as in sudden resurrection it lifted up its nead, I like that of Joseph, is a coat of many colours and knew that again the Sun was in Heaven. Call it patchwork if you choose, 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 cleared, but some stooked stubbles from which the stooks are fast disappearing, as the huge wains seem to halt for a moment, impeded by the gates they hide, and then, crested perhaps with laughing boys and girls,

"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 instinct 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 beDeath 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,

might picture for the mermaid's hair, pleasant as is her life on that Fortunate Isle, is yet said by us, who vainly attribute our own sadness to unsorrowing things-to belong to a Tree that weeps ;-though a weight of joy it is. 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

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,

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 that we know will disturb us with an emotion do so, so transcendently glorious is the sight 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

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 black- with the richest drapery that ever the skill of green PINE Clan, whose "leaf fadeth never," Art, that Wizard, drew forth in gorgeous folds a glorious Scottish tartan triumphing in the from his enchanted loom, if ideally suspended English woods. Though many glades inter- in the air of imagination beside the sun-andvene, we said; for thou seest that BELLE ISLE storm-stained furniture of these Palaces of is not all one various flush of wood, but be- Autumn, framed by the Spirit of the Season, dropt all over-bedropt and besprinkled with of living and dying umbrage, for his latest degrass-gems, some cloud-shadowed, some tree- light, ere he move in annual migration, with shaded, some mist-bedimmed, and some lumi- all his Court, to some foreign clime far beyond nous as small soil-suns, on which as the eye the seas! No names of trees are remembered alights, it feels soothed and strengthened, and -a glorious confusion comprehends in one the gifted with a profounder power to see into the whole leafy race-orange, and purple, and mystery of the beauty of nature. But what scarlet, and crimson, are all seen to be there, are those living Hills of snow, or of some sub- and interfused through the silent splendour is stance purer in its brightness even than any aye felt the presence of that terrestrial green, snow that fades in one night on the mountain-native and unextinguishable in earth's bosom, top! 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 blessing, 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 Saben 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

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 return never more! Images, it may be, of 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 di vine:

"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 daytentot Venus.

So stands the statue that enchants the world!"

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!"

Our memory is a treasure-house of written and unwritten poetry-the ingots, the gifts of the great bards, and the bars of bullion-much of the coin our own-some of it borrowed mayhap, but always on good security, and

"Through moors and mosses many, O," regarded with no imaginative spirit-when She seems, at the very lightest, a good round Joseph and his brethren were wanting-even half hundred heavier than Spring; and, when such symbols of the Seasons as these-while you imagine her plunging into the pool, you arose to gladden us many as fair an image as think you hear a porpus. May no Damon run ever nature sent from her woods and wilderaway with her clothes, leaving behind in exnesses to cheer the heart of her worshipper change his heart! Gadflies are rife in the dog-who, on his pilgrimage to her loftiest shrines, days, 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 bouncing babies at her breast-in her right hand a formidable sickle, like a Turkish scymitarin her left an extraordinary utensil, bearing, we believe, the heathenish appellation of 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 w iciness, and an old stump, half buried in the our taste-but our taste is inferior to our feel 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'

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

gorgeous-for the Bard came to his subject | round and round a rose-bush, and then settling full of inspiration; and as it was the inspiration, here, not of profound thought, but of passionate emotion, it was right that music at the very first moment should overflow the page, and that it should be literally strewed with roses. An imperfect Impersonation is often proof positive of the highest state of poetical enthusiasm. The forms of nature undergo a half humanizing process under the intensity of our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because only the soul of genius can give it a presence-though afterwards all eyes dimly recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their harps, and go drown themselves in Helicon.

himself down seriously to work, as mute as a mouse, among the half-blown petals. However, we are not now writing our Confessions -and what we wished to say about this passage is, that in it the one sex is represented as turning away the face from that of the other, which may be all natural enough, though polite on the gentleman's part we can never call it; and, had the female virgin done so, we cannot help thinking it would have read better in poetry. But for Spring to avert his blushful face from the ardent looks of Summer, has on us the effect of making both Seasons seem simpletons. Spring, in the character of " ethereal mildness," was unquestionably a female; but here she is "unsexed from the crown to the toe," and changed into an awkward hobblete. hoy, who, having passed his boyhood in the country, is a booby who blushes black at the gaze of his own brother, and if brought into the company of the lasses, would not fail to faint away in a fit, nor revive till his face felt a pitcherful of cold water.

"From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed,
Child of the Sun, refulgent SUMMER comes,
In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth :
He comes attended by the sultry hours,
And ever-fanning breezes, on his way;
While, from his ardent look, the turning Spring
Averts her blushful face, and earth, and skies,
All smiling, to his hot dominion leaves."

Here the Impersonation is stronger-and perhaps the superior strength lies in the words "child of the Sun." And here in the words describing Spring, she too is more of an Impersonation than in the other passage-averting her blushful face from the Summer's ardent look. The poet having made Summer masculine, very properly makes Spring feminine; and 'tis a jewel of a picture-for ladies should always avert their blushful faces from the ardent looks of gentlemen. Thomson, indeed, elsewhere says of an enamoured youth overpowered by the loving looks of his mistress,

"From the keen gaze her lover turns away, Full of the dear ecstatic power, and sick With sighing languishment."

This, we have heard, from experienced persons of both sexes, is as delicate as it is natural; but for our own simple and single selves, we never remember having got sick on any such occasion. Much agitated, we cannot deny-if we did, the most credulous would not credit us-much agitated we have beenwhen our lady-love, not contented with fixing upon us her dove-eyes, began billing and cooing in a style from which the cushat might have taken a lesson with advantage, that she might the better perform her innocent part on her first assignation with her affianced in the pine-grove on St. Valentine's day; but never in all our long lives got we absolutely sicknor even squeamish-never were we obliged to turn away with our hand to our mouth-but, on the contrary, we were commonly as brisk as a bee at a pot of honey; or, if that be too luscious a simile, as brisk as that same wonderful insect murmuring for a few moments

"Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf, While Autumu, nodding o'er the yellow plain, Comes jovial on," &c.,

is, we think, bad. The Impersonation here is complete, and though the sex of Autumn is not mentioned, it is manifestly meant to be male. So far, there is nothing amiss either one way or another. But "nodding o'er the yellow plain" is a mere statement of a fact in nature and descriptive of the growing and ripening or ripened harvest-whereas it is applied here to Autumn, as a figure who "comes jovial on." This is not obscurity-or indistinctness-which, as we have said before, is often a great beauty in Impersonation; but it is an inconsistency and a contradiction-and therefore indefensible on any ground either of conception or expression.

There are no such essential vices as this in

the "Castle of Indolence"-for by that time Thomson had subjected his inspiration to thought-and his poetry, guided and guarded by philosophy, became celestial as an angel's

song.

"See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train,
Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme,
These that exalt the soul to solemn thought,
And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms!
Congenial horrors, hail! with frequent foot,
Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life,
When nursed by careless Solitude 1 lived,
And sung of Nature with unceasing joy,
Pleased have I wander'd through your rongh domain;
Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure;
Heard the winds roar, and the big torrents burst;
Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd
In the grim evening sky. Thus pass'd the time,
Till through the lucid chambers of the south
Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smiled !**
Divine inspiration indeed! Poetry, that if read
by the bedside of a dying lover of nature,
might

"Create a soul

Under the ribs of death!"'

What in the name of goodness makes us suppose that a mean and miserable November day, even while we are thus Rhapsodizing, is drizzling all Edinburgh with the worst of all imaginable Scottish mists-an Easterly Harr