nishing of their most dismal and desperate | ple of Apollo or Plutus, we smile at the idea dream. of surmounting, so molehillish do they look and we kick them aside like an old footstool Let the country ask us for a scheme to pay off the national debt-there she has it; do you request us to have the kindness to leap over the moon-here we go; excellent Mr. Blackwood has but to say the word, and a ready-made Leading Article is in his hand, promotive of the sale of countless numbers of "my Magazine," and of the happiness of countless numbers of mankind. We feel-and the feeling proves the fact-as bold as Joshua the son of Nun-as brave as David the son of Jesse-as wise as Solomon the son of David-and as proud as Nebuchadnezzar the son of Nebopo lazzar. We survey our'image in the mirrorand think of Adam. We put ourselves inte the posture of the Belvidere Apollo. "Somewhat too much of this"-so let us strike the chords to a merrier measure-to a "livelier lilt"-as suits the variable spirit of cur Soliloquy. Be it observed, then, that the sole certain way of getting rid of the blue devils, is to drown them in a shower-bath. You would not suppose that we are subject to the blue devils? Yet we are sometimes their very slave. When driven to it by their lash, every occupation, which when free we resort to as pastime, becomes taskwork; nor will these dogged masters suffer us to purchase emancipation with the proceeds of the toil of our groaning genius. But whenever the worst comes to the worst, and we almost wish to die so that we might escape the galling pressure of our chains, we sport buff, and into the shower-bath. Yet such is the weakness of poor human nature, that like a criminal on the scaffold, shifting the signal kerchief from hand to hand, much to the irritation of his excellency the hangman, one of the most impatient of men-and more to the satisfaction of the crowd, the most patient of men and women-we often stand shut up in that sentry-Up four flight of stairs we fly-for the bath is looking canvas box, dexterously and sinis- in the double-sunk story-ten steps at a bound trously fingering the string, perhaps for five-and in five minutes have devoured one quarshrinking, and shuddering, and grueing minutes, ere we can summon up desperation to pull down tern loaf, six eggs, and a rizzar, washing all over with a punch-bowl of congou and a teaupon ourselves the rushing waterfall! Soon as bowl of coffee, the agony is over, we bounce out the colour of beet-root, and survey ourselves in a five-foot mirror, with an amazement that, on each successive exhibition, is still as when we first experienced it, "Then view the Lord of the unerring bow, "Enormous breakfast, Wild without rule or art! Where nature plays And then, leaning back on our Easy-chair, we utter demolition of our admirable friend Sir David Brewster's diatribe, in a late number of the Quarterly Review, on the indifference of government to men of science, chuckle over our nobly-won order, K. C. C. B., Knight Companion of the Cold Bath. "In life's morning march, when our spirits were young."-why, wE SQUARE THE CIRCLE, and to the By and by, we assume the similitude of an immense boiled lobster that has leapt out of the pan-and then, seeming for a while to be an emblematical or symbolical representation of the setting Sun, we sober down into a faint pink, like that of the Morn, and finally subside into our own permanent flesh-light, which, as we turn our back upon ourselves, after the fashion of some of his majesty's ministers, reminds us of that line in Cowper descriptive of the November Moon Many analogies between the seasons of the year and the seasons of life, being natural, have been a frequent theme of poetry in all countries. Had the gods made us poetical, we should now have poured forth a few exquisite illustrations of some that are very affecting and impressive. "Resplendent less, but of an ampler round." It has, however, often been felt by us, that not Like that of the eagle, our youth is renewed- a few of those one meets with in the lamenta we feel strong as the horse in Homer-a di- tions of whey-faced sentimentalists, are false vine glow permeates our being, as if it were or fantastic, and do equal violence to all the the subdued spiritual essence of caloric. An seasons, both of the year and of life. These intense feeling of self-not self-love, mind gentry have been especially silly upon the siye, and the farthest state imaginable in this militude of Old Age to Winter. Winter, in wide world from selfishness-elevates us far external nature, is not the season of decay. up above the clouds, into the loftiest regions An old tree, for example, in the very dead of of the sunny blue, and we seem to breathe an winter, as it is figuratively called, though bare atmosphere, of which every glorious gulp is of leaves, is full of life. The sap, indeed, has inspiration. Despondency is thrown to the sunk down from his bole and branchesdogs. Despair appears in his true colours, a down into his toes or roots. But there it is, more grotesque idiot than Grimaldi, and we ready, in due time, to reascend. Not so treat him with a guffaw. All ante-bath diffi- with an old man-the present company alculties seem now-what they really are-faci-ways excepted ;-his sap is not sunk down to linies of which we are by far too much elated his toes, but much of it is gone clean out of the to avail ourselves; dangers that used to ap-system-therefore, individual natural objects in pear appalling are felt now to be lulling securities-obstacles, like mountains, lying in our way of life as we walked towards the tem Winter are not analogically emblematical of people stricken in years. Far less does the Winter itself of the year, considered as a sea. | est, gentlest, mildest, meekest, modestest, softest, sweetest, and sunniest of all God's crea tures that steal along the face of the earth? So are we. So much for our similitude-a staring and striking one—to Spring. But were you to stop there, what an inadequate idea would you have of our character! For only ask your senses, and they will tell you that we are much liker Summer. Is not Summer often infernally hot? So are we. Is not Summer sometimes cool as its own cucumbers? So are we. Does not summer love the shade? So do we. Is not Summer, nevertheless, somewhat "too much i' the sun?" So are we. Is not Sum. mer famous for its thunder and lightning? So are we. Is not summer, when he chooses, still, silent, and serene as a sleeping seraph? And so too-when Christopher chooses-are not we? Though, with keen remorse we confess it, that, when suddenly wakened, we are too often more like a fury or a fiend—and that completes the likeness; for all who know a Scottish Summer, with one voice exclaim son, resemble the old age of life considered as a season. To what peculiarities, pray, in the character and conduct of aged gentlemen in general, do rain, sleet, hail, frost, ice, snow, winds, blasts, storms, hurricanes, and occasional thunder and lightning, bear analogy? We pause for a reply. Old men's heads, it is true, are frequently white, though more frequently bald, and their blood is not so hot as when they were springalds. But though there be no great harm in likening a sprinkling of white hair on mine ancient's temples to the sppearance of the surface of the earth, flat or mountainous, after a slight fall of snow-and indeed, in an impassioned state of mind, we feel a moral beauty in such poetical expression as "sorrow shedding on the head of youth its untimely snows"-yet the natural propriety of such an image, so far from justifying the assertion of a general analogy between Winter and Old Age, proves that the analogies between them are in fact very few, and felt to be analogies at all, only when touched upon very seldom, and very slightly," So is he!" But our portrait is but halfand, for the most part, very vaguely-the truth drawn; you know but a moiety of our charac being, that they scarcely exist at all in reality, ter. Is Autumn jovial?-ask Thomson-so Lut have an existence given to them by the are we. Is Autumn melancholy?-ask Alison power of creative passion, which often works and Gillespie-so are we. Is Autumn bright? like genius. Shakspeare knew this well-as-ask the woods and groves-so are we, he knew every thing else; and, accordingly, he Is Autumn rich?-ask the whole worldLives us Seven Ages of Life-not Four Sea- so are we. Does Autumn rejoice in the sons. But how finely does he sometimes, by yellow grain and the golden vintage, that, the mere use of the names of the Seasons of stored up in his great Magazine of Nathe Year, intensify to our imagination the ture, are lavishly thence dispensed to all that rental state to which they are for the moment hunger, and quench the thirst of the nations? felt to be analogous ?— So do we. After that, no one can be so purand-bat-blind as not see that North is, in very truth, Autumn's gracious self, rather than his Likeness or Eidolon. But "Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by the sun of York!" That will do. The feeling he wished to inspire, is inspired; and the further analogical images which follow add nothing to our feelings, though they show the strength and depth of his into whose lips they are put. A bungler would have bored us with ever so many ramifications of the same idea, on one of which, in our weariness, we might have wished him hanged by the neck till he was dead. "Lo, Winter comes to rule th' inverted year!" So do we. "Sullen and sad, with all his rising train- So are we. The great author of the "Sea- "Exalt the soul to solemn thought, And heavenly musing!" We are an Old Man, and though single not singular; yet, without vanity, we think ourselves entitled to say, that we are no more like So do we. And, "lest aught less great should Winter, in particular, than we are like Spring, stamp us mortal," here we conclude the comSummer, or Autumn. The truth is, that we parison, dashed off in few lines by the hand of are much less like any one of the Seasons, a great master, and ask, Is not North, Winter? than we are like the whole Set. Is not Spring Thus, listener after our own heart! Thou feelsharp? So are we. Is not Spring snappish? est that we are imaged aright in all our at So are we. Is not Spring boisterous? So are tributes neither by Spring, nor Summer, nor Is not Spring "beautiful exceedingly ?" Autumn, nor Winter; but that the character So are we. Is not Spring capricious? So are of Christopher is shadowed forth and reflected Is no: Spring, at times, the gladdest, gay-by the Entire Year. we we. A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON. Thus "Drooping, the ox Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands "The bleating kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, POETRY, one might imagine, must be full of and where he seems to us to have overshot his Snow-scenes. If so, they have almost all dis-mark, and to have ceased to be perfectly natusolved-melted away from our memory-as ral. the transiencies in nature do which they coldly pictured. Thomson's "Winter,” of course, we do not include in our obliviousness-and from Cowper's "Task" we might quote many a The image of the ox is as good as possible. most picturesque Snow-piece. But have frost We see him, and could paint him in oils. But, and snow been done full justice to by them to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the or any other of our poets? They have been fruit of all his toils"-to which we freely acwell spoken of by two-Southey and Coleridge knowledge the worthy animal was well en-of whose most poetical compositions respec- titled-sounds, as it is here expressed, rather tively, "Thalaba" and the "Ancient Mariner," fantastical. Call it doubtful-for Jemmy was in some future volume we may dissert. Thom- never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment. son's genius does not so often delight us by | Againexquisite minute touches in the description of nature as that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great scale, and to dash objects off sweepingly by bold strokes-such, indeed, as have The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepalmost always distinguished the mighty mas- herd agreed with us-one night at Ambrose's ters of the lyre and the rainbow. Cowper sets-that the third was not quite right. Sheep, nature before your eyes-Thomson before your imagination. Which do you prefer? Both. Be assured that both poets had pored night and day upon her-in all her aspects-and that she had revealed herself fully to both. But they, in their religion, elected different modes of worship and both were worthy of the mighty mother. In one mood of mind we love Cowper best, in another Thomson. Sometimes the Sea- Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow." sons are almost a Task, and sometimes the Task For, as they disperse, they do look very sadis out of Season. There is delightful distinct- and no doubt are so; but had they been in ness in all the pictures of the Bard of Olney-despair, they would not so readily, and conglorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of stantly, and uniformly, and successfully, have the Bard of Ednam. Cowper paints trees- taken to the digging, but whole flocks had Thomson woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous lines, rivers from source to sea, like You will not, we are confident, be angry the mighty Burrampooter-Cowper, in many with us for quoting a few lines that occur soon no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend after, and which are a noble example of the of a stream, or awakens our fancy to the mur-sweeping style of description which, we said mur of some single waterfall. But a truce to above, characterizes the genius of this sublime antithesis-a deceptive style of criticism-and poet :see how Thomson sings of Snow. Why, in the following lines, as well as Christopher North in his Winter Rhapsody "The cherish'd fields Put on their winter-robe of purest white. "Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts Along the mazy current." Nothing can be more vivid. "Tis of the nature of an ocular spectrum. Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet "brown," where all that is motionless is white "The foodless wilds Pour forth their brown inhabitants." That one word proves the poet. Does it not? The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by memory-a critic you may always trust to-is admirable; except in one or two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic, he agreed with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what immediately succeeds ished. "Then, sad dispersed, "From the bellowing east per In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wing Tipp'd with a wreath high-curling in the sky." Well might the bard, with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, address them in a language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast. "Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind was up "Far off its coming groan'd," and the poet was inspired. Had he not been so, he had not cried, "Baffle the raging year;" and if you be not so, you will think it a most absurd expression. Did you ever see water beginning to change itself into ice? Yes. Then try to describe the sight. Success in that trial will prove you a poet. People do not prove themselves poets only by writing long poems. A line-two words-may show that they are the Muse's sons. How exquisitely does Burns picture to our eyes moonlight water undergoing an ice-change! "The chilly frost beneath the silver beam, Crept, gently crusting o'er the glittering stream!" Thomson does it with an almost finer spirit "An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool And afterwards, having frozen the entire stream into a "crystal pavement," how strongly doth he conclude thus "The whole imprisoned river growls below." Here, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the most part, in tranquil images-for his life was passed amidst tranquil nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power. Cowper says "On the flood, great work was his first. He had not philoso phized his poetical language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of profound est study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study, while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertin. ism of the diction and versification of the "Seasons"-above all, in the closing strains of the "Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and wonder the whole, as it is-from the more measured seldom breathed upon us-glorious poem, on march of the "Excursion?" All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school, know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and Pyrenees, "Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave! Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c. The first fifteen lines are equal to any thing in the whole range of English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here they are "The godlike face of man avails him nought! The shrouded body from the grave; o'er which, Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they how!!' Lies undissolved, while silently beneath, Wild beasts do not like the look of the human And unperceived, the current steals away." eye-they think us ugly customers-and someHow many thousand times the lines we are times stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in now going to quote have been quoted, nobody an awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger can tell; but we quote them once more for the mixed with fear. A single wolf seldom or purpose of asking you, if you think that any never attacks a man. He cannot stand the one poet of this age could have written them-face. But a person would need to have a could have chilled one's very blood with such intense feeling of cold! Not one. "In these fell regions, in Arzina caught, The oftener-the more we read the "Winter" especially the last two or three hundred lines the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter" immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of his fame. But godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so, then "The godlike face of man avails him nought," more so is the trash about "beauty, force diis, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still vine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood, merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr. Watts's Souvenir. "Tis all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past without eating her-but simply because, an hour or two before, he had dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his stomach. Still the notion is a popu lar one, and how exquisitely has Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the attendant lion of such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and. were all committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to him at the time to be poetry-though sometimes it was but "false glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages, without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his inspirations. He luxuriates-he revels-he wantons-at once "Heavenly Una, with her milk white lamb!" with an imaginative and a sensuous delight in But Thomson, so far from making poetry of nature. Besides, he was but young; and his in this passage, has vulgarized and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of terror the shower, and join the hymn of earth u and pity. Famished wolves howking up the heavendead is a dreadful image-but "inhuman to relate," is not an expression heavily laden with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel, unnatural introduction of ideas purely superstitious, at the close, is revolting, and miserably mars the terrible truth. "Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl." Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost? Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, which they had good reason to be, why were not they off! We have frequently read of their wandering far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our pocket-copy of the Seasonsand to draw a few keelavine strokes over the rest of the passage-beginning with "man's godlike face." Go read, then, the opening of "Winter," and acknowledge that, of all climates and all countries, there are none within any of the zones of earth that will bear a moment's comparison with those of Scotland. Forget the people if you can, and think only of the region. The lovely Lowlands undulating away into the glorious Highlands - the spirit of sublimity and the spirit of beauty one and the same, as it blends them in indissoluble union. Bury us alive in the dungeon's gloom-incommunicable with the light of day as the grave-it could not seal our eyes to the sight of Scotland. We should see it still by rising or by setting suns. Whatever blessed scene we chose to call on would become an instant apparition. Nor in that thick-ribbed vault would our eyes be deaf to her rivers and her seas. We should say our prayers to their music, and to the voice of the thunder on a hundred hills. We stand now in no need of senses. They are waxing dim-but our spirit may continue to brighten long as the light of love is allowed to dwell therein, thence proceeding over nature like a victorious morn. There are many beautiful passages in the poets about RAIN; but who ever sang its advent so passionately as in these strains?— "The effusive south Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven All that follows is, you know, as good-better it cannot be-till we come to the close, the rerfection of poetry, and then sally out into "The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard And fruits, and flowers, on Nature's ample lap? Swift Fancy fired anticipates their growth; And, while the milky nutriment distils, Beholds the kindling country colour round." Thomson, they say, was too fond of epithets. Not he indeed. Strike out ne of the many there—and your sconce shall feel the cratch. A poet less conversant with nature would have feared to say, "sits on the horizon round a settled gloom," or rather, he would not have seen or thought it was a settled gloom; and, there fore, he could not have said— "But lovely, gentle, kind, And full of every hope and every joy, The wish of Nature." Leigh Hunt-most vivid of poets, and most cordial of critics-somewhere finely speaks of a ghastly line in a poem of Keates "Riding to Florence with the murder'd man;" that is, the man about to be murdered-imagi. nation conceiving as one, doom and death. Equally great are the words— "Man superior walks Amid the glad creation, musing praise, In that mood he is justified to feast his fancy with images of the beauty as well as the bounty of nature; and genius in one line has concentrated them all "Beholds the kindling country colour round." "Tis "an a' day's rain”—and "the well-showered earth is deep-enriched with vegetable life." And what kind of an evening? We have seen many such-and every succeeding one more beautiful, more glorious to our eyes than another-because of these words in which the beauty and the glory of (ne and all are enshrined |