**Till, in the western sky, the downward sun
Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush
Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam.
The rapid radiance, instantaneous, strikes
Th' illumined mountain, through the forest streams,
Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist,
Far smoking o'er th' interminable plain,
In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.
Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.
Full swell the woods; their every music wakes,
Mix'd in wild concert with the warbling brooks
Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,
And hollow lows responsive from the vales,
Whence, blending all, the sweeten'd zephyr springs.
Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds
In fair proportion, running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky."

How do you like our recitation of that surpassing strain? Every shade of feeling should have its shade of sound-every pause its silence. But these must all come and go, untaught, unbidden, from the fulness of the heart. Then, indeed, and not till then, can words be said to be set to music-to a celestial sing-song.

create their world gradually before your eyes, for the delight of your soul, that loves to gaze on the growing glory; but delight is lost in wonder, and you know that they, too, are warlocks. Some heap image upon image, piles of imagery on piles of imagery, as if they were ransacking and robbing and red-reavering earth, sea, and sky; yet all things there are consentaneous with one grand design, which, when consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give you but fragments-but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we shall live for ever.

Thus-and in other wondrous ways-the great poets are the great painters, and so are they the great musicians. But how they are so, some other time may we tell; suffice it now to say, that as we listen to the mighty masters-" sole or responsive to each other's voice"

"Now, 'tis like all instruments,
Now like a lonely lute;

And now 'tis like an angel's song
That bids the heavens be mute!"

Why will so many myriads of men and women, denied by nature "the vision and the faculty divine," persist in the delusion that they are poetizing, while they are but versifying “this bright and breathing world?" They see truly not even the outward objects of sight. But of all the rare affinities and relationships in Nature, visible or audible to Fine-ear-andFar-eye the Poet, not a whisper-not a glimpse have they ever heard or seen, any more than had they been born deaf-blind.

The Mighty Minstrel recited old Ballads with a war-like march of sound that made one's heart leap, while his usually sweet smile was drawn in, and disappeared among the glooms that sternly gathered about his lowering brows and gave his whole aspect a most heroic character. Rude verses, that from ordinary lips would have been almost meaningless, from his came inspired with passion. Sir Philip Sidney, who said that Chevy Chace roused him like the sound of a trumpet, had he heard Sir Walter Scott recite it, would have gone distracted. Yet the "best judges" said he murdered his own poetry-we say about as much as Homer. Wordsworth recites his own Poetry (catch him reciting any other) magnificently-while his eyes seem blind to all outward objects, like those of a somnambulist. Coleridge was the sweetest of sing-songers-and his silver voice "warbled melody." Next to They paint a landscape, but nothing" prates theirs, we believe our own recitation of Poetry of their whereabouts," while they were sitting to be the most impressive heard in modern on a tripod, with their paper on their knees, times, though we cannot deny that the leathern-drawing-their breath. For, in the front eared have pronounced it detestable, and the ground is a castle, against which, if you offer long-eared ludicrous; their delight being in to stir a step, you infallibly break your head, what is called Elocution, as it is taught by unless providentially stopped by that extraplayer-folk. ordinary vegetable-looking substance, perhaps a tree, growing bolt upright out of an intermediate stone, that has wedged itself in long after there had ceased to be even standingroom in that strange theatre of nature. down from "the swelling instep of a mountain's foot," that has protruded itself through a wood, while the body of the mountain prudently remains in the extreme distance, descends on you, ere you have recovered from your unexpected encounter with the old Roman cement, an unconscionable cataract. There stands a deer or goat, or rather some beast with horns, "strictly anonymous," placed for effect. contrary to all cause, in a place where it seems as uncertain how he got in as it is certain that he never can get out till he becomes a hippogriff.

Oh, friendly reader of these our Recreations! thou needst not to be told-yet in love let us tell thee that there are a thousand ways of dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse the sentiment by a single touch-by a ray of light no thicker, nor one thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded oy lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you may splash it .n as with a gorgeous cloud-stain stolen from sunset: or you may bathe it in with a shred of he rainbow. Perhaps the highest power of all possessed by the sons of song, is to breathe it in with the breath, to let it slip in with the ight, of the common day!

Then some poets there are, who show you a scene all of a sudden, by means of a few magical words-just as if you opened your eyes at their bidding-and in place of a blank, a world. Others, again, as good and as great,

But

The true poet, again, has such potent eyes, that when he lets down the lids, he sees just as well, perhaps better than when they were up; for in that deep, earnest, inward gaze, the fluctuating sea of scenery subsides into a

settled calm, where all is harmony as well as beauty-order as well as peace. What though bulk, that Loch Awe looked like but a sullen a whole black day, swollen into such enormous he have been fated, through youth and man- river at its base, her woods bushes, and Kilhood, to dwell in city smoke? His childhood churn no bigger than a cottage. The whole -his boyhood-were overhung with trees, and visible scene was but he and his shadow. They through its heart went the murmur of waters. seemed to make the day black, rather than the Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, day to make them so-and at nightfall he took is filled with images up to the brim, Imagina- wider and loftier possession of the sky-the tion's treasury. Genius, growing, and grown clouds congregated round without hiding his up to maturity, is still a prodigal. But he summit, on which seemed to twinkle, like draws on the Bank of Youth. His bills, whe-earth-lighted fires, a few uncertain stars. Rain ther at a short or long date, are never dis- drives you into a shieling-and you sit there honoured; nay, made payable at sight, they for an hour or two in eloquent confabulation are as good as gold. Nor cares that Bank for with the herdsman, your English against his a run, made even in a panic, for besides bars Gaelic. Out of the door you creep-and gaze and billets, and wedges and blocks of gold, in astonishment on a new world. The mist is there are, unappreciable beyond the riches slowly rolling up and away in long lines of which against a time of trouble clouds, preserving, perhaps, a beautiful regu larity on their ascension and evanescence, and between them

"The Sultaun hides in his ancestral tombs,"

jewels and diamonds sufficient

"To ransom great kings from captivity." We sometimes think that the power of painting Nature to the life, whether in her real or ideal beauty, (both belonging to life,) is seldom evolved to its utmost, until the mind possessing it is withdrawn in the body from all rural environment. It has not been so with Wordsworth, but it was so with Milton. The descriptive poetry in Comus is indeed rich as rich may be, but certainly not so great, perhaps not so beautiful, as that in Paradise Lost.

It would seem to be so with all of us, small as well as great; and were we North-to compose a poem on Loch Skene, -Christopher two thousand feet or so above the level of the sea, and some miles from a house, we should desire to do so in a metropolitan cellar. Desire springs from separation. The spirit seeks to unite itself to the beauty it loves, the grandeur it admires, the sublimity it almost fears; and all these being o'er the hills and far way, or on the hills cloud-hidden, why it-the spirit -makes itself wings-or rather wings grow up of themselves in its passion, and naturewards it flies like a dove or an eagle. People looking at us believe us present, but they never were so far mistaken in their lives; for in the Seamew are we sailing with the tide through the moonshine on Loch Etive-or hanging o'er the gulf of peril on the bosom of Skyroura.

We are sitting now in a dusky den-with our eyes shut-but we see the whole Highlands. Our Highland Mountains are of the best possible magnitude-ranging between two and four thousand feet high-and then in what multitudes! The more familiar you become with them, the mightier they appear-and you feel that it is all sheer folly to seek to dwindle or dwarf them, by comparing them as they rise before your eyes with your imagination of Mont Blanc and those eternal glaciers. If you can bring them under your command, you are indeed a sovereign-and have a noble set of subjects. In some weather they are of any height you choose to put upon them-say thirty thousand feet-in other states of the atmosphere you think you could walk over their summits and down into the region beyond in in an hour. We have seen Cruachan, during

"Tier above tier, a wooded theatre

Of stateliest view,"

or cliff-galleries with strange stone images sitting up aloft; and yet your eyes have not reached the summits, nor will they reach them, tin all that vapoury ten-mile-long mass dissolve, or be scattered, and then you start to see them, as if therein had been but their bases, THE MOUNTAINS, with here and there a peak illumined, reposing in the blue serene that smiles as if all the while it had been above reach of the storm.

The power of Egoism accompanies us into than in the hum of men. There the stocks solitude; nay, is even more life-pervading there and stones are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we may have left at home our fiddle-more potent we in our actuality than the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher! Be changed, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding silent the cataract on the cliff-the thunder on the sky. The sea beholds transformed into a multitudinous smile, he us on the shore-and his one huge frown turns flowing affections towards us along the golden sands-and in a fluctuating hindrance of lovely foam-wreaths envelopes our feet!

to prove, in one of his "postliminious preTo return to Thomson. Wordsworth labours faces," that the true spirit of the "Seasons," till long after their publication, was neither felt nor understood. argument he does not shine. That the poem In the conduct of his was at once admired he is forced to admit; but then, according to him, the admiration was false and hollow-it was regarded but with that wonder which is the "natural product of ignorance." After having observed that, excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchilsea. and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the "Seasons," does not contain a single new image of external nature, he proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian Emperor," descriptive of the bush

Mr. Wordsworth having thus signally failed in his attempt to show that "much of what Thomson's biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment," let us accompany him in his equally futile efforts to show "how the rest is to be accounted for." He attempts to do so after this fashion :-" Thomson was fortunate in the very title of his poem, which seemed to bring it home to the prepared sympathies of every one; in the next place, notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind which would be most likely to strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of the 'Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."

of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," then neither could the admiration which the and Pope's celebrated translation of the moon- "Seasons," on the first appearance of that glolight scene in the "Iliad," altogether "absurd" rious poem, excited, be said, with any truth, to -and then, without ever once dreaming of have been but a "wonder, the natural product any necessity of showing them to be so, or of ignorance." even, if he had succeeded in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their failure to establish the point he is hammering at, he all at once says, with the most astounding assumption, "having shown that much of what his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment-how is the rest to be accounted for?" Having shown"!!! Why, he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in supposing that his mere ipse dixit will be taken by the whole world as proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. Strange to think of an enthusiast," he says, (alluding to the passage in Pope's translation of the "Iliad,") "as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity!" We are no enthusiastswe are far too old for that folly; but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and as good eyes, too, as Mr. Wordsworth, and we often have recited-and hope often will recite them again-Pope's exquisite lines, not only without any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most devout belief that, with some little vagueness perhaps, and repetition, and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the description is most beautiful. But grant it miserable-grant all Mr. Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered-and what then? Though descriptive poetry did not flourish during the period between "Paradise Lost" and the "Seasons," nevertheless, did not mankind enjoy the use of their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those oculists and aurists, the poets? Were all the shepherds and agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very like a whale! Causes there were why poetry flowed during that era in another channel than that of the description of natural scenery; and if it flowed too little in that channel then which is true-equally is it true that it flows now in it too much-especially among the poets of the Lake School, to the neglect, not of sentiments and affections-for there they excel-but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and tumult-of which the interest is profound and eternal-of all the great affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is there in this world for imagining, with Mr. Wordsworth, that men had forgotten both the heavens and the earth. They had not-nor was the wonder with which they must have regarded the great shows of nature, the "natural product of ignorance," then, any more than it is now, or ever was during a civilized age. If we be right in saying so

Thomson, in one sense, was fortunate in the title of his poem. But a great poet like Wordsworth might-nay, ought to have chosen another word-or have given of that word a loftier explanation, when applied to Thomson's choice of the Seasons for the subject of his immortal poem. Genius made that choice-not fortune. The "Seasons" are not merely the "title" of his poem-they are his poem, and his poem is the Seasons. But how, pray, can Thomson be said to have been fortunate in the title or the subject either of his poem, in the sense that Mr. Wordsworth means? Why, according to him, people knew little, and cared less, about the Seasons. "The art of seeing had in some measure been learned!" That he allows-but that was all-and that all is but little-and surely far from being enough to have disposed people in general to listen to the strains of a poet who painted nature in all her moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either most unfortunate in the title of his poem, or there was not with the many that indifference to, and ignorance of natural scenery, on which Mr. Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather whole, of his preceding argument.

The title, Mr. Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to the prepared sympathies of every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate attention to the appearance of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has des perately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was necessary to account for the

Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and its generous feelings overflow all his poem. These are not the most poetical parts of the "Seasons" certainly, where such effusions prevail; but still, so far from being either vicious or worthless, they have often a virtue and a worth that must be felt by all the children of men. There is something not very credible in the situation of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example, and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr. Wordsworth say-in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first (and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale is still read by all simple minds) the most popular-that that story is a bad one? It is a very beautiful one.

kind of reception which his own poetry had | Thomson had not the philosophical genius of met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr. Wordsworth known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more popular than he supposed it to be-and, Heaven be praised, for the honour of the age, it was and is so!never had they been written, nor had he here and elsewhere laboured to prove, that in proportion as poetry is bad, or rather as it is no poetry at all, is it, has been, and always will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer. That Thomson, in the Seasons, sometimes writes a vicious style, may be true, but it is not true that he often does so. His style has its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate-especially to dunces. But its virtue is divine; and that divine virtue, even in this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely than earthly vice-be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions-is a creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the great author of the "Excursion."

Mr. Wordsworth, in all his argumentation, is so blinded by his determination to see every thing in but one light, and that a most mistaken one, that he is insensible to the conclusion to which it all leads, or rather, which is involved in it. Why, according to him, even now, when people have not only learned the "art of seeing' -a blessing for which they can never be too thankful-but when descriptive poetry has long flourished far beyond its palmiest state in any other era of our literature, still are we poor common mortals who admire the "Seasons," just as deaf and blind now, or nearly so, to their real merits-allowed to be transcendent-as our unhappy forefathers were when that poem first appeared, "a glorious apparition." The Rhapsody on Love, and Damon and Musidora, are still, according to him, its chief attraction-its false ornaments-and its sentimental commonplaces-such as those, we presume, on the benefits of early rising, and,

That many did-do-and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in the Seasons-won by their false glitter or commonplace sentimentalism, is no doubt true: but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantua-makers and man-milliners, and “the rest," peruse the Rhapsody on Love-one passage of which we ventured to be facetious on in our Soliloquy on the Seasons-and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the "Oh! little think the gay licentious proud!" Winter," the first published of the "Sea- What a nest of ninnies must people in genesons;" during which, Thomson had not the bar- ral be in Mr. Wordsworth's eyes! And is the barity to plunge any young lady naked into the "Excursion" not to be placed by the side of cold bath, nor the ignorance to represent, dur-"Paradise Lost," till the Millennium? ing such cold weather, any young lady turning Such is the reasoning (!) of one of the first her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and of our English poets, against not only the peothe vehemence of her whole enamoured de-ple of Britain, but mankind. One other senportment. The time never was-nor could have been-when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem. Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people admired most in the poem what they least understood; for the Rhapsody on Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem much mystery in Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is it not melancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr. Wordsworth, earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful.

tence there is which we had forgotten-but now remember-which is to help us to dis tinguish, in the case of the reception the "Seasons' met with, between "wonder and legitimate admiration!" "The subject of the work is the changes produced in the appearances of nature by the revolution of the year; and, undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged himself to treat his subject as became a poet !** How original and profound! Thomson redeemed his pledge; and that great pawnbroker. the public, returned to him his poem at the end of a year and a day. Now what is the "mighty stream of tendency" of that remark? Were the public, or the people, or the world, gulled by this unheard-of pledge of Thomson, to regard his work with that "wonder which is the natural product of ignorance!" If they were so in his case, why not in every other! All poets pledge themselves to be poetical, but too many of them are wretchedly prosaic-die and are buried, or, what is worse, protract a miserable existence, in spite of their sentimental

commonplaces, false ornaments, and a vicious | all look up to her loveful blue or wrathful style. But Thomson, in spite of all these, black skies, with a weather-wisdom that keeps leapt at once into a glorious life, and a still growing from the cradle to the grave. Say not more glorious immortality. that 'tis alone

There is no mystery in the matter. Thomson-a great poet-poured his genius over a subject of universal interest; and the "Seasons" from that hour to this-then, now, and for ever-have been, are, and will be loved, and admired by all the world. All over Scotland "The Seasons" is a household-book. Let the taste and feeling shown by the Collectors of Elegant Extracts be poor as possible; yet Thomson's countrymen, high and low, rich and poor, have all along not only gloried in his illustrious fame, but have made a very manual of his great work. It lies in many thousand cottages. We have ourselves seen in the shepherd's shieling, and in the woodman's bower-small, yellow-leaved, tatter'd, mean, miserable, calf-skin-bound, smoked, stinking copies let us not fear to utter the word, ugly but true-yet perused, pored, and pondered over by those humble dwellers, by the winter ingle or on the summer brae, perhaps with as enlightened-certainly with as imaginationovermastering a delight as ever enchained the spirits of the high-born and highly-taught to their splendid copies lying on richly carved tables, and bound in crimson silk or velvet, in which the genius of painting strives to imbody that of poetry, and the printer's art to lends its beauty to the very shape of the words in which the bard's immortal spirit is enshrined. "The art of seeing" has flourished for many centuries in Scotland. Men, women, and children,

"The poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind

Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind!"

In scriptural language, loftier even than that, the same imagery is applied to the sights seen by the true believer. Who is it "that maketh the clouds his chariot?" The Scottish peasantry-Highland and Lowland-look much and often on nature thus; and they live in the heart of the knowledge and of the religion of nature. Therefore do they love Thomson as an inspired bard-only a little lower than the Prophets. In like manner have the people of Scotland-from time immemorial-enjoyed the use of their ears. Even persons somewhat hard of hearing, are not deaf to her waterfalls. In the sublime invocation to Winter, which we have quoted-we hear Thomson recording his own worship of nature in his boyish days, when he roamed among the hills of his father's parish, far away from the manse. In those strange and stormy delights did not thousands of thousands of the Scottish boyhood familiarly live among the mists and snows? Of all that number he alone had the genius to "here eternize on earth" his joy-but many millions have had souls to join religiously in the hymns he chanted. Yea, his native land, with one mighty voice, has for upwards of a century responded,

"These, as they change, Almighty Father, these Are but the varied God!"

THE SNOWBALL BICKER OF PEDMOUNT.

BEAUTIFUL as Snow yet is to our eyes, even | startle the moon and stars-those in the sky, through our spectacles, how gray it looks be- as well as those below the ice-till again the side that which used to come with the long tumult subsided-and all the host of heaven winters that glorified the earth in our youth, above and beneath became serene as a world till the white lustre was more delightful even of dreams. Is it not even so, Shepherd? What than the green-and we prayed that the fine is a rink now on a pond in Duddingstone fleecy flakes might never cease falling waver-policy, to the rinks that rang and roared of old ingly from the veil of the sky! No sooner on the Loch o' the Lowes, when every stone, 'comes the winter now, than it is away again circled in a halo of spray, seemed instinct with to one of the Poles. Then, it was a year in spirit to obey, along all its flight, the voice of itself a whole life. We remember slides a him that launched it on its unerring aim, and quarter of a mile long, on level meadows; and sometimes, in spite of his awkward skillesssome not less steep, down the sides of hills that ness, when the fate of the game hung on his to us were mountains. No boy can slide on own single crank, went cannonading through one leg now-not a single shoe seems to have all obstacles, till it fell asleep, like a beauty as sparables. The florid style of skating shows it was, just as it kissed the Tee! that that fine art is degenerating; and we look in vain for the grand simplicity of the masters that spread-eagled in the age of its perfection. A change has come over the spirit of the curlers' dream. They seem to our ears indeed to have "quat their roaring play." The cry of "swoop-swoop" is heard still-but a faint, feeble, and unimpassioned cry, compared with that which used, on the Mearns Brother-Loch, to make the welkin ring, and for a moment to

Again we see-again we sit in the Snow house, built by us boys out of a drift in the minister's glebe, a drift-judging by the steeple, which was sixty-about twenty feet high-and purer than any marble. The roof was all strewed with diamonds, which frost saved from the sun. The porch of the palace was pillared -and the character of the building outside was, without any serv le imitation-for we worked in the glow of original genius, and