them, as mere critics on art, someas may be daily seen in the pretty prints that what superciliously, yet there is almost always bedeck the paper-walls of the parlours of inns. no inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, Spring is always there represented as a spanker paintings, poems, or prose-works, that-pardon in a blue symar, very pertly exposing her bud- our tautology--are popular with the people. ding breast, and her limbs from feet to fork, in The emblematical figments now alluded to, a style that must be very offensive to the mealy- have been the creations of persons of genius, mouthed members of that shamefaced corpo- who had never had access to the works of the ration, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. old masters; so that, though the conception is She holds a flower between her finger and her good, the execution is, in general, far from perthumb, crocus, violet, or primrose; and though fect. Yet many a time, when lying at our we verily believe she means no harm, she no ease in a Wayside Inn, stretched on three doubt does look rather leeringly upon you, like wooden chairs, with a little round deal-table one of the frail sisterhood of the Come-atables. before us, well laden with oat-meal cakes and Summer again is an enormous and monstrous cheese and butter, nor, you may be sure, withmawsey, in puris naturalibus, meant to image out its "tappit hen"-have we after a long Musidora, or the Medicean, or rather the Hot-day's journey-perhaps the longest day— tentot Venus.

"So stands the statue that enchants the world!"

"Through moors and mosses many, O," regarded with no imaginative spirit-when Joseph and his brethren were wanting-even such symbols of the Seasons as these-while arose to gladden us many as fair an image as ever nature sent from her woods and wilder

who, on his pilgrimage to her loftiest shrines, and most majestic temples, spared not to stoop his head below the lowest lintel, and held all men his equal who earned by honest industry the scanty fare which they never ate without those holy words of supplication and thanksgiving, "Give us this day our daily bread!"

She seems, at the very lightest, a good round half hundred heavier than Spring; and, when you imagine her plunging into the pool, you think you hear a porpus. May no Damon run away with her clothes, leaving behind in ex-nesses to cheer the heart of her worshipper change his heart! Gadflies are rife in the dogdays, and should one "imparadise himself in form of that sweet flesh," there will be a cry in the woods that will speedily bring to her assistance Pan and all his Satyrs. Autumn is a motherly matron, evidently enceinte, and, like Love and Charity, who probably are smiling on the opposite wall, she has a brace of bouncOur memory is a treasure-house of written ing babies at her breast-in her right hand a | and unwritten poetry-the ingots, the gifts of formidable sickle, like a Turkish scymitar- the great bards, and the bars of bullion-much in her left an extraordinary utensil, bearing, of the coin our own-some of it borrowed we believe, the heathenish appellation of mayhap, but always on good security, and cornucopia on her back a sheaf of wheat-repaid with interest-a legal transaction, of and on her head a diadem-planted there by John Barleycorn. She is a fearsome dear; as ugly a customer as a lonely man would wish to encounter beneath the light of a September moon. On her feet are bauchles-on her legs huggers-and the breadth of her soles, and the thickness of her ankles, we leave to your own conjectures. Her fine bust is conspicuous in an open laced boddice-and her huge hips are set off to the biggest advantage, by a jacket that she seems to have picked up by the wayside, after some jolly tar, on his return from a long voyage, had there been performing his "Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come, toilet, and, by getting rid of certain incumAnd from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, brances, enabled to pursue his inland journey While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower with less resemblance than before to a walkOf shadowing roses, on our plains descend!" ing scarecrow. Winter is a withered old That picture is indistinctly and obscurely beaubeldam, too poor to keep a cat, hurkling on tiful to the imagination, and there is not a sylher hunkers over a feeble fire of sticks, ex- lable about sex-though "ethereal mildness," tinguished fast as it is beeted, with a fizz in which is an Impersonation, and hardly an Imthe melted snow which all around that un-personation, must be, it is felt, a Virgin God housed wretchedness is indurated with frost; | dess, whom all the divinities that dwell be while a blue pool close at hand is chained in tween heaven and earth must love. Never to iciness, and an old stump, half buried in the drift. Poor old, miserable, cowering crone! One cannot look at her without unconsciously putting one's hand in his pocket, and fumbling for a tester. Yes, there is pathos in the picture,

which even a not unwealthy man has no need to be ashamed-none of it stolen, nor yet found where the Highlandman found the tongs. But our riches are like those that encumbered the floor of the Sanctum of the Dey of Algiers, not very tidily arranged; and we are frequently foiled in our efforts to lay our hand, for immediate use or ornament, on a ducat or a diamond, a pistole or a pearl, a sovereign, or only his crown. We feel ourselves at this moment in that predicament, when trying to recollect the genders of Thomson's "Seasons "

our taste-but our taste is inferior to our feel ing and our genius-though you will seldom go far wrong even in trusting it-never had a poem a more beautiful beginning. It is not simple-nor ought it to be-it is rich, and even