Clm PR503 
 Boot -^^ 
 
 DOBELL COLLECTION 
 

 FROM CIRCUMSTANCES 
 
 HEREINAFTER ADVERTED TO, 
 
 THE SIXTY COPIES OF THIS ORlfclNAL EDITION 
 
 ARE NOT DISPENSED ON CUSTOMARY 
 
 " CONSIDERATIONS." 
 
COLLOQUIES, 
 
 DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, 
 
 BUT CHIEFLY UPON 
 
 POETRY AND POETS: 
 
 BETWEEN AN ELDER, ENTHUSIASTIC, 
 
 AND AN APOSTLE OF THE LAW. 
 
 " One caveat, good Reader, and then God speed thee!— Do not open it at 
 adventures, and by reading the broken pieces of two or three lines, judge it; 
 but read it through, and then I beg pardon if thou disliliest it. Farewell!" 
 
 T. Adams. 
 
 FKOM THE PRESS OF J. LORDAN, ROMSEY. 
 
 1843. 
 

 205449 
 
PROFESSOR WILSON. 
 
 Bight-admired Sir, 
 
 It might have very well comported with the line 
 of argument adopted by a certain Pleader in a case of 
 great notoriety^ to make light of the virtue fin sej 
 of a Name : — " Whafs in a Name .?" The energetic 
 advocate to whom I allude, might have been justified 
 in protesting against the undue influence of patro- 
 nymics, considering that they were synonymous with 
 prejudices which the most impassioned pleading could 
 not over-rule, and that their authority, had it been 
 decisive, would have insisted on a nonsuit. His 
 interrogative, however, is remarkably happy in the 
 elasticity of its signification; — / intend it to be read 
 with another punctuation — "What's in a Name!" 
 and thus employ it to convey an emphatic converse 
 Cleaning to that which it expresses in re Romeo 
 Montague. 
 
The pages to which I venture to prefix a Name 
 with Poesy " linked like leaves to flowers/' afford 
 an habitation for sundry cogitative vagrancies over 
 that delectable territory, rich in all floral luxuriance, 
 which considerate Muses have fertilized for the health- 
 ful holiday of young hearts, and for the reinvigoration 
 of the world-wearied — to whom the " constant revo- 
 lution" of the same repeated cares, might else 
 
 " make languid life 
 A pedlar's pack, bowing the bearer down." 
 
 It would, however, have required a reckless confidence 
 in the benignity of Professor Wilson, to proffer 
 these stray conceits as an acceptable thank-offering 
 for many hours charmed pursuit of his efflorescent 
 pen; — crude as they are in conception, and cramped 
 in conformation, this presentation of them to a Poetic 
 Mind would, if it were written, be indited with a 
 trembling pinion. But certain peculiarities in the 
 construction of the "habitation," encourage me to 
 hope for a lenient scrutiny of its contents. 
 
 Of the little volume before you, one individual 
 has been composer, and compositor and imprinter 
 throughout: — this circumstance is only noticeable. 
 
inasmuch as it may be a mental and mechanical com- 
 bination unprecedented, but unimposing. Printers 
 have been authors of renown ; and Methuselah, with 
 a knowledge of the art, adequate materiel, the patience 
 of Job, and sufficient perseverance, might, singly, 
 have completed a work, voluminous as the bulkiest 
 Cyclopsedia of the present day. 
 
 But the pen has been a stranger to the prose part 
 of its composition, and the scribe's office subverted: 
 — with the exception of acknowledged quotations, I 
 have been unaided by a line of manuscript or other 
 copy. There is a rhythmical extravaganza in the 
 sixth chapter, which I very reluctantly signalize in 
 this place, because the skeleton of twenty lines of it, 
 or thereabouts, was pen-traced; the composing-stick 
 has been otherwise my sole mechanical " help to com- 
 position." Memory has supplied me with sentiments 
 syllabled aforetime, to the occupation of three or four 
 pages; so unpremeditated else were its contents, that 
 when, as an employment for leisure, I commenced the 
 chapter called Introductory, it heralded I knew not 
 what. Evidences of a want of design and forethought 
 will, I fear, too frequently recur to substantiate this 
 fact, and to prevent an innocent illusion I should wish 
 
to create, that my " actors" are not " spirits/' but 
 independent personages, holding separate opinions, 
 and endowed with the gift of tongues. 
 
 In proportion as this explanation may be injurious 
 to subsequent vraisemblance, it may propitiate the 
 severe. The entire absence of a preconcerted plan 
 from the beginning, may " show cause" why no pro- 
 fessional uniqueness distinguishes a literary bantling, 
 to which, possibly, the annals of printing may not 
 " parallel a fellow." But having accustomed myself, 
 at distant intervals, to simultaneous composition, I 
 had closed the first colloquy before it occurred to me 
 that perseverance might accomplish a novelty. It was 
 essential to uniformity that I should proceed in the 
 plain style of execution in which I had commenced. 
 
 I shall be fortunate. Sir, should its " plainness move 
 you more than eloquence." The practical disadvan- 
 tages inseparable to the mode piu'sued in its com- 
 position, will (I repeat my hope,) modify the strictures 
 of the considerate. 
 
 C. L. LOKDAN. 
 
 Ilonisey, March, 1813. 
 
COLLOQUIES. 
 
By familiarity with our errors we sometimes lose sight of them.— 
 The disadvantage of revising sentences of my own shaping, with an 
 eye half- reconciled to the inaccuracies it had permitted to pass at the 
 first ' muster,' will, I trust, be admitted as an excuse for a few typo- 
 graphical errors, of which (abhorring detail) a general confession is 
 here made. — A more-than-peccadiUo in page 136, and an occasionally- 
 superfluous B after the exclamation " Ay," demand a special acknow- 
 ledgement. 
 
COLLOQUIES, 
 
 DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, BUT CHIEFLY UPON 
 POETRY AND POETS. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 " There is Poetry that is not written. As I here use it, it is delicate percep- 
 tion ; something' which is in the nature, enabling: one man to detect harmony, 
 and know forms of beauty better than another. It is like a peculiar gift of 
 vision, [may it not create one^ making the world we live in more visible. The 
 poet hears music in common sounds, and sees loveliness by the wayside. There 
 is not a change in the sky, nor a svveet human voice, which does not bring him. 
 pleasure. He sees all the light and hears all the music about him— and this is 
 Poetry." 
 
 Many thanks, claarming Mary Russell Mitford ! 
 for a short and satisfactory definition of a theme, 
 which, when certain of our Poets essay to ekicidate, 
 dilates delectably for perusal, but fills with despair 
 the seeker after a summary signification. Look, for 
 instance, at that masterly and stirring reply to What 
 is Poetry? in an Appeal for Poets from the pen of 
 Barton; — a glorious whole, which it were gothic to 
 garble by quotation. A marvellous creature, by the 
 way, that Bernard Barton — worthy of love and honor ! 
 
» INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 Hath Quakerism foregone its frigidness, or how came 
 he in the cold cradle of his caste? and not he alone, 
 but others, whom that same " frozen bosom" hath 
 strangely quickened with poetic breath, and sent 
 forth in poetic guise, lovely as " yellow cowslip and 
 pale primrose from flowery lap of May." The Hewitts 
 among these, and especially Saint Mary! — where is 
 verse more suffused by Innocency than hers, — more 
 guileless and gladsome, — more red^olent with the air 
 of the Garden anterior to the great Mother's misdeed? 
 How easy — were the Law one whit less inexorable — 
 how easy to conceive a mental reservation, made in 
 Mary's favor, by Eve, before the fall! 
 
 Among the multifarious subjects which, in our days, 
 our fathers', and, perhaps, in annals yet more remote, 
 have attracted, instructed, or diverted the public 
 mind, what singular or individual subject has retained 
 a potency so perennial as that of Poetry ? Chrono- 
 logers who descend to the minutiae of modern times, 
 will, in all conscience, have need of flexible pens to 
 pourtray faithfully the fluctuations of feeling and of 
 general opinion which have characterised the age; 
 — its web has indeed been of " a mingled yarn, good 
 and ill together;" — and whether, in the judgment of 
 posterity, glory or shame shall be deemed to pre- 
 dominate in their review of the past proximate, the 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 6 
 
 historian, if metrically inclined, may thus impartially 
 
 usher in his lucubrations : — 
 
 " Admire, exult, despise, laugh, M^eep, and mourn, — 
 For here there is much matter for all feeling." 
 
 But, (let us hope that the symptom be not necessarily 
 vicious !) the mind, created ' upright,' has of late ap- 
 proved itself so fecund with ' inventions,'* — has so 
 diversely disported with fantasy, fanaticism, and folly, 
 — that few of the swarming " topics of the day" can 
 be dignified by the record or esjDected at the hands 
 of the chronologer. The age has developed hneaments 
 which, however, are British, or, in other words, are 
 bold, vigorous, and philanthropic, and these will find 
 an " habitation and a name" in the imperishable page ; 
 — as to the host of bubbles, over whose birth trum- 
 pets were blown, sometimes by fools, at others, by 
 knaves — the?/ have evaporated, as was inevitable, 
 before the breath of 
 
 " Time's old daughter, Truth." 
 
 These, if they deserve the mention of their paternity, 
 were chiefly the ofispring of Politics in a phrenzy ; 
 but the "fitful fever" of the parent has subsided, 
 and its morbid progeny sleep well. The mild genius 
 of Poetry will probably experience, in times future 
 
 * " God made man upright, but they have sought out many in- 
 ventions." — Ecdcsiastes, 
 
4 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 as it has experienced recently, tlie strongest check to 
 its diffusiveness and, consequently, to its dominion, in 
 the jealousy and turbulence of that spirit, — just now 
 subdued, but " scotched, not killed," — which smoul- 
 ders in the body politic: — a restless spirit whose 
 element is contention, troubled in its very repose, and 
 swiftly, with a fancied right or fancied wrong, making 
 
 " all Europe ring, from side to side." 
 
 Here, however, in saucy, sea-girt Albion, we have 
 said ejOfectually ^pro tern. J to the furious flow of Fac- 
 tion, Here shall thy waves be stayed ! Britain now 
 is growing less Babel-like, and, politically speaking, 
 we English people are becoming more " of one lan- 
 guage and of one speech." For, notwithstanding 
 that (in perilous identification of the vox popidi with 
 the vox Dei,) the old and solid carved work of our 
 good ship, " The State," has been a wee bit notched 
 and splintered in the petty lunacies of certain, who, 
 drest in authority by the grace of our sovereign Lady, 
 Victoria, (God bless her !) and by the sufferance of her 
 lieges, did most recklessly " Avield their little tridents" 
 • — notwithstanding the mock-heroic havoc of the past, 
 our anxieties sleep ; for the bark now floats on smoother 
 waters, and we have sure confidence in our Pilot. 
 His predecessors persevered in a sinuous policy, which 
 bare and rotten," as became it. 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. O 
 
 they modestly preferred to name " liberal and enligh- 
 tened!" Let the misnomer pass for the present. In 
 their diurnal routine of official navigation, the work 
 of pumping and scuttling went on in jocund alter- 
 nation, enhvened now and then with a dash into the 
 breakers; but the helm is at length wrested from 
 tenacious hands ; and steered by the " powers which 
 be," the vessel is in no fear of stranding, although 
 the manly* Mariner — who believes her buoyancy to 
 be a quality infinite — may find the subsidized sea 
 surgy in places, and tempestuous. 
 
 " In your modern books for the most part," said 
 Coleridge, " the sentences in a page have much the 
 same connection with each other that marbles have in 
 a bag — they touch without adhering;" — in the actual 
 perpetration of irrelevancy, how just appears the ob- 
 servation! yet, gentle Eeader, admire the candour 
 which forewarned thee from the outset, that in these 
 pages many a swerving from strict connectedness may 
 be expected; and therefore pray we that Nature, 
 in thy allotment of attributes, may have endowed thee 
 with a less austere and rigid sense of " oneness" than 
 that of Mr. Curdle — dogmatic in dramatic criticism; 
 for be again assured, our progress vidll manifest a 
 daring disregard to " unities." 
 
 * For the propriety of this appellative, vide the Premier's speeches 
 in jiropouiiding- and defending the Income-tax Act. 
 
b INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 But on a scribe who cannot " wander at his own 
 sweet will " without having to travel back again, his 
 errings avenge themselves ; and the spirit of digression 
 is certainly of that rebellious class which " no exorcism 
 can bind." Revenons ! Before the word politics es- 
 caped usj we were adverting to the pinnacle which 
 Poetry has serenely maintained in a discordant and 
 distracted generation; shedding, from the lofty sum- 
 mit on which her seat is fixed, an influence benign, 
 pacific, and ennobling, through all the acrimony of 
 political and literary contest, — the birth, rise, and fall 
 of hydra-headed faction, — and the active dissemination 
 of doctrines, pestilent though ephemeral, and demo- 
 ralising although delusive. 
 
 Not to detain thee, dear Beader, longer on a 
 dubious threshold, I will hint at what may be anti- 
 cipated in the following papers. In the early spring 
 of the year of grace, forty-one, it was my lot literally 
 to stumble on an individual, in whose companionship, 
 originating in this contingency. Time seemed to aug- 
 ment the velocity of his flight. Age, as I afterwards 
 discovered, had dealt leniently with him ; for, though 
 in much closer proximity to the grand climacteric than 
 any spinster-lady in the three kingdoms (as was satis- 
 factorily attested by the last census-returns), his visage 
 was little marred by furrows, and hoary hairs have won 
 reverence for many a younger brow. He had been 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. i 
 
 an enthusiast in poetic admiration, nay more, a poet, 
 according to the tenets of Miss Mitford, — one of the 
 " many that are sown by Nature ;" and this enthusiastic 
 temperament was still the idiosyncrasy of the man. 
 It had been, and was, the character of his life. Exter- 
 nally, with one exception, his aspect was so unmarked 
 by peculiarity, that in the thronged streets of a city 
 the majority would have honored him far less than 
 Wordsworth's "Wanderer, and have passed him with- 
 out remark. But those who, by accident or audacity, 
 had looked in for a few consecutive moments at the 
 window of liis soul, forgot rudeness in yielding to 
 fascination ; for it was a bright and vivid, but inces- 
 santly-varying light which flashed firom it. Yet did 
 its unrest reveal nought of repulsive passion — no sign 
 of strife, or guilt, or fear ; it interpreted alone a swift 
 transition of emotions, which, as though reflected 
 from a glass, disproved all affinity with the sordidness 
 which degrades or the vices which pollute the crowd. 
 He was of average stature, and his nether propor- 
 tions were arrayed in that old-gentlemanly garb, by 
 ancient scriptural translators miputed (in name at 
 least) to primitive times, and to the invention of one 
 of our first parents — the paternal ancestor, no doubt. 
 A supplement in the shape of gaiters, of the same 
 dark hue with its antecedent, completed the covering 
 of locomotives of no ungraceful structure, and ex- 
 
8 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 tended over the major part of shoes, well-shaped, 
 and as accurately fitted as was compatible with lux- 
 urious yet not lavish looseness. His upper garment, 
 least of all, betrayed subserviency to the Parisian idol ; 
 and the placid artist whom he delighted to honor, 
 establishing each primal pattern as a precedent abso- 
 lute, and " nursed at happy distance" from, or paying 
 platonic indiiference to, conflicting Reports of Fashion, 
 never tortured his patron's body or kindled ire in his 
 flashing eye, by chasing a fugitive comme it faut for 
 the more becoming decoration of his person. That 
 unreasonable and (were it not for custom) unseemly 
 item, which, without the recommendation of comfort 
 or elegance, humanity has so long chosen, under one 
 contour or another, for the conservation of the cranium 
 from ungenial elements or casual assaults — that formal 
 and vacant product of a block, which men call hat, 
 as it appeared on the personage of whom I write, was 
 in keeping with the ensemble. That part of it for 
 which, if seeking a general illustration, we should 
 seize instanter upon the half-gallon measure at a 
 potato-shop, was rather low than lofty, and would have 
 made a lucrative guage for the merchant, if employed 
 in such a dispensation of his wares. Its margin, Hke 
 that of the elite of modern publications, was capacious, 
 and, slightly aiding gravity, served also to render 
 less evident to first-sight the swift vicissitudes of 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. » 
 
 visionary expression, to which I have adverted; but, 
 in further reference to this " peculiar eye," its keenness 
 of perception was, I would aver with humility, a match 
 for the Wanderer's in the Excursion. In youth it 
 had been subject to short-sightedness; and now, from 
 causes clear, I believe, to oculists, Time, so far from 
 clouding, clarified its powers. Indeed, the vigour 
 of this faculty in one so old, was almost incredible ; 
 nor was it until after long intercourse that I, who met 
 him oft, was made to comprehend the full reach of 
 that tremendous organ, and then by an acquisition 
 of intelligence more sudden and startling than the 
 stoppage of a bank to an American. My friend — for 
 in sooth he and I were soon 
 
 " A pair of Friends, though I was young. 
 And he was sixty-two" — 
 
 my friend (I mention it to thee in a whisper, fair 
 Eeader,) existed in a state of celibacy, sometimes 
 miscalled single blessedness ; [a man who knew what 
 happiness meant so well as he, lived not designedly 
 so, you may be sure — but of the causes, peradventure, 
 anon :] and there came occasionally to brighten the 
 old Sponsor's abode by her presence, and make it 
 more melodious with the sweet outpourings of her 
 solicitude than it was wont to be with poets' voices, 
 a Visitant, lovely enough to be ideal, but happily of 
 
10 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 more perdurable material than " dreams are made of." 
 With this fair form, when acquaintanceship had duly 
 ripened into familiarity, I commenced a kind of tele- 
 graphic correspondence — the signals consisting of 
 amatory glances and sighs ; and confiding too implicitly 
 in the denseness of that curtain which Old Age 
 lowers, with hasty or gentle hand, on eye and ear, we 
 saw in the Ancient's presence no absolute impedi- 
 ment to all communication. — So we continued to 
 exchange dispatches, till the conspiracy demanded 
 a denouement, and we resolved — she, of course, re- 
 luctantly — that " the catastrophe should be a nuptial." 
 That only which allied perplexity with passion was 
 the unquestioned fact, that Mary's godfather was as 
 profoundly in the dark about her leaning " to the 
 soft side of the heart," as was wont to "be a merry 
 ex-chief-minister, touching the movements and pro- 
 jects of his right trusty and well-beloved co-mates in 
 the executive. 
 
 The happiest day of one's life is not invariably ap- 
 proached by pleasurable steps. The business of oral 
 confession is embarrassing to the most voluble tongue, 
 if the tale it tells to the ear mostly concerned be one 
 of truth; but the emharras augmenteth mightily if 
 another avowal be expedient. However, having to 
 leave town for an indefinite space, and reflecting that 
 wishes " had not a body in them" to make confession 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 11 
 
 by proxy, I racked up my resolution to the highest 
 degree of desperation, and with stanunered accent and 
 in paralytic phrase besought to inform him of — that — 
 which — " he had read (if outward signs of things 
 within could be read) connectedly, from alpha to 
 omega, and of which he flattered his discernment he 
 could have given me the earliest information !" 
 
 He was a bachelor, but he loved — the poets and 
 his godchild in particular, all mankind in general. 
 His conversation, when it turned not on practical 
 subjects, was poetic in conception, and often poetic in 
 expression, and was enriched and stimrdated by an 
 exuberancy of quotation. It is some of such that I 
 shall endeavour, from crude and hasty notes, to tran- 
 scribe. Where there may appear intelligence, the 
 praise be his ; where insipidity, the reproach be mine : 
 and this must, I fear, frequently occur — for charms 
 of voice, impressiveness of gesture, and eloquence of 
 eye, are efficient auxiliaries to any theme — too subtle, 
 alas ! to be " turned into shape" by any but a " poet's 
 pen;" and even by that inspired instrument, are 
 seldom in strict fidelity transfixed to the poet's page. 
 
 It only remains, among preliminaries, to relate how 
 I became acquainted with the individual I have very 
 imperfectly described; and here a fitting occasion 
 presents itself (at least, in my opinion, which I sub- 
 mit with deference,) for some elucidation of the first 
 
12 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 person in the singular number in this narration. My 
 dramatis personce are limited, and the expediency of 
 personal portraiture will, consequently, and perhaps 
 fortunately, be unfrequent. Nevertheless, where a 
 prolonged intercourse is probable, it is preferable to 
 foreknow something of one's camarade; — nay, it is 
 desirable, even though he be but the convive of a festal 
 hour, or the companion in a stage-coach. — In steam- 
 carriages such prescience is a matter of indifference, 
 — so is a pleasant prospect and a brawling brook, — 
 everything, in short, except the bursting of an engine 
 or sepulchral symptoms in a tunnel. 
 
 Be it known then unto thee, friendly Reader, by 
 these presents, which come greeting, that the part 
 I was to act upon the stage of life (provided I retained 
 an essential principle) was appointed for me ere I had 
 emerged from swaddling-clothes. At what precise 
 period in the present century I made my appearance in 
 a part which, like the lion's* (allotted to Snug), is done 
 " extempore, for it is nothing but roaring," it is not 
 pleasant to communicate. A desire to avoid divulging 
 the exact antiquity of the chronicle commenced by 
 Time coeval with our birth, is a delicate refinement 
 now so generally displayed, that a definite reference 
 to the calendar is out of date, and indeed indicates 
 eccentricity in a writer. The cause may be question- 
 * Midsummer Night's Dream, act iii. scene 1, 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 13 
 
 able — wlietlier this exquisite sensibility be fostered 
 by the increase of infant seminaries, sanctioned by an 
 enlightened legislature ; or by the diffusion of liberal 
 arts and sciences, by still more liberal hawkers pro- 
 mulgated on the lowest possible terms on the mer- 
 curial side of nothing — the cause, I repeat, may be 
 questionable, but the effect is undeniable, that an 
 antipathy to reveal with precision the passage of Time 
 over our heads, is becoming universal as intelligence. 
 It seems to be a resolution of the day, that if the ruth- 
 less tyrant will exact his penalties on this corporeal 
 compound, it shall be done sub sileiitio/ if we cannot 
 efface or conceal, we will not needlessly pubKsh his 
 progress on the dial. So that (out of life-insurance 
 offices) the utmost admission made consists of a plain- 
 tive iteration of the Patriarch's lament — "few and 
 evil have the days of the years of my life been." 
 
 I borrow from the Prophet the paternal, maternal, 
 and grand-maternal decree concerning myself: here 
 it is, briefly — " To the law!" I grew up in the 
 dangerous and isolated position of an oidy son — not 
 dangerous because isolated, but because idolised. I 
 always foresee fearingly the fate of an only son — 
 shudderingly, if there be a grandam in existence. A 
 unique " pledge," in such a case, is more hapless 
 and more to be lamented over than the least-hkely 
 to be redeemed at a pawnbroker's. To every volition 
 
14 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 of his will there is regard — to every appeal, acqui- 
 escence j and how can either teeth or temper main- 
 taia a purity against indulgences, dispensed with 
 freer hand than that of pope of Rome in direst 
 poverty? Much less to be expected then, from such 
 matriculation, is any premature penchant for those 
 interestmg studies and that agreeable discipline ad- 
 judged by lord Eldon to be essential to such as hope 
 to live by the law. 
 
 My forensic future was proverbial in my boyhood, 
 and numberless were the exhortations to learning and 
 docility to which it supplied a text. " I heard them, 
 but I heeded not." The pedagogue to whose training 
 I was entrusted at a later stage, mourned over my 
 " mania for wood-walking and vagaries in verse, which 
 for the most part were vanity, and would doubtlessly 
 end in vexation of spirit ;" but was too tender-hearted 
 to chastise, and, like Southey's, " never consumed 
 birch enough in his vocation to make a besom." How 
 strongly some oddities protest against oblivion ! Poor 
 M — ! never shall I forget the " anger, insignificantly 
 fierce," which, when it distorted thy patient features, 
 was certain to defeat its purpose, provoking to risibi- 
 lity, with difiiculty suppressed, the culprit it was in- 
 tended to daunt. Nor ever can I fail to remember those 
 frequent, quaint, and quiet bubblings from a natural 
 fount of humour, whose current the cares of a con- 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 15 
 
 tentious wife and seven clamorous bantlings had not 
 sufficed entirely to da7n. 
 
 M — astounded and delighted me a few weeks ago, 
 by presenting himself at my chambers. London has 
 always a choice collection of comicalities in human 
 shape, or claiming a kindred with humanity, but the 
 worthy dominie of D — (in the far west) was no mean 
 metropolitan marvel during his sojourn in the city, 
 " whose streets," quoth he, " are verily interminable, 
 presenting a changeless perspective of sooty dwellings, 
 dimly visible through an atmosphere of smoke." M — 
 was an amateur, of lowly pretensions, on the violin ; and 
 in the lull of holiday-freedom he sought in psalmody 
 a refuge from connubial reproach, which yielded to 
 but one assuaging influence — sleep. M — had a tune 
 on the title of which he jested with lugubrious levity ; 
 " There is balm (said he) in Gilead." Conscious of 
 his enjoyment of sweet sounds, I insisted on his accom- 
 panying me to a concert in Hanover-square; and 
 during the plaudits which followed a pathetic aria 
 from a female singer, he remarked, with a physiogno- 
 mical expression in which humour, ecstasy, and gra- 
 vity were strangely mingled, " Of a verity, Mr. C, 
 yon syren's was the sweetest melody that, in the 
 years of my experience, I ever heard produced by a 
 Birch '^^ 
 
 * In allusion to the canfatrice of tliat name, who sung. 
 
16 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 The season of boyhood I think to be as swift of 
 wing as those which succeed it; — aye, by the light of 
 Memory, whose property it is to condense tribulation 
 and to dilate joy, it appears scarcely less swift than that 
 Spring of the seasons of the soul — its first love. Before 
 I was half prepared to relinquish my capacity as 
 
 " a Dreamer among men, indeed 
 
 An idle Dreamer," 
 
 I was summoned to sterner engagements, in the coil 
 of which, narrowing as it did the boundaries of all 
 previous pleasures, I syllabled, in con expressione 
 monotony, 
 
 " All, happy years! who woukl not be again a boy?" 
 
 Let all on the side male who cannot plead guilt- 
 less of this ejaculation, in spirit if not in the very 
 letter, come with me hereupon to an arbitrement; 
 and as many elegant minds have imbibed many unin- 
 telligible fancies from " The Childe," who, were the 
 state of childhood agahi their own, would not appear 
 as hoys, either by creation or by choice, let us em- 
 brace the supplicants of both sexes, and determine 
 who are they that — were the change optional — would 
 antedate their lives agreeably to their longings. 
 
 Not the youth who is professing love, nor the 
 maiden who is pondering upon marriage. 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. IT 
 
 The youth might who has gone before the priest, 
 and found himself nearer purgatory than paradise; 
 and so might the mother of a thankless child. 
 
 Not the youth who is coming simultaneously to the 
 estates of manhood and of money — to the liberty of 
 full age and the legacies of fond ancestors. 
 
 The heir might who has gained discretion and lost 
 his domain; and so might a young man made old by 
 excesses; — so might a saint in an outburst of in- 
 nocency, and a sinner in a paroxysm of despair. 
 
 So might he who hath seceded from vice, and is 
 troubled at the tears he hath occasioned, or harrowed 
 by the heart he may have broken. 
 
 So might he to whom the moral condition of the 
 time is " dark as Erebus," who believes that atrocities 
 accumulate, and who is discontented at everything. 
 
 But so would not he who knows that progressive 
 privileges attend progressive age, and each nobler in 
 its order : — that our intellectual advancement, founded 
 upon holy Truth, is the supereminent aim, element, 
 and safeguard of the soul — our greatness here, and 
 qualification for hereafter! 
 
 It is a work of considerable difficulty — which in- 
 creases daily — to keep one's footing on the road to 
 Honor, beset as it now is beyond all precedent, by a 
 host of aspirants beyond all calculation. It is the 
 
18 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 struggling, hustling, anxious course, on which the 
 million compete, and the few unconcernedly regard. 
 And of the crowd which enter for the race, how 
 few attain the goal — of the countless array of com- 
 petitors, how scanty are the gifted with the garland! 
 That ramification of the said road which leadeth unto 
 legal eminency, is especially notorious for its tortuosity 
 and glorious uncertainty; and many a chancellor and 
 chief baron in nocturnal visions, which befriend,* 
 has found himself bewildered below the bar even, 
 and in a like predicament with the disputative an- 
 gels, " in wandering mazes lost." With all my 
 respect for that learned body to which my sii-e sup- 
 plied an insignificant limb in my unworthy person, 
 I did not suddenly burn with the ambition to signalise 
 myself in the profession : I felt no instantaneous ex- 
 hilaration from the study of equity, nor was I roused 
 to emulation by the confiict of the courts. A simple 
 summary of the subjects it was necessary to know, 
 convinced me that Cromwell had singularly fallen 
 upon truth when he said, that " there being so many 
 law-books of great bulk, so many old musty records, 
 reports, and book-cases, as that after the time spent in 
 school-learning, the rest of the time of the flower of a 
 man's life would be little enousrh to read them over 
 
 " Night visions may befriend, 
 
 Our waking dreams are fatal."— FoMMg'. 
 
INTEODUCTORY CHAPTER. 19 
 
 and peruse them." Vigilantihus non dormientihus 
 suhserviunt leges, should be an aphorism in as constant 
 repetition with a student, as his "Ave" with the 
 suppliant of a certain creed. No doubt the truism is 
 distressing, but it is salutary. If, thought I, I apply 
 myself to this " sage and serious doctrine," it must be 
 at the sacrifice of pursuits infinitely more pleasurable, 
 though certainly less profitable, if estimated by the 
 Hudibrastic standard — 
 
 " What is the worth of any thing 
 But so much money as 'twill bring?" 
 
 Then, too, I had scruples, suggested by admiration 
 of Consistency and reverence of Truth, which, per- 
 haps, but for lofty prototypes in punctilio, I might 
 have coyly concealed. To " lie like truth," — to 
 imitate in one particular a celebrated parliamentary 
 refugee, 
 
 " Hazer lo bianco negro, y lo negro bianco," — 
 
 and with the consciousness of crime, to assume and 
 argue as for innocence, were hard to be reconciled 
 with preconceived notions of the sanctity of Right, 
 or conformed to a moral creed in which it was a pri- 
 mary article that " The simple energy of Truth needs 
 no ambiguous interpetrers." Yet if such reasons 
 could prevail upon the noble and sensitive mind of 
 
20 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 the father of Hale, with so much force as to induce 
 him to retire from the practice of his profession, to 
 what can we look for a more effective confutation 
 of their right to prevail, than to the character of his 
 illustrious son? — in the contemplation of which I 
 derived a quietus for this order of compunctious 
 visitings. 
 
 My countenance was not always " sicklied o'er with 
 the pale cast of" parchment which it now wears, and 
 on the eve of my entry at Lincoln's-inn, I cogitated 
 on a subject of mutual concern with myself and grand- 
 mother (not Blackstone). I had still sympathy enough 
 with rustic vulgarity to look lovingly on a visage 
 whose ruddy tinge betokened a connexion with the 
 heart, — a connexion, the existence of which in law- 
 yers is sometimes disputed by the profane, on other 
 grounds than that of a bloodless physiognomy. It 
 was grievous to think that ere long I might as 
 strikingly resemble " a thing that ne'er had life" 
 as did respectively H — and B — and P — , whose 
 ghostly apparitions flitted before me, like weird 
 and warning monitors, their livid features dilating 
 in awful elongation, till the sphere proper to the mas- 
 ticatory process appeared in each like an emporium 
 of ivory tusks. And these, not long since, had been 
 " sweet-faced men as one shall see in a summer's day ;" 
 and, fitted once to personate Pyramus, could hence- 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 21 
 
 forth be counted as stars — perhaps only as satellites — 
 in the Apothecary line for ever ! But the " venerable 
 Maid" has no more regard for the pride of the 
 physical constitution, than Miss Mary- Ann Walker 
 for the pride of the political; and 
 
 " The visage wan, the purblind sight," 
 
 are phases and signs which the prejudices of the 
 multitude obstinately identify with ability. I re- 
 member once on the ciixuit leaving the court-house or 
 hall, at Salisbury, on the heels of smiling Mr. M — ; 
 and as he turned a corner, while I remained at the 
 window of a book-shop, I overheard a countryman 
 say to his companion, alluding to the comely barrister, 
 " Now, if I did want a laayer, I wouldna choose he ; 
 — Jw he a dale too fat and pleasant-loohiyig for a 
 laayer V^ 
 
 Enfin, (dissyllabic darhng of our neighboui's, help 
 me to an end!) ejijin, I became that which I am. 
 Blackstone, in his " Farewell to the Muse," enume- 
 rates a train of penalties, contingent to the fervent 
 embrace of "fair Justice," which are penalties although 
 poetically clothed, as pills made palatable with sweet- 
 meat are still physic. But, comprehensive as is his 
 catalogue of contingent ills, there is a remainder un- 
 mentioned, before which all recited evils " hide their 
 diminished heads :" can the briefless need a reminder 
 
22 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 that theii^ condition is not included in his catalogue 
 of professional calamities? But the sanguine tem- 
 perament of youth is not prone to contemplate chagrin 
 or privation, and dwells more interestedly on arenas 
 of legal contention — anticipates the applausing hum 
 of courtS;, the murmured homage to eloquence — fore- 
 fancies championship and conquest ; and preconceives 
 the florid invocation, resistless argument, and eloquent 
 propitiation of a decree, on which are suspended the 
 absorbing interests of Life, and Fame, and Honor ; — 
 and speeds, by an ideal path, to fortune, preferment, 
 ease. Soon on the stoicism of adolescence, ambition 
 works; and soon I looked at this, the bright side of 
 the scene. Hume (the historian) estimates a natural 
 disposition to view things on the sunny side, as more 
 than equivalent to a fortune of £10,000 a year. — A 
 living economist might think the calculation hasty, 
 and feel disposed to cavil at so large a " tottle." In 
 embracing law I had, moreover, home anticipations — 
 not to reahse, for they were Utopian, but to cherish, 
 for they were fond. Advising, after twelve months 
 application, with a visitor at the paternal residence, 
 on a plain principle, a copious (and superfluous) use 
 of technicalities convinced my father that my time 
 had been well spent, and threw around me the halo 
 of an oracle in the dim eyes of a venerable maternal 
 ancestor, who woidd " die happily could she live to see 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 23 
 
 me a judge" — her ne plus ultra of forensic dignity. 
 Dear old Lady ! without this anodyne her " sleep of 
 death" was peaceful as a pleasant dream, and little 
 recked she of the superadded " labor and sorrow" 
 that must have been entailed on her by the fruition 
 of her wish. For my own part, my aspirations are 
 less presumptions ; and a silk gown, wliich never would 
 have occurred to her as a desideratum with men, 
 would appease my longings and be gratefully ac- 
 knowledged. 
 
 Prolixity, O Reader ! is, as thou mayest haply know, 
 peculiar to the Law and its disciples ; and if herein 
 I stand accused of circumlocution, would that I could 
 truly interpret to thee that encouragement to expatiate 
 which now I feel, in assured freedom from the frowns 
 of impatient jurymen, and the " To the point, Mr. C." 
 
 of courteous baron . Notwithstanding, I believe 
 
 I may safely promise thee that we are hastening to a 
 climax. 
 
 On an April morning in 41, I was proceeding to 
 
 my chambers in . I had been engaged during 
 
 the greater part of the night in a complicated inves- 
 tigation, and having arrived at an opinion wliich I 
 considered to be as well-grounded as it would be 
 satisfactory to my client, I was disembarrassed of care, 
 and my spirit seemed gifted vrith the volatility of 
 an angel's wing. " Town-imprisoned," as gentle 
 
?4 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 Mary terms it (William Hewitt's Mary, not mine), 
 town-imprisoned, we taste but a dilution of the joy- 
 enkindling elixir wliich Deliglit, prime almoner to the 
 Queen of seasons, pours lavishly by wood, and field, 
 and stream, in the golden light of an April morn. 
 Yet, weakened as becomes the pure effluence by com- 
 mixture with the murky atmosphere of busy haunts, 
 it still retains ingredients which inspire' with a joyous 
 consciousness of the time ; and even in the clamour 
 of a city the heart recognises and leaps lithely at the 
 voice of Sprmg. For stony limits may sooner shut 
 out Love* than exclude Nature; and when the all- 
 animating Spring passes over creation, with her vivi- 
 fying breath making the old world young again, her 
 influence operates in man like a renewal of God's 
 breath of life; and the indefinable exultation which 
 rises in his bosom attests but his participation in the 
 instinctive and insuppressible sympathy which all 
 things living own for youtli — the doctrine of whose 
 infinite prolongation in a happier sphere lends the tint 
 of transport to fabled felicity, and gilds the pinions of 
 a surer and sublimer Hope. Eternal youthl What 
 other epoch of existence can imagination appropriate 
 to the glad heritage of bliss? Not the dawn of 
 capacity, or its decline ; not immaturity or imbecility 
 
 " With Love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls, 
 
 For stony limits cannot hold Love out." — Romeo and Juliet. 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 25 
 
 — but the ever-ripening, ever-rosy Morn; — Morn 
 which prevails in perpetuity, and which cannot 
 hasten Noon, for Noon is Night's precursor, and 
 Night may not spread her sable mantle over the 
 E,ealm of the Eejoicing! 
 
 On the morning to which I have adverted, I had 
 resigned myself to the Spirit of the Air, — 
 
 " The pleasant season did my heart employ; 
 My old remembrances went from me wholly. 
 And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy." 
 
 Who has not smiled at his own locomotive irregula- 
 rities, when governed by the impulses of an ecstasy 
 to which all temporal care is alien, and inspired with 
 which, the human heart yearns from its most hallowed 
 depths with the boundless desire to bless ? — 
 
 " To me that morning did it happen so;" 
 
 and having, in changing mood and by changing mo- 
 tion, nearly attained my destination, I had lingered 
 in loving dalliance before the attractive exposition of 
 a bibliopolist — one of those tempting arrays of title- 
 pages, which to tliis day (unless urged onwards by a 
 professional pressure fi-om without,) detain me with 
 the virtue of an arrest. There were treatises, by 
 master-minds, on the E-eligion which reconciles and 
 irradiates life ; on the pharmaceutic Science, by which 
 
26 ' INTRODUCTOEY CHAPTER. 
 
 purcliasers might secure an immortality ici las ; and 
 on Law, by whicli its mysteries were simplified to the 
 scale of Readings made Easy. And, above these, a 
 rank of Poets, living and dead — if indeed true Poets 
 can die — cherished titles all, the humblest of which by 
 mere articulation sounds a chord that kindles rapture. 
 There were — but what need to recapitulate names 
 " familiar as household words?" Last of all stood 
 Burns; and, swift as thought, the rapture within me 
 found utterance in words of song : 
 
 " O Jjife! how pleasant in thy morning-, 
 Young Fancy's rays the hills adorning! 
 Cold-pausing Caution's lessons scorning, 
 
 We frisk away, 
 Lilie schoolboys at th' expected warning, 
 
 To joy and play T" 
 
 Then, lest I might be longer beguiled by that " sweet 
 companie," I receded hastily, and in unconscious 
 vicinity with the Old Man too long lost sight of in 
 these pages, who had been standing behind me, I 
 came into a collision with him so violent and unex- 
 pected, that for a moment I was a painful witness of 
 a critical experiment on the laws of gravitation. 
 
 Of course I was instantly earnest in apology, which 
 was not, he benignantly assured me, needed. There 
 are symbols out of Masonry which attest fraternity of 
 feeling, and a disposition towards attachment was 
 
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. %i 
 
 suddenly and reciprocally developed in us two. The 
 passion of Celia and Oliver, wlio " no sooner looked 
 than they loved/" was not quicklier conceived than 
 our friendship. He had heard my quotation from the 
 Scottish bard, (which I had vented audibly, believing 
 myself alone,) and though tolerably well-stricken in 
 years, he appeared to appreciate the ecstatic pride 
 of life to which the poet has supplied a language. 
 We conversed a while and parted, for recollections of 
 waiting clients gat hold upon me. But we exchanged 
 addresses ; and when — ^in reply to his earnest solicita- 
 tion that I would visit him soon, very soon — I promised 
 on the evening of the second day to call on him at 
 Ivy Lodge, it was with a strong confidence that I 
 should find it a " haven where I would be." 
 
 As You Like It. 
 
COLLOQUY I. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 " Whate'er you see, whate'er you feel, display 
 The Realm you sought for." — Parnell. 
 
 The habitation of the individual with whom I had 
 thus become acquainted, and for whom I was sensible 
 of a sudden and singular interest, was situate in one 
 of the pleasantest environs of London. The daylight 
 had not departed when I arrived; and there was 
 something in the neatness of its external aspect, and 
 in the arrangement of a limited parterre, which be- 
 spoke its owner's sense of chasteness and propriety. 
 Its character was more rural than, in that neighbour- 
 hood, suburban dwellings are in general; and whilst 
 its size and situation might have adapted it for the 
 retreat of a merchant, the absence of certain customary 
 features dear to the soul of a commergant, convinced 
 you that it was not the harbour of a merchantman, or 
 that if it was, its appearance might be accepted as a 
 guarantee for good taste and true gentility. [I pro- 
 
30 CHAPTER II, 
 
 test, en passant, against any illiberal deduction from 
 this remark, which, involves merely a matter of gout 
 and not of worth: — I have several unexceptionable 
 clients in " the commercial interest," whom I prize 
 highly for their prompt payments.] The entrance- 
 gate opened by a peculiar catch, and formed part of a 
 wood fencing of lattice-work, which, being high and 
 over-run with ivy, concealed from pedestrian passers- 
 by the lower rooms of the lodge. The house also 
 was nearly covered Avith the same vagrant root, dis- 
 playing two distinct hues — that which grew upon the 
 projections of the building appearing of a darker green 
 than that which overspread its recesses. A few vases 
 and rustic ilower-stands were dispersed in judicious 
 display, and were garlanded with the snowdrop and 
 primrose. And facing the doorway was a roomy 
 dog-house, from the entrance of which there partially 
 protruded (both a type of quaintness and terror to 
 petty miscreants) the caput of a mastiff, " life-like 
 and awful to view," though merely carved from wood 
 and colored (as you discovered on a closer and keener 
 scrutiny), and representing the sentinel as keeping 
 a vigilant eye upon the wicket, although in couchant 
 attitude. 
 
 The public thoroughfare to which the domicile was 
 contiguous, was not the most-frequented route to the 
 metropolis, although sufficiently peopled; yet, from 
 
COLLOQUY I. 31 
 
 the height and density of the fence that bounded it^ 
 the gate was no sooner closed on the inside, than you 
 seemed in an outer realm of Silence, — in a sanctuary 
 only intruded upon by the casual note of some wood- 
 warbler, 
 
 " soothing, as it sank 
 
 On the lull'd ear, its melody that drank." 
 
 And many a weary wing had its quiet resting-place 
 there — not more secure in leafy solitudes, than in the 
 depths of that redundant ivy and the guardianship of 
 the kind heart it sheltered ! The stillness that reigned 
 without the lodge presided more intensely within : — 
 it was almost a realisation of Peace made palpable. 
 Windows, some partially and others wholly composed 
 of amber-colored glass, imparted to the interior " a dim, 
 religious light"of that chastened hue, neither silvery or 
 golden purely, but a commingling of both, such as you 
 may have beheld in the west at eventide, and fancied 
 the Day in devotion, ere its lustrous Orb suffused the 
 horizon with the deep crimson radiance which con- 
 summates his setting. There is a peculiarly-tran- 
 quillizing influence in that soft amber light; and 
 perhaps from associating it with the quietude that 
 prevails at sunset, or with the solemn splendour which 
 it sheds over sacred places, we connect it instinctively 
 with serenity. The apartment in which I found the 
 
S2 CHAPTER n. 
 
 genius loci, had an air of luxurious comfort, utterly 
 apart from ostentation : the walls supported the effigies 
 of six generations of his fathers ; and though the room 
 was not large, the chief portion of the space left 
 unoccupied by his ancestors was devoted to the accom- 
 modation of four capacious bird-cages, ' the lodging' 
 (as he observed smilingly, the instant he perceived my 
 eye upon them,) ' the lodging of a few parlour-boarders, 
 in addition to a numerous singing-class in the eaves 
 and leaves without. — I feel,' he continued, in reply 
 to a remark I made connected with his in-door aviary, 
 " I feel ' a sacred and home-felt delight' in the strains 
 of my domestic quire, which, by-the-bye, the last 
 few days of warmth and sunshine have driven to such 
 excess of riot, as made them almost 
 
 ' vex with mirth the drowsy ear of Night:' 
 
 but my joy was well-nigh at an end, and my band in 
 danger of being broken up, by a doctrine oihumanity 
 taught with the power of poesy by that dear Disturber 
 in the North, the undying Christopher of that 
 name, for whom I will not impute to you the bar- 
 barism of a want of love and reverence. He denomi- 
 nates the singing of caged birds ' a rueful simulation 
 of music ;' and ' upon this hint I spake,' though loth, 
 a sentence of emancipation in favor of that unconscious 
 captive roosting on the upper perch there, (still wide 
 
COLLOQUt I. «J3 
 
 awake, 'per Hercule I ) my feathered knight^ Sir Fre^ 
 deric — to whom esteem yourself as introduced. My 
 servant is infected with his master's prejudices, and 
 did the part of Liberator as lazily as would a more 
 reputed son of Fame, were his liberating efforts honO^ 
 rary. And indeed my newly-born humanity was nearly 
 convulsed at the bird's embrace of Liberty, whom I had 
 not heart to hail then as ' the merry mountain nymph j* 
 for, independently of the favoritism induced by long 
 companionship, I had gloomy forebodings of a compul- 
 sory indolence and disenchanted solitude, if the 'fytte* 
 caught from the Recreations of Christopher shordd 
 have four days' continuance. What matinal employe 
 ment could I invent, as a substitute for the duty of 
 preparing sustenance for those devourers? That 
 same blithe bigot, sir Fred, turns sullen and threatens 
 felo de se by starvation if any other hand than mine 
 presumes to meddle with his provision; and the 
 Queen Dowager — near my honored grandsire's por» 
 trait — even she does despite to a hallowed Name, by 
 signs of unamiable temper, if other than I prepare 
 her royal board. But away — after long pausing and 
 beginning late — away went sir Frederic on his ' ad« 
 vent'rous flight,' to a shi-ub five yards distant from his 
 prison-house, whence, after a perplexing reconnoitre, 
 he adjourned to the ivy above the window here. We 
 saw no more of the knight until morning, and then 
 
34 CHAPTER II. 
 
 he was discovered en attendant on the window-ledge,, 
 in a frame of feathers 
 
 ' That, in the various bustle of resort, 
 Were all too ruffled and somewhat impaired.' 
 
 A luckless boon was freedom to sir Fred! The co- 
 lonists on the outside — an envious Ishmaelitish 
 mobocracy ! — did most despitefully entreat and per- 
 secute the yellow-crested knight. But yet — (you 
 know the philosophic chant of the Swan of Avon) — 
 
 ' There is some soul of goodness in things evil ;' 
 
 and the maladventures of my marred and maimed 
 minstrel over-ruled the ultra-liberalism of the North ; 
 enabled me with quiet conscience to retain my house- 
 hold company of melodists ; and did assuredly qualify 
 me, by patient watchings and successful healing, 
 for a physician's diploma in ornithological pharmacy. 
 — Really I am bound to apologise for permitting a 
 mere canary-bird thus early and, perhaps, indeco- 
 rously to incite me to garrulity. But I have a 
 secret faith that I may, with you, assume the freedom 
 of a more protracted intimacy. Read you ever the 
 Poet-Preacher (Taylor)'s Sermon on the Marriage- 
 Ping?" 
 
 I nodded negatively. 
 
 " No ! Then, abstain from it if you would avoid 
 
COLLOQUY I. 35 
 
 the state of wedlock! ' No man/ says that divine 
 Divine, * can tell, but he that loves his children, how 
 many delicious accents make a man's heart to dance 
 in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges. 
 Their childishness, their little angers, their innocence, 
 their imperfections, their necessities, are so many 
 little emanations of joy and comfort to him that de- 
 lights in their persons and society.' Now I am a 
 doating old man, unwedded, and the bu-ds you see 
 around me are some of my fondlings — my adopted 
 children.'''' 
 
 A tone of voice, soft, and touched with the gentlest 
 trill, (not dissimilar to that which, about nine years 
 ago, distinguished the bishop of Winchester's,) and the 
 peculiar visual expression I have mentioned, gave 
 wondrous effect in speech to what may appear tame in 
 transcript. His eyel — it was nearly tantamount to 
 another tongue, — the mind's interpreter by an optical 
 language. And his voice, though not naturally pow- 
 erful, was capable of inflexions so nice and gifted with 
 intonations so musical, that, together, he spake and 
 looked an expiring subject into vivid life again: and, 
 making every object he alluded to,"live in description," 
 there breathed from him, as he pleaded his concern 
 for his feathered family, such ineffable fondness, that 
 in the purity of his affection you admired it the more 
 for its simplicity, and felt the effect of its eloquence 
 to be a new estimation of canaries. 
 
no CHAPTER II. 
 
 The sanctum in which he was seated, was sur^ 
 founded with book-shelves, fitted under, and forming 
 an additional support to, his progenitors on the canvas. 
 On one side of the apartment were arranged the 
 works of prose authors, the back of each serving as 
 p, remembrancer of reputation, either time-honored or 
 cotemporary ; and the opposite compartment was filled 
 with the works of Poets, chiefly British. A volume 
 of the Faery Queene, another of Racine, Chalmers' 
 Tron Church Sermons, and Les Oraisons Funebres de 
 Bossuet, were lying on the table. We discoursed for 
 a brief space upon current topics, and the circum- 
 stance of our rencontre. He told me of his peculi- 
 arities of taste and sentiment, " which are not either 
 peculiarities, I trust," said he, in summing them up, 
 ^' since my best hope is in Religion, my warmest aspi- 
 ration for my fellows' good, and my chief pleasure 
 in Poetry — which is to Nature (which is all, save 
 God !) as the handmaid of a lovely regal maiden, who 
 Indicates, and calls upon you to admire, the charms 
 0f her sovereign mistress." 
 
 *■ I see," he remarked, when, on a momentary 
 cessation, I had glanced at the books before him, 
 ■** I trace a shadow of surprise, at the diversity of 
 writings which appear here in juxta-position. To use 
 % phrase familiar tp you, I have turned to them each 
 for a rejre^her. My memory, which I kept tolerably 
 
COLLOQUY I. 37 
 
 ' schooled and exercised ' in my youth, plays the 
 truant 'in mine age, now I am gray -headed ;' and, 
 faithful from period to period, has not fidelity which 
 can abide a paragraph. A lady of my acquaintance 
 has made my cottage eloquent to-day with the praises 
 of Mile. Rachel: her name recalled the Hermione 
 of Racine's Andromaque, whom I heard and saw at the 
 Theatre Francais. The Englishman's World-painter, 
 glorious Will himself, and in his own language, often 
 dwindles into doggrel in attempting to jingle; but 
 the French tragedial rhyme is intolerable. What 
 sympathy can one feel for sentiment, that should move 
 with the majesty and ease of a monarch, stalking on 
 stilts, and rescued from a monotonous twang only 
 by manifest effort?" 
 
 C. — " Little, indeed; though the first-class ar^ 
 tistes avoid with much dexterity the gulf which yawns 
 at the close of each couplet ! This difiiculty and, to 
 us, defect, displays in full-relief the scarecrow which 
 Milton designates ' the troublesome and modern 
 bondage of rhyming.' " 
 
 E. — " True. You have seen Rachel, then?" 
 
 C. — " I have, but not as Hermione." 
 
 E. — " She is the reigning deesse with our fickle 
 friends, whose fashion it is intensely to idolize, or 
 to dispatch, unaneled, au diahle. Each line here 
 suggests Poetry in a palsy, and occupies nearly as 
 
30 CHAPTEK II. 
 
 long in reading, as the birth, progression, and decay 
 of an affaire du cceur — an amour eternel, in the Centre 
 of Civilization. Nevertheless, here are hnes which 
 seem to rise from the page with the nerve of 
 giants refreshed. Where shall we alight upon a 
 scene of conflict more fiery and impetuous than this, 
 where every little word on the tongue of a French 
 girl becomes a stiletto ! — 
 
 ' Ne vous suffit-il pas que je I'ai condamne? 
 Queje le hais ; enfin, seigneur, queje V aimed?' 
 
 add to his character of miserable that of murderer ; 
 but Rachel, once seen hurling this passion-poisoned 
 shaft, in fitful vengeance, at her unhappy suitor — 
 he ' sighing like furnace' — can never be forgotten. It 
 is indelible as the recollection of a lightnmg-flash 
 which in youth may have blasted a human creature 
 on your right-hand, and swept by you scatheless — 
 horrified but unhui't. I have never before recog- 
 nized so forcibly as now I do, in this reminiscence, 
 the strength of this sentence of Madame de Stael :* — 
 ' Tant (Tindividus traversent V existence, sans se douter 
 des passions et de leur force, que souvent le theatre 
 retele Vhomme d Vhomme, et ltd inspire une sainte 
 terreur des or ages de Vdme^ " 
 
 * Sur " i^a De'claQiation." 
 
COLLOQUY I. 39 
 
 C. — " An axiom, in words worthy the daughter of 
 Necker! But you have, there, French eloquence of 
 another order — a style which, partial as I am to poetry 
 in my proper tongue, claims pre-eminent admiration 
 in the Gallic. What an avalanche of the elements 
 of oratory, what facile flow of language, what graphic 
 delineation, what sonorous adjective-aid, what mel- 
 lifluous cadence, conspire, in presence of a lofty am- 
 bassador in things divine, to sink (pour le moment J 
 the terrestrial; to make " the merry-hearted sigh;" 
 and to win, from fair aspirants after bliss, the homage 
 of a fervent ' Cetait magnifiquel'' on their return 
 from the mass to prepare for the masquerade !" 
 
 E. — " Aye, the preacher's end and aim, conviction, 
 is, I fear, a fruit rarely found in profusion ; yet, as it 
 regards the discours, many an epic poem has been 
 pronounced from a French pulpit. That which Cole- 
 ridge is reported to have said of Taylor, that he sel- 
 dom wrote prosaically excepting in rhyme, applies 
 with equal (probably with greater) justice to the 
 superior order of the priests of France — their sermons 
 are poetiy, dismounted from the stalking-horse on which 
 it paces the stage. Here, for instance, in Bossuet's 
 Oraison Funebre de la Reine de la Grande-Bretagne, 
 is an exordium of grandeui', worthy to be admired of 
 all men, and to sink into the hearts of princes : ' Celui 
 qui regne dans les deux, et de qui relevent tous les 
 
40 CHAPTER II. 
 
 empires, a qui seul appartient la gloire, la majesU ei 
 Vindependance, est aussi le seul qui se glorifie de fairs 
 la hi aux rois, et de leur dormer, quand il lui plait, de 
 grandes et de terribles legons.' And tliis ' solemn 
 opening' precedes no ' insignificant conclusion ;' his 
 theme throughout is arrayed in apparel befitting its 
 majesty, and merits CoUins's quaternity of epithets — 
 
 ' Warm, energic, chaste, sublime.' 
 
 If an old man's company should induce you often 
 hither, we will scan more intently the legacy of this 
 ' holie prieste' — and of others, — of Massillon ! That 
 mighty painter's name unrols a picture intensely ivild 
 in its solemnity. I cannot repeat it verbatim, but it 
 occurs to me like a vision of Belshazzar's Feast, or, 
 more fearful still, the Deluge,— reviving a multitude, 
 in all the horror of madness but without its uncon- 
 sciousness, urging their gasping flight from the gorge 
 of the on-rolling, inexorable wave. He portrays, as 
 already present, the end, and arraigns each soul before 
 the tribimal of the visible Judge ! They tell us that 
 his words ran chilly as a stream of ice through his 
 hearers' veins ; and when you read them you feel an 
 involuntary shudder, and almost seem to fluctuate 
 on the brink of that dread abyss, over whose despair 
 etherial Hope for a moment folds her wings. And yet 
 this Massillon, whose every stroke in this picture of 
 
COLLOQUY I, 41 
 
 awe serves, but suspends, the climax, till his hand is 
 suddenly arrested, and the whole concentration of 
 imaginable calamity is before you_this Massillon,who 
 seizes upon and sways the mind like a despot, and 
 urges it through scenes of increasing tumult into a 
 mental Reign of Terror — this strife-creating Spirit, 
 has a voice placid as the smile of Peace — a strain 
 halcyon as a di-eam of Heaven ! And over his xaages, 
 as standing yesterday in the open firmament, you ask. 
 Can this serene sky have but an instant since been 
 canopied with cloud and storm?" 
 
 C. — " The foHe of French preachers, as far as I 
 have observed, consists mainly in description and in 
 declamation ; and the predominancy of the latter may 
 perhaps account for the unsatisfying results of their 
 ministry ; the Voice that should penetrate the heart, 
 plays pleasantly upon the ear as a tinkling cymbal or 
 a dulcimer. I should unwillingly pronounce the 
 French to be a frivolous people ; but Gaiety is their 
 Diana, and they have not resolution to abstract them- 
 selves from the worship of the idol, and to sit down 
 in silence, and be thoughtful. I can hardly conceive 
 a greater contrast to the general style of the French 
 divines, than that which marks the Scottish Chal- 
 mers, some of whose sermons I remember to have 
 read, and remarked for their apparently-irresistible 
 argument.'''' 
 
42 CHAPTER II. 
 
 K — " Perhaps by Southrons the eloquent Scot is 
 better read than heard. But he keeps in awe the 
 host of opposing prejudices against truth, which are 
 apt to rise now in man, as they have ever risen since 
 the Great Rebellion in the year of the world 1, — they 
 fall back, I say, before this man, like the army of 
 Israel at the advance of Goliath, before the coming 
 up of David. Would you enter the lists of contro- 
 versy with him, you are sensible of the impotency of 
 a stripling, in the iron grasp of a gladiator. Demon- 
 stration is the term he chooses for his theological 
 motto, and he has a right to it. Read at your 
 leisure (if it is one you have not read), this seventh 
 of the Tron Church discourses, and if you find a 
 loop-hole, admitting the escape of any single shade 
 of character from the responsibility of a solemn but 
 reasonable self-investigation, then (although a lawyer) 
 I will consider your ingenuity stimulated by aid that 
 shall be nameless. On the arguments of Chalmers 
 Truth stems the wave of worldly opposition as the 
 ark rode on the swelling waters. Here is a simile for 
 the Scotchman, borrowed from an old divine : it may 
 represent the progress of a series of his demonstrations. 
 ' When the waters of the flood came upon the face of 
 the earth, down went stately turrets and towers. In 
 like sort, when the waters of affliction arise, down go 
 the pride of life, the lust of the eyes, in a word, all 
 
COLLOQUY I. 43 
 
 the vanities of the world. But the ark of the soul 
 riseth as these waters rise, and how too? even nearer 
 and nearer unto heaven.'* Those old men speak, do 
 they not? with admirable simplicity, and shape you 
 out a pleasant picture almost in monosyllables. Is the 
 primitive mantle rejected ' from Dan even unto Beer- 
 sheba?' is the spi7it of the fathers' style ' interred 
 with their hones T " 
 
 C — " Ah ! the moan of discontent with things pre- 
 sent, the sigh for past perfections, echoed from the 
 Poet there; not captiously, but with the old man'' s 
 natural tone of complaint." 
 
 E. — "Complaint! and caught from Edmund Spenser ! 
 At what infectious spot?" 
 
 C. — " From this most * musical and melancholy 
 chime,' it may be — 
 
 ' So oft as I with state of present time 
 The image of the antique world compare, 
 Whenas man's age was in his freshest prime, 
 And the first hlossom of faire vertue bare — 
 Such oddes I find 'twixt those, and these which are. 
 As that, through long continuance of his course, 
 Me seemes the world is run quite out of square 
 From the first point of his appointed sourse ; 
 And being once amisse grows daily wourse and wourse.' " 
 
 E. — " Upbraid not the Poet for repining at ' the 
 ills of Eld ;' — for such, and only such degree of dis- 
 * Disce Mori. Sutton* 
 
44 CHAPTER II. 
 
 content with Earth as lifts him to the lofty enter- 
 prise of a New "World! — a land whose lustrous 
 outline the piercing eye of the Poet — by Piety di- 
 rected — may have traced, — although obscurely, yet 
 with sufficient distinctness to animate his hope of 
 inheritancy, and his longing for 
 
 — ' that same time when no more change shall be, 
 But steadfast reste of all things, firmly stayd 
 Upon the pillars of Eternitie, 
 Which is contraire to mutabilitie : 
 For all that moveth doth in change delight, 
 But thenceforth all shall reste eternallie 
 With him that is the God of Sabaoth highte. — 
 O that great Sabaoth God, grante me that sabbatli's sighte!' " 
 
 C. — " Impressive as Luther's Hymn, heard in 
 Westminster Abbey !" 
 
 E. — " Nay, Poetry, of however sublime a birth, 
 can never be so effective alone as when wedded to 
 Music, and then in the celestial alliance Poetry is the 
 ■^weaker vessel.' For among all the instruments to our 
 delight, there is not one so potent (during its fugitive 
 control) or so mysterious as Music. The hind, moulded 
 from the clod and almost as senseless, acknowledges 
 its irresistible might, as it undulates on his drowsy 
 ear, rousing, and charming, and holding captive. — 
 And on finer-fibred spirits does it not operate like a 
 breaking up within the bosom of the fountains of the 
 
COLLOQUY I. 45 
 
 great deep!' But its mystery is a nobler and an en- 
 nobling theme — a tlieme which is not ' of the earth, 
 earthy/ but which has to do with the imagination, 
 detaching its wing from a vain brooding over material 
 things, and urging it to soar into that vast Realm of 
 Anticipation, to which, as the heirs of infinite promise 
 and the creatures of infinite hope, we have hereditary- 
 right. And making us to marvel, that if such vivi- 
 fying influence belongs to the concord of human 
 creation, wAa# ecstasy shall be ours amid the minstrelsy 
 divine — sounding from the harps of angels, in spheres 
 whose secret preparations for his bliss the ear of man 
 hath not heard nor can hear !" 
 
 E. was so borne away by the impetuosity of feeling 
 excited by his subject, in which his whole being ap- 
 peared to be absorbed, that, as he came to a close, his 
 faculty of enunciation was impeded, and he pillowed 
 his head upon his hand for a minute. The efferves- 
 cence had worked away during that interval, and he 
 resumed, — his countenance the visible seat of gentle- 
 heartedness, and his voice " soft as the west wind's 
 sigh,"— 
 
 " ' Though I spake with the tongues of men and 
 angels,' I should fail to depict faithfully the dominion 
 which this celestial Captivator possesses over me. 
 And attributing to it as I do — not the powers of tra- 
 ditionary miracle, but yet a mighty power to modify 
 
46 CHAPTER II. 
 
 tlie harshness of humanity, to mitigate its ruggedness, 
 and cause many a tract in the wide wilderness ' to 
 blossom as the rose,' — I pant for the promulgation 
 from high quarters of a well-advised system of in- 
 struction. Next to Holy Truth itself, which the 
 Spanish proverb majestically designates the Daughter 
 of God — 
 
 ' La verdad es hija de Dios ' — 
 
 next to Truth, I venerate its Shrine — next to the 
 priceless Pearl, I am anxious for the Ark which bears 
 it through the troublous sea of Time : and with the 
 impression I have of the ameliorating, spiritualizing 
 influence of an extension of the empire of Music, 
 I would that the solemnly-aflianced sons of the Mother 
 of my Faith — the English Church — were energetic 
 in its promotion. Her temples do not yet resound 
 with holy song — the vernacular language of Gratitude, 
 and the temperature of the frigid zone prevails at 
 the ' gate of heaven.' For in praise it is that the 
 mighty power of harmony subserves its most majestic 
 purpose : — attuned in homage of Him before whom 
 so many worlds move in order and ' give out music 
 as they go,' it is but the reverberation, as it were, of 
 the inaudible but not invisible concord that pervades 
 the universe; the sacrifice of accordant sound to its 
 refulgent Soul and Source!" 
 
COLLOQUY I. 47 
 
 C — " The poet Wordsworth, referring to the sud- 
 den and spreadmg rise of new churches, describes 
 the time as conscious of its ivant. In regard to the 
 energy, the absence or paralyzation of which in our 
 services you bewail, this consciousness of a privilege, 
 in many places inadequately appreciated, and in some 
 (excepting in form) passed into desuetude, approves 
 itself to be reviving, and in the symptoms of resusci- 
 tation which it exhibits, gives us grateful 
 
 ■ ' help, when we would weave 
 
 A crofl'n for Hope.' " 
 
 E. — " The wedding- chime for an only child could 
 not more sadden me in its first effect, or more gladden 
 me in its second, than that past stifling and present 
 unshackling of the spirit of reverential song. And 
 depend on it our Church will experience a mighty 
 strengthening of her sinews in nourishmg this breath 
 of song. For her symmetry and fair proportions, 
 ' long concealed, concealed and cherished long,' are 
 developing in our day before children capable of the 
 only in-\Tilnerable allegiance — an intelligent one. We 
 defend the Faith of our Fathers, not solely because 
 our fathers defended it, but because our consciences 
 have weighed it, and found it not wanting. And 
 thus our attachment combines the deep veneration 
 of the soul with the warm affection of the heart. — 
 
48 CHAPTER II. 
 
 You have alluded to the * joyful haste' with which 
 ascending spires and the sound of ' the church-going 
 beir are gladdening the land, fertilizing its length 
 and breadth. 'Tis the sovereign'st characteristic of 
 the age ! The Proposer of Fifty new Churches in a 
 single city, will need no elaborate Latin epitaph, to 
 invite the praises of posterity." 
 
 The timepiece sounded reprovingly, and I arose to 
 leave, taking a slight liberty with Spenser — 
 
 " Ere long the nortlierne waggoner will set 
 Ills sevenfold teanie behind the stedfast starre." 
 
 E, — " Ah! Alma Mater has seduced us from the 
 Faery Queene, and deafened us to the voice of the 
 Charmer. Praise to the name, and Peace to the 
 manes of Gentle Edmund Spenser! I have acquired 
 a habit of prefixing the epithet ' gentle' to this poet, 
 for as / recognize his character in his works, gentle- 
 ness was his predominating trait. You seldom meet 
 with Edmund in a storm, or behold his eye ' in a 
 fine frenzy rolling ;' but he conducts you on a calmly- 
 flowing tide, over waters whose little heavings and 
 undulations are lit by moonbeams, to a garden which 
 you know has golden fruit, for now and then you see 
 it ; but the greater part of its produce is netted — some- 
 times very thickly netted. And now, if you persist 
 
COLLOQUY I. 49 
 
 in going, 'A Dieu!'' in solemn French. But, harkye ! 
 never reproach gentle Edmund again, unless for this 
 — and then hushed as a spirit's voice, for he confesses 
 the foible — that ' the whole intention of his conceit is 
 too clowdily enwrapped in allegorical devises.'* " 
 
 Letter to Raleigh. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ELDER PROFFERS AN OPINION UPON 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 " I cannot mend it, I must needs confess, 
 And do remain as neuter." — York, in Rich. ii. 
 
 Three days had elapsed since the interview which 
 closed with the last chapter, and in company with 
 applications for jpi'ofessional " opinions from all sorts 
 of people," Rowland Hill's emissary for the district 
 in which my chambers were situate, deposited therein 
 on the morning of the fourth day, the original of the 
 following: — 
 
 " Ivy Lodge, 9th Ap. 41. 
 " Did my parting salutation on Monday night in- 
 clude an ' Au revoir?' — I have been di-illing my 
 reminiscent faculties ' from morn till eve,' and the 
 more I drill with interrogations, the more am I har- 
 rowed with doubts. Once for all, cause, I pray you, 
 the ' deep umbrage' of my locale to ' prate of your 
 
52 CHAPTER III. 
 
 whereabouts' whensoever you will, and consider the 
 old man here as your friend. I seldom remember to 
 inmte; make, therefore, this injunction a ' standing' 
 one, like the patriotic war-whoop of ' Hereditary 
 Bondsmen!' 
 
 " April is sadly subject to epileptic Jits ; what a 
 paroxysm the poor month suffered on Friday ! How 
 do you account for the frequent sulkiness of Friday? 
 I never cared to plunge into the misty mysteries of 
 meteorology, and apprehend, abstractedly, that an 
 elemental opposition goes on against the Tory Premier, 
 Sol, and that the fine old fellow is overpowered for 
 a brief space by an incongruous coalition, lashed into 
 foam by a most disorderly tail. 
 
 " But he has recovered the mastery ; and if a bel- 
 ligerous radical, in the semblance of a cloud, ventures 
 into his presence, and begins to cough or expectorate, 
 the gorgeous Minister radiates the splenetic effusion 
 with prismatic colors. They who profess to know best 
 about it, affirm, that our shoulders sustain an im- 
 mense pressure of atmospheric air — I forget precisely 
 the amount of pounds, hundreds-weight, or tons per 
 square inch of flesh. — The learned in lachrymal lore, 
 (I mean the grievance-mongers,) might make some- 
 thing of this oppressive fact: is it not enough to be 
 taxed for light ? must we be also burdened by air ? — 
 Government ought certainly to riiypah this Union; 
 
CHAPTEJR III. 53 
 
 and the intrepid Phseton of the cabinet shoukl be 
 requested to take a diplomatic drive up to Phoebus, 
 and plead for a treaty on terms less onerous. 
 
 " Well, with all this ponderosity without, I can 
 say or sing (alas! 
 
 ' Omnia Tempus edax carpit — omnia sede movet!' 
 
 I was momentarily oblivious of dental deficiencies, 
 but remember that I can only say J Je sm's conte?it! 
 ' Tis happy for us that, thus laden, we have an elastic 
 supporter within. By shameless sir Fred ! the sun 
 and song of to-day made a safety-valve well-nigh 
 essential, as an escape for tumultuous spirits. 
 
 " You may think me here, alone, sans kith, sans 
 kin, an old man to be pitied. Spare your compas- 
 sion ! Even were all my plumed pets under discussion 
 among worms, I have a petticoated pet who enraptures 
 because she loves me. You knew not that I had a 
 child! — that is, not exactly of mine own, but I love 
 her as though she were my very own; and next to 
 the thrilling ecstasy in loving, is the exquisite joy in 
 the knowledge that one is loved. I became part- 
 owner of the darling at her baptism, nineteen years 
 ago, and have given her more attention than was 
 stipulated ' in the bond,' inasmuch as to the practice 
 of piety she adds a taste for poetry. — But the hussy 
 has her conceits, — ' gives proof,' as old John Har- 
 
54 CHAPTER III. 
 
 rington observes^ ' of woman's ways ;' and though she 
 doesn't contend with me openly against the sove- 
 reignty of immortal Will, her allegiance is weakened 
 by the song and sorrow of Mrs. Hemans. 
 
 " It is a necessity of my pen to travel to the end of 
 the fourth page; — pardon the cramped characters in 
 which I assure you of my esteem. 
 
 " G. E." 
 
 A few days afterwards, towards evening, I turned 
 my back upon ' the smoke and stir of that dim sjjot' 
 called London, and revisited E. The morning had 
 been marked by the ' uncertain glory' peculiar to the 
 month ; but the latter part of the day was altogether 
 lovely, and the sun set with unusual splendour. — 
 E. had observed its radiance, and was watching its 
 parting ray when I entered; and had no sooner j)ro- 
 nounced my welcome, than he inquired if I had wit- 
 nessed the transcendent lustre of the sun's decline. 
 
 It might more justly be entitled a disquisition than 
 a colloquy which followed my reply; for, happening 
 to incorporate with it a sentiment of Wordsworth, the 
 old man remarked, that he had omitted at our previous 
 interview to ascertain mj opinion of this Poet, whose 
 especial lot it was, he added, neither to be approved 
 or discommended in moderation, but who was esteemed 
 by the enthusiastic of one class as an angel of light, 
 
AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 55 
 
 and regarded by the inveterate of another class as 
 a ' despised and broken idoL' 
 
 E. had tacitly and rightly accredited for admiration 
 the frequent loans I had levied on the thoughts and 
 expressions of Wordsworth, and avowed himself also 
 in the foremost rank of the poet's admirers. He ex- 
 pressed the sadness, not unpleasing, with which the 
 contemplation of the departing sun had filled him — 
 a state of feeling aided by solemn reflections suggested 
 by the thoughtful Poet; and alluded to a severe 
 critique upon his works, which he had recently read, 
 indignant with its palpable malevolence; adverting, 
 with no profusion of compliment, to that caustic portion 
 of the community of critics whose custom it is to 
 indite an author's penal settlement with ink of an 
 uncommonly-acidulated quality. 
 
 E. — " ' The grand affair,' says Rousseau, ' is, to 
 think differently ;'' and the conception which, in the 
 pomp and circumstance of publication, issues from 
 one mind, is often a signal for the conflict of many; so 
 that the dulcet-strain of the few, fitted by education, 
 judgment, and reflection, to be Rulers and Guides 
 of Opinion, is drowned in the penny-trumpet din 
 of the canaille; for it is the proverbial misfortune of 
 wisdom that it is diffident — of folly, that it is dogmatic. 
 It is the deep river that floAvs in silence — the shallow 
 in commotion : and so of minds ; the superficial are 
 
56 CHAPTER III. 
 
 contentious — tlie sterling, composed. It is unchris- 
 tian to detest; but to the hyper-critic the extremity 
 of my dislike verges on detestation. When I en- 
 counter the profound absurdities of such commentators, 
 I ask with Burns (and perhaps with more impatience 
 than beseems ' the sere and yellow leaf) — 
 
 ' ff honest Nature made vow fools, 
 What sails your grammars?' 
 
 Why should my Isle of Palms be made desolate — 
 be transformed to a City of the Dead, by the coloring 
 of cynicism or of pragmatic stupidity? is the living 
 landscape, in which there may perchance be here a 
 stunted tree, and there an unseemly hovel — scarcely- 
 seen deformities, which leave the whole lovely, — is all 
 ' the pride of my glory' to be stained, because another, 
 whose happiness is not nourished at the, same fount 
 with mine, has looked upon this picture with a 
 '^jaundiced eye?' Such an one may be spectator, if 
 he pleases, but I object to his becoming scribe — unless, 
 indeed, to cheapen paper for the chandler." 
 
 C. — " How multitudinous and motley a host have 
 levelled insult, contempt, and coarse abuse, at Words- 
 worth — his design and its achievement!" 
 
 B. — " Pardon me, the design of Wordsworth is 
 yet far from its achievement. Other poets have left 
 us much to learn, but Wordsworth more than all ; and 
 
AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 57 
 
 the age will be millennial in its character, which 
 realizes the heau ideal of this Poet. It might not 
 suit the temjser of the present house of commons to 
 create a poetic episcopacy, but in the event of such a 
 measure the archbishopric should be named from E-ydal 
 Mount; and if I smile at the idea, I say it not irreve- 
 rently ; for the philanthropic aim of Wordsworth has 
 been to purify the avenues of the cotter's mind, and 
 render it accessible to a new and noble enjoyment; — 
 in few words, to correct the waywardness and wil- 
 fulness of humanity by a pleasant ' medicine of 
 cherries.'* He who kindles gratitude upon the altar 
 of the heart, though he possess not the credentials 
 of a priest, has performed an important part of the 
 priest's office; and if Wordsworth but succeeds in 
 illuming a spot ' wildered else and dark,' he sustains 
 the hallowed joy by constant annunciation of 
 
 * the cheerful faith, 
 
 That all which we behold is full of bi,essings.' 
 
 I touch with reverence, profound as Cowper's, the 
 pulpit: but in what terms — by what representation — 
 can man be more eifectually exhorted, than by this 
 belief, to habitiial thanhfidness? — a feeling which 
 should ascend, like perpetual incense, before that 
 
 * Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
58 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ' Parent of good,' who ' openeth His hand and fiUeth 
 all things living with plenteousness.' " 
 
 C. — " And yet the Propounder of this Poetic Faith 
 above all others salutary, has been above all others of 
 his order, a mark for the violence of ' envy, hatred, 
 malice, and all uncharitableness' — " 
 
 E. — " Provoked, not perhaps so much by the doc- 
 trine as by its occasional development. But the lion 
 may be stung by gnats, and the stately vessel be re- 
 tarded by remorse. The ' mild Apostate from poetic 
 rule' was not, happilj^, irritated by petty persecution 
 into the scornful silence of misanthropy, and left not 
 the argosy, freighted with the principles of his new 
 faith, to sink, because of the animalculse that clung to 
 its keel. When Wordsworth arose, to announce his 
 creed and expound its peculiarities, a thousand arrows 
 were launched at his devoted head : ' among them, 
 but not of them,' were canons of fearfal fulmination 
 — literary ordnance of heavy caliber — which boomed 
 like a knell of annihilation upon the ear of the 
 period (for each era has its idiosyncratic eye and ear), 
 and to Wordsworth then might have been not inap- 
 propriately applied a line from Prior* — 
 
 ' Lord of his new hypothesis he reigns !' 
 
 The Poet, in his hours of weariness and persecution, 
 
 * Ode on Exodus iii. 14. 
 
AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 59 
 
 must, however, have found solace and invigoration in 
 an axiom which he has couched in the beauty and 
 power of truth: 
 
 — ' Every gift of noble origin 
 
 Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breatli:' 
 
 and surely the prime lineaments of the Poet's aim 
 bear the stamp of nobility, and approve themselves 
 
 ' Majestic in their own simplicity.' 
 
 I do not, of course, intend the term ' simplicity' to 
 apply to those indeterminable hypotheses of a pre- 
 vious state of existence, of which Wordsworth is so 
 eloquently credulous. That 
 
 ' The soul which rises with us, our life's Star, 
 
 Hath had else^vhere its setting, and cometh from afar,' 
 
 is a theory which may dominate in the imagination, 
 and glow on the Poet's page, as it does in the Ode* 
 from which I have quoted; but it is conjectural, and 
 must remain so as long as the immortal part of the 
 mysterious compound, man, is ' girdled by mortality.' 
 " If I mistake not, it was Seneca who said, that the 
 most miserable object which could be conceived, was 
 an old man who would be young again. I had been 
 young and was old, when first I imbibed with an 
 * Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood. 
 
60 CHAPTER III. 
 
 appetite the spirit of Wordsworth; but I remember 
 well there ran along with my blood as it were, a 
 rivulet of rapture, at the visible embodiment in lan- 
 guage, of innumerable phantoms wherewith I had been 
 haunted ; and then, reflecting how comparatively torpid 
 were my sensations to what they would have been in an 
 earlier day, — then, for the first and last time in my life, 
 I felt that I would renew my youth, were its renewal 
 in my power. For the doctrines of this poet require 
 to be woven with the primary principles of our moral 
 and intellectual being, and to grow with our growth; 
 they are but grafted on the man; and the elements 
 of age, although in casual instances ardent and pre- 
 disposed, cannot retain the plasticity of youth : and 
 indeed the susceptibility to impression which lends a 
 charm to the spring-time of life, would imply insta- 
 bihty and be considered as indiscretion in the man of 
 maturer years. But even now, when the * wild ec- 
 stasies ' of former days are stilled into sober pleasure, 
 there are no gradus ad Patiiassum that I tread -with 
 a happier or more improved spirit than those shapen 
 by the poet Wordsworth." 
 
 E. paused an instant to respire, and resinned with 
 a livelier air and less soliloquizingly — 
 
 <f Wordsworth is essentially the Oracle of Nature. 
 He has tuned his lyre at many a fount, and some of 
 his less legitimate notes are cherished among the 
 
AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 61 
 
 ' sweet sounds and harmonies' which have their home 
 in memory; but when he stands by the side of a 
 murmuring stream, in fair field, or flowery dell, 
 intent on the portraiture of unheeded loveliness, — on 
 redeeming the scene in which he stands, like isolated 
 minstrel, from the reputation of a voiceless solitude, — 
 and on quickening in all things a spiritual intelligence ; 
 then the Poet appears overwhehned with * a sense 
 sublime,' and his harp-strings seem wrought of the 
 fibres of our very being. He guides the admiring 
 eye over the many-featured face of Nature, with a 
 rod of enchantment, whose property it is to invest 
 Avith grace and gladness every object to which it 
 points; and there is not a single exiled feature but 
 he rescues it from demerit, and does so endow it 
 with charms, that you are led captive to the con- 
 fession of a 
 
 — ' glory in the grass and splendour in the flower,' 
 
 And, turning from Nature herself, how touchingly 
 does he depict the child, and youth, and man, as 
 swayed unconsciously by the Influence above us and 
 aroimd, to the intelligent observance of which, man- 
 kind in thousands are deadened, by custom * heavy 
 as frost.' Here is a cast, not from the lineaments but 
 from the characteristics of the child: — refer me, in the 
 entire range of poetic delineation, to a happier illus- 
 
62 CHAPTER 111. 
 
 tration of boyhood and girlhood — the natural im- 
 petuosity of the one, the sweet timidity and tenderness 
 of the other : — 
 
 ' Oh ! pleasant, pleasant were the days. 
 
 The time when, in our childish plays, 
 
 5Iy sister Emmeline and I 
 
 Together chased the Butterfly. 
 
 A very hunter would I rush 
 
 Upon the prey — with leaps and springs 
 
 I followed on o'er brake and bush, 
 
 liliile she — God love her.' — -Reared to hrush 
 
 The dust from off its wings!' 
 
 Call nothing henceforth common; — Wordsworth has 
 power to make a child's involuntary gesture poetical, 
 and to extract something tangible and to look at from 
 an urchin's sigh. 
 
 " Then, too, he has a singular art in sinister strokes. 
 We are familiar with the apothegm, that ' Vice, to 
 be hated, needs but to be seen ;" but you would not 
 for a moment think of imputing flagrancy to a bag- 
 man, because he passed a buttercup without halting 
 to do it homage ; yet recite, with ordinarily-becoming 
 emphasis, the following triplet, and Peter Bell the 
 Potter becomes positively an atrocious character, for 
 regarding a field-fl 
 of a field-flower ! — 
 
 ' A primrose by a river's bi'im 
 
 A yellow primrose was to liim, 
 And it was nothing more !" 
 
AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 63 
 
 I 
 
 " From tlie beginning, in every age, the heaven- 
 instructed Poet has recognized in the made a sha- 
 dowing forth of the attributes of the Maker; and, if 
 devout, has ca,used this discernment of the Deity to 
 redound to His praise. It has been the Poet's function 
 — and how august a function! — to rend from the 
 aspect of Xature the dense veil of indifference thrown 
 over it by habitual unconcerned intercourse, and, in 
 the winning accents of ' sweetly-uttered knowledge,'* 
 to rouse the listless creature to wakefulness, and 
 thence to interested watchfulness of the Creator's 
 operations; — to convince him that the garniture of 
 earth and its starry canopy are not unmeaning dis- 
 play or inexpressive adornment, but that all, to the 
 observant eye, is significant; — that the humblest 
 object which can attract his gaze, though seemingly- 
 inanimate or inert, is yet an instrument of design 
 in the laboratory of the Lord of all. And perceiving 
 in all things traces of the divine handiwork, and 
 accepting as infinite the wisdom of the Almighty 
 Mechanist, it is an essential part of the Poet's faith 
 that nothing has been created vainly, but that the 
 minutest object subserves, in its vocation, the inscru- 
 table purposes of Omniscience. — And this exalting- 
 doctrine has been, I repeat, the Poet's argument 
 from the beginning. Hear the muse of Chaucer 
 * Sidney. 
 
64 CHAPTER III. 
 
 attesting his credence^ in the early lispings of our 
 mother-tongue : — 
 
 ' Eternalle God that through thy purveyaunce, 
 Ledist the worlde by certaine governaunce. 
 In idle, as men saine, ye nothing malce.' 
 
 Woukl not the time fail me to recount by name 
 the illustrious succession of Defenders of this Faith ? 
 and have they not — each minstrel in his ministry — 
 received a special gift? all, save Two of an unbounded 
 realm — Wanderers by every of the thousand rills 
 which flow ' from Helicon's harmonious springs.' 
 YeSj to each, in his demonstration of the divinity 
 perceptible in man's daily walk, has been allotted his 
 individual province ; and in his own peculiar empire 
 Wordsworth stands pre-eminent. For him it is not 
 enough that the silent wood be invested with ca- 
 thedral solemnity and grandeur ; he creates a priest- 
 hood by the wayside. He will not that our path 
 through the Desert to the Garden be coldly allowed 
 to possess occasional attractiveness ; he clears a film 
 from the traveller's eye, and his pilgrimage becomes 
 not pleasurable only, but enchanting. It sufiices him 
 not simply to describe the earth's glory — he dissects 
 it ; and beneath the soft enamel of this lowly flower, 
 he will trace its vivid veins and arteries, and will 
 impress you with so acute a sense of its life, that 
 
AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. 65 
 
 thenceforth you feel it would be inhumanity to crush, 
 with careless foot, the ^active principle' in form so 
 sensitive and lovely. He will not that you look upon 
 the tree, to admire its outline only, or even that you 
 gather an abstract morality from its foliage, now fair, 
 now withering; he claims for it an eloquence more 
 subtile — he insists that its leaves are legible. He 
 represents all things, in heaven above and on the earth 
 beneath, as ministering to man's faith and hope; and 
 would amalgamate all the heart's affections in one 
 predominating Jt>a55^o?^ of charity — one grand, absor- 
 bing fi-ater-feeling, whose flow of love should be 
 ceaseless as the mercies of God ! 
 
 " If Shakspeare, in a signification comprehending 
 his intuitive famiharity both with man and the scene 
 in which he moves, has been styled Nature's darling* 
 to "Wordsworth (in an especial scenic signification,) 
 may be applied the title, by himself suggested, (not 
 to himself appropriated,) of Nature's foster-child ; 
 and undoubtedly those are his master-strokes which 
 he draws when clinging closest to the Mother's 
 breast : — theti 
 
 — ' the rich stream of music winds along. 
 Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, 
 Through verdant vales:' 
 
 yet, as I think I have already remarked, the strings 
 
 * Progress of Poesy. 
 
66 CHAPTER III. 
 
 of the Poet's lyre are sometimes sounded in a key 
 less legitimate, though scarcely-less euphonious, pro- 
 ducing strains which fly instinctively to the home of 
 Music within us, and take up their welcome abode 
 there. I have no intention to particularize his mis- 
 cellaneous charms ; but lest I ' talk you dead,^ or, at 
 least, into slumber, I will refresh you by the repetition 
 of one only : on the tympanum of an ear tuned, like 
 yours, to the Wordsworthian chant, the sonnet I am 
 about to recite has the rousing power of a trumpet on 
 a war-horse; and tell me who has ever found an 
 utterance for the Spirit of indignant Patriotism, in 
 sentiments plus grands et solennels. A noble Spaniard, 
 as you will remember, is contemplating the overtures 
 made to Spain by Napoleon: — 
 
 • We can endure that he should waste our lands, 
 Despoil our temples, and, by sword and fiame. 
 Return us to the dust from which we came ; 
 Such food a tyrant's appetite demands: 
 And we can brook the thought, that by his hands 
 Spain may be overpowered, and he possess. 
 For his delight, a solemn wilderness 
 JVhere all the Brave lie dead. But when of bands 
 Which he will break for us — he dares to speak. 
 Of benefits, and of a future day 
 When our enlightened minds shall bless his sway — 
 Then the strained heart of fortitude proves weak! 
 Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare 
 That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear.' 
 
AN OPINION UPON WORDSWORTH. t>7 
 
 '' It is delightful to recall the beauties of Words- 
 worth, — to the severe be left the banquet furnished 
 by his defects. The age is not yet prepared to ap- 
 preciate the Poet in his fulness; and our hopes for 
 the ultunate universality of his faith, repose, with all 
 our other hopes, in the Future. He has left to his 
 kind a telescope, which does not create, but which 
 uncurtains the created and existing; — ^which charms 
 both the eye and the mind; to the one, revealing and 
 expanding forms of beauty; — to the other, unfolding 
 the secret meaning of a myriad of things ignorantly 
 deemed insensate : like the forbidden fruit in Eden, 
 but without its restrictive penalty, to the eye it is 
 pleasant ; — ^by the mind, ' to be desired to make one 
 wise.' But the eye — the eye of the period needs sub- 
 limation; 'this muddy vesture of decay' doth yet too 
 grossly close in its visual faculty. Man and Nature, 
 as they appear through the telescope of Wordsworth, 
 assume no ideal grace, no visionary excellence; but, 
 clothed by Philanthropy, they exhibit a comeliness 
 which engenders optimism, rendering it, as far as 7nan 
 is concerned, 
 
 — ' a joy to think the best 
 We may of humankind ;' 
 
 and, in reference to his position in nature, enforcmg 
 our acquiescence in the assertion, 
 
 * Thy lot, O Man! is good, thy portion fair.' 
 
68 CHAPTER III. 
 
 " "Wordsworth has been the subject of censure be- 
 cause he has corroborated the proof of past ages, 
 that the nobleness of indomitable zeal is frequently 
 heedless of the barriers erected by Opinion and the 
 prevailing Taste ; and because he continues the chain 
 of evidence attested by the illustrious of yore, that 
 Energy, when Herculean, is liable to the error of 
 excess, in its manifestation. One so wise as he, 
 would eschew the pretension to faultlessness ; and who 
 woidd defend the exemption from fault of either 
 Shakspeare or Milton? Johnson, in Rasselas, con- 
 tends, that imperfections are reasonably to be ex- 
 pected from those ' who have much to do ;' and 
 Wordsworth, as the Founder of a Faith, promulgated 
 in the clamour raised by prejudice, had confessedly 
 ' much to do.' Yet the dauntless champion has sur- 
 vived to witness his creed become one of earnest and 
 increasing acceptation, and the confessions of grateful 
 proselytes deck, gloriously as garlands, the Poet's 
 retreat. May an old man's benediction be permitted 
 to mingle with the heart-thanks which flow to the 
 Seer of Rydal Mount — to Wordsworth, of the 
 intellectual creditors of our age, a Chief among ten 
 thousand!" 
 
 During the greater portion of the time occupied in 
 the delivery of this comment, E.'s manner had been 
 
CHAPTER III. 69 
 
 marked by a gravity whicli contrasted strongly with, 
 the vivacity he had displayed at our previous inter- 
 view. Now and then, at the recurrence of an image 
 moulded in poetic grace, or in recapitulating the 
 Poet's claims to praise, his eye brightened and his 
 energy revived; but for the most part his air was 
 similar to that of an individual in soliloquy. His 
 dissertation, void alike of effort reflective or enun- 
 ciatory, flowed like a tranquil current of articulate 
 thought — its progress stayed for a moment at unfre- 
 quent intervals, and again calmly resuming its on- 
 ward course, as a stream, which petty obstacles at 
 times impede, is soon impelled by accumulating 
 waters rearward. As soon as E. had fairly ended, I 
 recalled him to his former self by preparing for de- 
 parture; and starting at once into jocularity, he said, 
 " Now if I were of that unenviable temperament 
 which glorious Will has sketched, odious as the 
 person of an Italian mendicant taken in yellow chalk, 
 — if, I say, I was in danger of ' creeping into the 
 jaundice by being peevish,'* I'd vent my spleen like 
 a simoom, at being thus ensnared by your quiescence 
 into that besetting sin of age, prolixity. My plea is 
 that of the disordered Lear, ' I am an old man; pray 
 you now forget and forgive.' I protest that the softer 
 sex are libelled by the Talmud, which asserts, that 
 
 * Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene i. 
 
70 CHAPTER III. 
 
 of ten measures of garrulity awarded to our race, 
 tlie women took nine! — 'tis rank injustice. Sir. By 
 the name of Patience, for two tedious hours have 
 you borne with a burr, narcotic as the motion of a 
 spinning-wheel! It does not break my heart, this 
 consciousness of culpability, but it reminds me of the 
 wail of Ithocles, in the Broken Heart of Ford — 
 
 ' I now repent it: this now is now too latel' 
 
 Shade of the Poet ! regard benignly a parody propped 
 upon certitude and uttered in contrition — 
 
 Our tongues elongate as our days decline. 
 
 " Before you leave, hear, at least, my request, that 
 you will defer till morning your return, in future. 
 Express, if it please you, the astonishment of the 
 lawyer, at the absence of ' cauld-pausing Caution ;' 
 but I ken more of you than you may suppose. — Are 
 you not retained in the case of S — v. Wainright?" 
 
 I replied in the affirmative. 
 
 " Eh hien : the plaintiff has supplied me with wine 
 these fourteen years past, and has made me his con- 
 jidant on several occasions. On the morning in which 
 my corns so narrowly escaped a crushing, and I was 
 threatened with Burns upon hunnions, I was on a 
 mission to the merchant's house ; and, while there, his 
 solicitor entered to communicate an opinion of Mr. C. 
 
CHAPTER III. 71 
 
 I ascertained the identity of this Mr. C. with the 
 carnal cataclysm which had nearly overwhelmed me 
 at the bookseller's window; and when the solicitor 
 retired, S — related the particiilars of his suit, as 
 well as certain professional incidents to yonr personal 
 credit; amongst them, the defence — " 
 
 I had long been on terms of intimacy v/ith the 
 good-hearted vintner, whom to know was to esteem; 
 and remembering his loquacity, and apprehensive of 
 exaggerated commendation, I felt a slight effeminate 
 tinge getting the better of my professional sang froid 
 — a mark of modesty so monstrous, that the old man 
 reined-up abruptly, and exclaimed, astounded, 
 
 " What, Sir ! a blush on the face of a lawyer !-^I 
 vow, then, the bar is basely slandered and maligned; 
 the calumny of the Talmud, after this, sinks into a 
 ^ soft impeachment ;' and in dilating upon the sensi- 
 tiveness requisite to appreciate Wordsworth, I have 
 not, after all, been feeling for a pulse in the dead!" 
 
 I bore with aU the fortitude I could summon, the 
 raillery excited by the display of a constitutional 
 infirmity which I had hardly mastered at that time, 
 but which, fortunately, does not now interfere with 
 the imperturbable nonchalance so essential to the 
 legal profession, wherein a reputation for wisdom 
 is not a little favored by the preservation of a wintry 
 exterior. Women must have the compassion of angels 
 
72 CHAPTER III. 
 
 to wed with lawyers, of first-rate, unco-guid, phy- 
 siognomical advantages (professional), cased up, as 
 they appear to be, in a covering " of that complexion 
 which seems made" of soiled skins, — a hue bloodless, 
 but less like the untrodden snow on Linden, than 
 that in a lane, which is in process of thaw, and dingy. 
 
 Previously to leaving Ivy Lodge on this second 
 occasion of my visit there, I had determined upon 
 obtaining information of the comings and goings of 
 the " child" mentioned in E.'s letter; and as it 
 appeared probable that I should " return unexpe- 
 rienced," unless I made it a matter of interrogation, I 
 entered on a delicate and indirect examination, which 
 elicited for the maiden the ready Elder's affectionate 
 praises, and for me, sufficient data whereupon to 
 determine my next appearance at the Lodge. E.'s 
 fondness and fervour for his god-child was of that 
 order of love, which, according to Scott, has in it 
 " less of earth than heaven ;" and the old man's tone 
 was so thankful for this treasure of his heart, that, as 
 he indulged in its expression, his feelings deepened 
 and his voice grew tremulous — imparting to his lan- 
 guage and gesture an eifect of indescribable pathos. 
 
 " God's name be blessed!" said E. looking upwards 
 with patriarchal grace, " His mercy be praised, for 
 this one gift, that having endowed me with the heart 
 to love, I am not left in the wide world to mourn in 
 
CHAPTER III. 73 
 
 loneliness that undiscovered one, for whom, if absent, 
 
 our Human Nature supplicates, with plaint fathomless 
 
 as the source of life, and holy as the hope of heaven ! 
 
 For it is of heaven, this longing, when pure, to lavish 
 
 our heart's wealth upon kindred or friend; and even 
 
 where, as here, the strong aiEnity of blood is wanting, 
 
 the great Father of love doth sometimes implant a 
 
 principle exotic, mightier or purer than which I can 
 
 hardly conceive to dwell in man. Once — lang syne — 
 
 I might have cherished the hope of closer ties, and did 
 
 cherish; and e'en now, encompassed with blessings 
 
 from an overflowing Hand, this rebel heart is apt 
 
 to repine for what the Father willed not ; and stirs to 
 
 re-invest with the sufferings and sorrows of this lower 
 
 world, a spirit which — thanks to the Finisher of our 
 
 Faith — it is my confidence, as that I live, is numbered 
 
 with that happy band from whose faces God hath for 
 
 ever wiped away all tears. There is a stanza of 
 
 Campbell, in the solemn plaintiveness of which I 
 
 seem to hear again that angel's breath, when putting 
 
 off mortality : — 
 
 ' Clasp me a little longer, on the brink 
 
 Of fate, while I can feel thy dear caress; 
 
 And when this heart hath ceased to beat, oh! think. 
 
 And let it mitigate thy woes' excess. 
 
 That thou hast been to me all tenderness. 
 
 And Friend to more than human friendship just. 
 
 O I by that retrospect of happiness, 
 
 And by the hopes of an immortal trust, 
 
 God shall assuage thy pangs when I am laid in dust.' " 
 
COLLOQUY 11. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ^' And sure there seem of human kind 
 
 Some born to shun the solemn strife; 
 Some for amusive tasks designed 
 To soothe the certain ills of life, 
 Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose, 
 Call forth refreshing shades, and decorate repose." 
 
 Shenstone. 
 
 There were three soiils in the sanctum at Ivy Lodge 
 on a laughing day in merry May. The Church, 
 by a straight-forward, honest, and rather aiFecting 
 process, and without the aid of or pretension to magic, 
 has since reduced those three into two, by joining 
 together one of the three and myself, and prohibiting 
 the putting us asunder. I have before hinted at this 
 " catastrophe." That eulogistic description in detail 
 which it would have been excellent gratification to 
 attempt for E.'s god-daughter unyoked, would be 
 egregious impropriety under existing circumstances. 
 I have two codes of law, by one of which I regulate 
 
76 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 my conduct socially, and by tlie other, my conduct 
 professionally; and so far am I from confounding the 
 dictates of the former with the suggestions of the 
 latter, that, out of court or chambers, I am painfully- 
 jealous in avoiding equivoke and exaggeration, and 
 am careful, when doffing the coif, to put on candour. 
 It requires but little art or diligence, so to whinow 
 the testimony of an interested witness as to reduce it 
 to chaff m the judgment of a jury of yeomen, and to 
 inspire contempt for the individual discredited. The 
 portrait of a young wife, drawn by her husband, and 
 he peradventure uxorious, could hardly be set up for 
 the scrutiny of Candour, the mind of the painter being 
 intoxicated by a very grateful hallucination, which 
 blinds him to the fault of an extravagant use of ver- 
 milion. So, like Bassanio before the gaudy golden 
 casket, " I will none of it." It may be suiferable to 
 laud the object of one's love, while yet advancing on 
 that pathway of pleasant meanders which have their 
 terminus at the church-porch; but that goal once 
 attained, the sound of rhapsody beyond grates on the 
 general ear, and incites to sarcasm and a search after 
 hlots. I restrain my ink, therefore, at the chops of a 
 channel, into which, if its current once entered. Im- 
 partiality might be deluged, and the pilotage of 
 Prudence despised. It is comfortable to hear the 
 cooing of old couples, who, having well-nigh ended 
 
CHAPTER IV. 77 
 
 their journey over the thorny wiklerness, and loving 
 the more tenderly for its lacerations, are justified in 
 the congratulation, that the hazardous result of custom 
 has approved itself in reciprocal solace, not in satiety. 
 But I distrust the discretion of those who, barely 
 entered on the perilous noviciate of the nuptial noose, 
 announce their conjugal felicity to be secured on a 
 lease for life, and confidently calculate upon realizing 
 a vague amount of bliss, equivalent to Paradise re- 
 gained. Experience, however, like the wary inspector 
 of a building-plan, made captivating by impracticable 
 embellishments, reminds the credulous and eager 
 candidates for so blissful a possession, that the paradise 
 which fascinates them exists merely in design; — that 
 the soil fde la naiMre humcdne,) is always uncertain, 
 and may be sometimes treacherous, concealing stub- 
 born rocks and gnarled roots ; — that this portal of the 
 home of Pleasure, to-day gaudy in fanciful decoration, 
 may to-morrow be made grotesque by mutilation, or 
 be pitilessly shattered by storm; — and that the fabric, 
 in its best estate, lodges, with its possessors, a little 
 reptile-horde of bickerings in embryo, which, exposed 
 to a particular heat, burst from the shell at once into 
 vigour, and are deadlier in. their enmity than armed 
 men. These cautious cavils raised by Experience 
 are not agreeable to dwell upon, but they lend no 
 feeble aid to Prudence, in advising the suppression 
 
78 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 of a premature proclamation of happiness which is 
 to he. " The world's a stage" on which the scene 
 sometimes shifts as soon as the poor player has strutted 
 a few paces; and in the scene of a marriage, the 
 merry bridal-peal has often almost subsided into the 
 note of burial; — so brief the intermission between 
 transport and the tomb. To sum up, therefore, I 
 conceive it better becomes the newly-married to be 
 taciturn than babblers about bliss, lest at any time a 
 nuptial dirge should suddenly succeed a nuptial ditty. 
 
 The month of May could never have presented a 
 comelier aspect or have diffused a kindlier influence 
 than at the time of which I have spoken. The quire 
 about Ivy Lodge were distending their tiny throats in 
 fugue and forte music; and the Elder's eyes were 
 ready to leap from their socket, in a perfect fever 
 of exhilaration. 
 
 E. — " ' Welcome hither, as is the spring to the 
 earth !*' Mr. C. By frantic Fred ! (Mary, is that bird 
 inebriated?) by sir Fred! we are to-day most highly 
 favored. My daughter-in-baptism. Sir; — Mary, this 
 is Mr. C, who promises to surpass thee as a patient 
 listener, child; — ^nay, no incredulous smile; 'tis honest 
 verity, I vow. We practice here. Sir, no ' fashion or 
 ceremony — the appurtenance of welcome,' as Hamlet 
 hath it; and had '^the old sexton, Tinie,'t plyed his 
 * Winter's Tale, act 5, scene i. t Taylor. 
 
COLLOQUY II. 79 
 
 pickaxe less lutiAesslj j)armi les dents, I'd sing you 
 a strain of welcome, shrill as sir Fred's. Seriously, 
 Madam, is our parlour becoming a republic? — tbese 
 yellow villains take unwonted licence when the Lodge 
 is under female government, and I may as well go 
 whistle to the wind as call the rioters to order. — 
 Silence, ye chartists ! Prithee fetch wool, good Mary, 
 wool, for the ears of Mr. C. — I have cause to be con- 
 cerned for a faculty of hearing so long-suffering !" 
 
 How pleasant it is to look upon the evidence of a 
 heart flooded with guileless mirth — a respite and 
 relaxation from the weary round of " lamentation, 
 and mourning, and woe !" There is a charm in the 
 wild shout of careless childhood, a richness in the 
 glad eye kindling at the call to revelry, which, to 
 hear and see, is to the care-worn as water to a 
 thirsty land. And, when tempered by an instructed 
 mind, not less delightful is it to witness gieefulness 
 in old age — signs of greenness about the trunk of 
 the venerable tree, against which the tempests of 
 time have poured out their violence indestructively 
 — testunonies that the advances of Decay and prox- 
 imation with the Grave have brought no gloomy 
 Winter upon the sord ; and promising to the hoary 
 traveller, as he totters to the tomb, the calm of a 
 protracted Autumn, submerging at last into the glories 
 of an eternal Spring ! 
 
80 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 E. — " A revered friend of mine had only left us as 
 
 you entered, tlie Rector of tlie parish of , two 
 
 miles hence. How I wish you had come earlier. 
 Mr. F. is, like myself, a sexagenarian; and my views 
 on church polity and construction of doctrine coincide 
 with his in every particular. Have you ever met with 
 persons with whom you felt a pleasure — an active 
 pleasure in diifering; and others, with whom to dis- 
 agree was to maintain integrity at the expense of real 
 regret? Mr. F. is, in my circle of acquaintance, of 
 this latter class ; a man of so much worth and sound 
 judgment that it would be grief to me to differ from 
 him. Then we are both thorough sticklers for the 
 excellency of Holy Mother ; but though her reverend 
 son and servant will not bate one jot to her adversa- 
 ries, he maintains the meekness of the Christian 
 champion; and while, as from a superior eminence, 
 he looks down upon ' the errors and wanderings, the 
 mists and tempests in the vale below, his prospect is 
 chiefly with pity, not with contemptuous pride.'* 'Tis 
 verily music to the mind to hear that eloquent old 
 man recounting the virtues and superiorities of his 
 Mother — for we both so designate our Church; and 
 F., who has written poetry in his time, and has a 
 strong perception of the native power of words, de- 
 clares, that the force of a volume of affectionate 
 * Bacon. 
 
COLLOQUY II, 81 
 
 epithets is compressed in this fond appellative, Jfo^Aer / 
 If the liberty of Truth were again subjected to the 
 shackle, F. is one of the many who possess, and 
 would prove, the constancy and courage of a martyr. 
 The excellent man comes here occasionally, but only 
 too rarely, and we congratulate each other upon the 
 growing influence and cheering prospects of the 
 Establishment; and when he tarries leisurely, and 
 Mary is not here to suiFer penance by speechlessness, 
 we indulge in chess — at which (in modesty 'tis spoken) 
 — the layman is rather more aufait than his teacher." 
 C. — "Apropos of chess: I was amused the other 
 day in reading extracts from an ancient and curious 
 book, entitled ' The Game and Playe of the Chesse, 
 translated out of the French, and imprinted by William 
 Caxton. Fynysshed the last day of Marche, the yer 
 of our Lord God a thousand foure hondred Ixxiiij.' 
 The book is considered, upon high authority, to have 
 been the first work printed in England; and in it the 
 translator assumes for the game of chess a high moral 
 ground: he dedicates his book to the duke of Clarence, 
 to whom he sends ' peas, healthe, joye, and victorye; 
 not presumyng to correcte or empoigne ony thynge 
 agenst his noblesse, but to thentent that other of what 
 estate and egrese they stand in, may see in this said 
 lityll booke, that they governed themself as they ought 
 to doo.' He dates the origin of the game to the time 
 
 M 
 
82 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 of Emsmerodach, king of Babylon, ' a jolly man,^ 
 without justice/ and a parricide; and states as 'the 
 first cause wherefore it was founded, — to correct and 
 reprove the king.' He quotes the 'holy doctour 
 saynt Paule,' where the apostle says that ' alle that is 
 wrytten is wrytten unto lerning;' and he intends, 
 though he travels to a little distance in expressing it, 
 that his ' lityll and syniple booke' should lessen ' the 
 nombre of foles, which, saith Salamon, is infenyte.' 
 And in a second edition of his book, he asserts, ' that 
 the kyng, that tofore tyme had been vyctous, and dis- 
 ordynate in his lyuyng, was made just and vertuous, 
 debonayr, and ful of vertues unto all peple. And a 
 man that lyuyth in thys world without vertues lyueth 
 not as a man, but as a beste. Thenne, late every 
 man, of what condycion he be that redyth or herith 
 this litel book redde,take thereby ensaumple to amend 
 hym.' And for as many as read it leniently, he ' shal 
 pray, that God, of his grete mercy, shall reward them 
 in his euerlastyng blisse in heuen, to the whiche he 
 brynge us that wyth his precious blood redemed us. 
 Amen.' " 
 
 E. — " The pious perorations of the olden time would 
 now be deemed ' preposterous conclusions.' Such a 
 termination to a modern treatise on chess, would be as 
 unexpected, as the recent benediction of a preacher, 
 who, after enumerating the merits of an exemplary 
 
COLLOQUY II. «3 
 
 spinster deceased, and representing her to the special 
 imitation of the single sisterhood, ending by observing 
 to them — ' Thus she lived, and thus she died, a 
 blameless old maid — wMch that you may all do, may 
 God of his hijinite goodness grantj' 
 
 " You expressed, some time ago, the interest which 
 conjecture upon the mystery of music possessed for 
 you. Very various are the tastes of men. One 
 of my most-esteemed friends, a man of fine poetic 
 feeling, and whose memory is a kind of poetic jewel- 
 house, has assured me, that he should be disappointed 
 to find the influence of music, under any development, 
 a chief ingredient in the joys of heaven. He and the 
 Rector of — are at antipodes in this opinion; and I 
 once heard the pastor persuade his people to value 
 the unheeded privilege of assimilating their worship 
 to the adoration of the angels, in terms which I 
 cannot forget, and with impressiveness of manner 
 which I cannot imitate. Thus spake, emphatically, 
 the zealous priest: 
 
 " ^ It is the peculiar province of Sacred Music to 
 liberate the immortal mind from the thraldom of 
 earthly thoughts; and on the wings of holy harmony 
 the soul uprises towards heaven. In sacrificial song it 
 is that the homage of the sinner and the seraph cor- 
 respond in character, however dissimilar in degree; 
 and, when sincere, it is a religious rapture of the 
 
84 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 supremest order of delight. It gives birth, to an 
 indescribable joy, but Piety is reconciled in it, and 
 the majesty of the Most High propitiated, for it is 
 that pure joy which is the inspiration of Innocence 
 and the expression of Gratitude. [F. paused for a 
 moment, with a countenance of intense solemnity, and 
 you might have heard the heaving of your bosom in 
 the profound silence of the sanctuary — for evening 
 had hushed the world.] Oh ! lamentable unconscious- 
 ness of its overwhelming debt to the Power which 
 might have hurled us into the abyss of torment, but 
 for the Love which would aUure us to the realms of 
 bliss ! — deplorable insensibility to Mercy, or alarming 
 indifference to its manifestation, is that of the heart 
 torpid and voiceless in presence of Him in whom it 
 lives, and moves, and has its being. How marvellous 
 the contradiction and the coldness too often visible 
 in the demeanour of Christians, congregated osten- 
 sibly for united praise ! Would it not be rational to 
 study the example, and strive to emulate the fervour, 
 of beings who worship in a loftier sphere ? — there is 
 not a reasonable soul in this assembly but responds 
 affirmatively; but, alas! of this assenting throng 
 how few are there who do not condemn themselves 
 in the acknowledgment. What! confess that the 
 celestial example is worthy of all emulation, and yet 
 abide in this thankless and unbroken lethargy! — 
 
COLLOQUY II. 85 
 
 Lie tlie grateful emotions of your hearts so wofuUy 
 congealed, that the sunbeams of that Love which 
 burns incessantly, cannot dissolve their icy bondage; 
 and the brightness ' which maketh the eyes of the 
 angels to dazzle,' can it not dispel that gloom which 
 overshadows the mind, dense almost as the darkness 
 of chaos, ere God commanded that there should be 
 light. ' It is meet and right, and our bounden duty, 
 with angels and archangels, and all the company 
 of heaven, to magnify the Lord God of sabaoth :' — 
 avowing this, quit ye like men, and as you avow so 
 act, each one of you ; for think ye, my brethren, that 
 sombre Silence inhabits the bright land to which we 
 hasten? — think ye, that in the clime whose very at- 
 mosphere is harmony there lives one songless spirit; 
 — that among all its countless myriad of minstrels 
 there could exist one sullen lyre ? 
 
 " ' Sacred Music ii-radiates the mysteries of Faith 
 with the glow and the gorgeousness of imagination, 
 and induces a sense of exaltation, wherein 
 
 ' We feel that we are greater than we know:' 
 
 thus, its influence subjugates the grosser qualities of 
 the heart; expands its nobler capacities; familiarizes 
 its conceptions with whatsoever things are piure; ad- 
 vances the mortal to the dignity of a ministering spirit ; 
 and accelerates the progress of the mind towards that 
 
86 CHAPTEK IV. 
 
 eminent altitude of perfection, which, while imprisoned 
 in its earthly tabernacle, the soul has not freedom to 
 attain. The assurance of a vast beatitude, too exqui- 
 site for the recognition or comprehension of dege- 
 neracy, is the revealed distinction between the supreme 
 enjoyments of heaven and the subordinate pleasures 
 permitted to the upright of the world ; but the grate- 
 ful power of harmony on the complicated machinery 
 of natural passion, would encourage in us the expec- 
 tation, that the large bounty of enthroned Benevolence 
 has mingled the raptures of choral consummation 
 with the guerdon which awaits His people. And 
 this anticipation is not only permissible, but war- 
 rantable on sure and certain evidence; for not alone 
 are His felicities affirmed to be indistinguishable by 
 human eye and inconceivable by human heart; it is 
 likewise pronounced concerning them, that the ear of 
 man hath not heard the rich reward which God hath 
 in reserve for them that love Him. 
 
 " ^ The dynasty of depravity in the constitution 
 of man has, in truth, despoiled the purity of those 
 glorifying strains vernacular to the stainless soul; 
 and anthems ascending with simultaneous charm from 
 the high estate of primal innocence to the sphere of 
 the excellent glory, have been exchanged by its 
 dominion for dissonant and broken music. Yet — 
 though sin and sorrow have subdued the tone of man's 
 
COLLOQUY II. 8T 
 
 rejoicing — the victory over Death, the purification 
 from defilement, redemption, unmerited providence, 
 the wiping away of tears, and the eternal joy, are 
 themes which remain to our fallen race ; and invited 
 to a reconciled Father, his rescued children may well 
 forget their fleeting infirmities in the interminable 
 perspective of peace — their light aiflictions in the 
 glad heritancy of a weight of glory, and still delight 
 to come before His presence with a song!' 
 
 " This," continued E., '' is all that Mary and I 
 could bring away, for closet-consideration; but the 
 effect of F.'s discourse, aided, as I have remarked, by 
 an extraordinarily-impressive delivery, was highly 
 gratifying ; and when you attend his church, you will 
 not fail to remark there the ' meek fervour of devo- 
 tion,' which Wordsworth laments as a characteristic 
 of ancient piety, unfound in the modern : nor will you 
 wonder that the multitude should be all absorbed in 
 the moving eloquence of the Church's petitions, when 
 you hear them, in all their sacred force and compre- 
 hensive meaning, from the lips of this pious man, 
 who, imputing to form and ceremony no availing 
 influence per se, does not therefore disdain to demand 
 veneration for antiquity, and cement attachment by 
 representations and persuasions, which the suspicious 
 rather than devout might pronounce to be conducive 
 to a super stitioxis regard, but which, by more ingenuous 
 
88 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 disciples, are found to promote an ardency of affection 
 for Xheform, which aids rather than supersedes the 
 spirit of a reasonable worship. The signs of the 
 times induce an apprehension, that the bosom of the 
 Church will be agitated ere long by ultra-advocates 
 of two classes — the one insisting too pertinaciously on 
 precision in ritual ceremonies ; the other, displaying a 
 lax observance, amounting, in the indiscreet, to dis- 
 respect and contumely, exceedingly to be deprecated. 
 The tenets of F. are, I conceive the juste milieu; and 
 the calm authority of opinions such as his, will main- 
 tain our holy Mother's eqiulibrium, until her querulous 
 children shall ' cease from troubling.' Many there 
 are who prophecy ^Woe to Ariel!' some in timid 
 alarm, in envious gratulation others, at the prospective 
 issue of these dissensions ; and an old friend — a kind 
 of brother in my youth, alack! a weary distance to 
 look back upon — would have made me melancholy a 
 few days ago, if gloomy predictions from a venerable 
 prophet could have prevailed over anticipations more 
 sanguine. I wish you to understand the complexion 
 of that virtue which F. attributes to the extraneous 
 circumstance of antiquity and of hereditary sonship. 
 He would urge his flock to scrutinize the intrinsic 
 strength and moral grandeur of the Ark of our Faith, 
 — to mark tcell her bulwarks ; and is content that by 
 her own merits she stand or fall. Then, after demon- 
 
COLLOQUY II. 89 
 
 strating her essential pre-eminence over the sects 
 of dissent, will he press her upon onr aiFections by 
 energetic arguments ah extra. — ^ Our fathers^ says 
 he, ' our fathers reared this Ark, despite of terrors 
 — never be their holy heroism forgotten ! — and having 
 launched it on the tide of Time, they committed 
 themselves to its guardianship ; and generations have 
 since been borne in it to ' the haven where they would 
 be.' And in our voyage through time, shall we hesi- 
 tate to embark in that imperishable vessel, which has 
 survived the wreck of ages and which shall survive ? 
 * From the cradle to the grave we are on the stormy 
 sea;'* but, men and brethren, may we not well exult, 
 that in trusting the treasure we carry with us to the 
 keeping of the Ancient Mariner, we are able to confide 
 in our Pilot? And shall we, then, look indiiferently 
 on, while the foes of the ship we sail in are attempting 
 to dismast the stately fabric which tJiey cannot over- 
 loJielmf " 
 
 C. — " You make me anxious to hear your clerical 
 friend : his sentiments appear to be in strict accordance 
 with what I recognize as the theory of legitimate 
 churchmanship — the love of our Church primarily as 
 the uncompromising Expositor of Truth; secondarily, 
 because bequeathed to us — like the inestimable Hope 
 of Glory — at the price of agony and blood. The wise 
 * Disce Mori. Sutton. 
 
90 CHAPTER IT. 
 
 man preserves with solicitude the costly purchase 
 of a prudent ancestor ; and the unlettered poor regard, 
 religiously as penates, the heir -looms of sires who 
 sleep. The Protestant Church descends to us as a 
 legacy which inherent worth enriches and historic 
 associations sanctify; and Montgomery, in praising 
 the great of Britain, expresses our feelings for the 
 valiant who raised and defended her best bulwark : 
 
 ' Their deeds of old renown inspire 
 Our bosom with our fathers' fire; 
 A proud inheritance we claim 
 In all their sufferings, all their fame.' 
 
 And now our Church resembles, morally, a luminary 
 radiated by all hallowing influences — influences which 
 will not expire while the elements of our present 
 nature constitute man. For, amid the incessant tumult 
 of sectarianism, unperverted by sophistry, unmoved 
 by scorn, the heart which values a steadfast anchor for 
 its faith, will render its ready tribute of admiration to 
 the fortitude that wrought it ; and with the reverence 
 which from a child he is taught to yield to Wisdom,, 
 will the man blend the veneration he instinctively 
 owns to Antiquity. To me it is cheering to perceive,, 
 on all sides, an endeavour in the clergy generally to 
 rivet the links which attach the English Churchman 
 to the ancestral altar, by appealing to feelings 
 " Essential and eternal in the heart:' 
 
COLLOQUY II. 91 
 
 an earnest striving to quicken a soul in the cold habit 
 of modern conformity ; to strengthen present decrepi- 
 tude by illustrations of primitive vigour ; to fetter us 
 by the gentle aid of Fancy^ as well as by the stirring 
 representations of Reality; and, by poetic pictures of 
 past attachment, 
 
 ' Leaving that beautiful which still was so, 
 And making that which was not, till the shrine 
 Becomes religion, and the heart runs o'er 
 With silent worship. * * The dead still rule 
 Our spirits from their urns.'* " 
 
 R — " If that be the character of your churchman- 
 ship, Mr. F. is your pulpit-champion; and in the 
 Ecclesiastical Armoury of Wordsworth might you 
 have found a cartel, in terms entrancing as the strains 
 of Circe and the Syrens : 
 
 ' More sweet than odours caught by him who sails 
 
 Near spicy shores of Araby the blest, 
 
 A thousand times more exquisitely sweet 
 
 The freight of holy feeling which we meet. 
 
 In thoughtful moments, wafted by the gales 
 
 From fields where good men walk, or bowers wherein they rest.' 
 
 But I am guilty of a kindred superstition. I remember 
 part of an ex cathedra exhortation to fidelity to holy 
 Mother, made by F. during the voluntary system 
 struggle, and delivered from the pulpit because 'he 
 believed it due from him to warn his people against 
 * Manfred. Byron, 
 
9S CHAPTER IV. 
 
 the craft and malice of designing men, and could 
 not hope for the opportunity of doing so ft:om another 
 place.' I might justly say of F. that 
 
 ' Surely never did there live on earth 
 A man of kindlier nature;' 
 
 and it is not in the power of ordinary provocations to 
 
 ' stir the constant mood of his calm thoughts, 
 Or put them into misbecoming plight:' 
 
 but of the pressure of threescore years the priest 
 seems utterly unconscious when his feelings are 
 quickly touched; and at that period of hubbub about 
 religious equality, the good man waxed warmer with 
 indignation than I had ever or have ever seen him : — 
 for he is well read in man; and the rancorous 
 enmity which bound in brief alliance an incongruous 
 phalanx, using Conscience for its watchword, and 
 trampling upon Consistencij , excited his animadversion 
 and disgust. So it was not in ' a well-bred whisper' 
 that he reminded his parishioners of their privileges 
 and responsibilities. After manifesting the injustice 
 which the conscientiously-insphed were perspiring 
 to promote, he adverted to the sleepless spirit of 
 antagonism to the Establishment, and said, 
 
 " ' It becomes your duty, my brethren, to emulate 
 the adversaries' activity, deprived of its acerbity. 
 Qur Church is calumniated to the very corners of the 
 
COLLOQUY II. 93 
 
 land by a host of vindictive assailants, whose familiar 
 theme is the vituperation of the established order of 
 things, and who, in the face of their system's poverty 
 and nakedness, avouch vociferously that it is ^rich, 
 and increased with goods, and has need of nothing.' 
 And now are we summoned to preserve from the 
 desecration of the profane and the intermeddling of 
 the equivocally-pious, the Casket of Christian Truths 
 the consecrated Repository of our Religion, the Land- 
 mark for our souls' guidance — the setting up of which 
 was so holy an enterprise with our fathers, that the 
 soil in which this landmark was enfixed might almost 
 be said to have been soddened by the crimson gush- 
 ings of their life-blood. And the Virgin Daughter 
 which they alienated from a Mother to whose prin- 
 ciples their consciences could not conform, and whom 
 corrupt men had moreover sullied, has, in process of 
 time, herself acquu'ed the sanctity of maternity ; and 
 in this present day, amid persecution and defamation, 
 are we appealed to as sons, to whom a consciousness 
 of filial responsibility and a sentiment of filial afiection 
 are not considered foreign. That nursing Mother to 
 whose arms we were carried for her baptismal bene- 
 diction, and who will receive us again to her bosom 
 when we rest from our labors, demands of us. Is a 
 Parent's defence in a gainsaying age no part of the 
 duty of her children? Guarding us from the awful 
 
94 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 peril of Infidelity, from the difficulties and bewilder- 
 ments of Dissent, from the solitariness of Schism, 
 from the slavery of Superstition, and, by the pure 
 light of Truth, guiding our feet into the way of Peace, 
 is there no emotion of gratitude in our hearts, prompt- 
 ing us to rally round her standard, and vigorously 
 contend for the Faith once delivered to the Saints ? 
 That noble army of martyrs, to whom life was less 
 dear than her integrity, calls us to the contest. That 
 great Head of the Church, whose earthly prayer it 
 was, and whose heavenly will it is, that His may be 
 one in Him, even as He is one with the Father, — He 
 too summons us to maintain, as a quality inviolate, 
 the unity of His church on earth. Breathing the 
 very prayers of saints in successive generations ga- 
 thered into rest — in these pathways of the spirit 
 tracing their very footsteps — and thus connecting 
 ourselves with the long line of the faithful, is it our 
 lethargy which shall conspire to deliver the Church 
 into the hands of her enemies, who, dead to the 
 bleeding sorrow wherewith Piety contemplates sacri- 
 lege, would glory and not grieve ' to see her in the 
 dust;' — enemies, too, puny in consistent ranks, but 
 strenghtened now for a fleeting hour by most un- 
 principled confederacy; — and it is ours to behold 
 and to repel the Voluntary System, which, like a 
 huge battering-ram, is levelled at the Fortress of our 
 
COLLOQUY II. 95 
 
 Faith, from the Babel of belief, by a motley army, in 
 the concentrated violence of a thousand conflicting 
 animosities !' " 
 
 C. — " Tempora mtitantur! Such a change has 
 come o'er the spirit of the nation's dream, that the 
 present prostration of the antagonistic party seems 
 irreconcileable with the late vaunt of invincibility; 
 and in the lull of the tempest we look about us for 
 the noisy groupes, rushing to invoke K.eligious Liberty, 
 a guardian genius in her rightful lineaments, but at 
 that time ' followed, flattered, sought, and sued,' as 
 
 ' A reeling^ goddess with a zoneless waist.' 
 
 Like the Indian at his early home, inqiiiring for the 
 friends of his youth, we ask after the sectarian chiefs, 
 ' Where are they? and Echo answers, TVhere?' " 
 
 J^. — " Woe betide this bonny isle of Britain and 
 her manifold dependencies if words had oftener been 
 deeds !* There were many, however, in that alliance, 
 in whom the madness of hostility blinded better 
 judgment; for, in a moral war, which that essentially 
 should have been, they had not else rejected Prin- 
 ciple, which is moral strength, in favor of Union, 
 which is physical. I have no sympathy whatever 
 with sectarianism; and the sects which are for ever 
 subdividing Christendom at the impulse of graceless 
 * ' Words are no deeds,' — Henry viii. Shakspeare. 
 
96 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ambition or pragmatical whim, and recklessly rending 
 the mantle of Christianity, which its Founder would 
 have seamless and entire, — these mushroom corps 
 attest in how little regard is held the sin of schism. 
 StUl, I do not think the dissenters of the Equality- 
 epoch went voluntarily into the rough arms of Repub- 
 licanism or received willingly the traitor-kiss of E.ome ; 
 rather, that they became unwitting instruments of the 
 furious demagogue and wily zealot, and could not 
 discern with how despicable a company they were 
 fellow-workers ; or if they did recognize their true 
 position, the near prospect of a large concession, made 
 compulsory by numbers, was too tempting to turn the 
 back upon, at the recommendation of Rectitude. — 
 When I think of that hapless wallowing in defilement, 
 and that Puritanism, blindfolded and urged on by 
 the designing, should have thus rashly immersed itself 
 in pitch and pollution, I feel (as gentle Edmund* 
 felt for beauty in tribulation,) that ' all for pity I 
 could die.' The avowedly-religious began the contest 
 with the elements of moral warfare, — with argument, 
 and plea, and the protestations of Conscience (grown 
 pitiably petulant, by-the-way, in its degeneracy !) ; but 
 ' evil communications corrupt,' you know; and after the 
 exhaustion of their argumentative ammunition, which 
 flashed and did no more, they resorted to expedients 
 * Faory Queene, canto iii. 1, 
 
COLLOQUY II. 97 
 
 wliich^ severely weighed, would long expose them to 
 honest scorn; but, regarded compassionately, suggest 
 merely a comparison with the '^ little angers' of way- 
 ward urchins, who, annoyed by a robuster youth, and 
 vexed with the feeling of inferiority, will wreak their 
 harmless ire in hasty verbiage, and hurl promiscuous 
 missiles at him they cannot reach." 
 
 C. — " '^ Yonder harlot, throned on the seven hills,' 
 must have ' coined her cheek to smiles' at the co- 
 operation of the children of the conventicle, some of 
 whose more fastidious fathers repudiated and rejected 
 the reformed Church, because of an alleged remaining 
 taint of Popery. Rome could not but have waxed 
 complacent at the evidence of docility where, of yore, 
 was loud and deep defiance. I firmly believe that a 
 strong (if not the strongest) general check experienced 
 by the movers of that sectarian sedition was the result 
 of a conviction pressed upon the public mind, that 
 the continued strife for equalization Avould ultimately 
 tend to promote the designs of never-dormant Rome. 
 The doctrine of equalization, either civil or rehgious, 
 is known by Englishmen to involve an absurd con- 
 stitutional anomaly; and though our countrymen are 
 ' liable to have their understandings played upon by 
 unmeaning terms,'* yet, once convinced of error or 
 fatuity, they are much too sensible to persevere in the 
 * Palcy. 
 
98 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ' strenuous idleness' of a chase after chimeras. To 
 those who looked forward — who saw events in their 
 causes and could ascertain contingencies* — the issue 
 of a successful league against the Establishment pre- 
 sented itself in the disturbed guise of a temporary- 
 religious republic, in which energies whose proper 
 direction should be dictated by Religion, might be 
 seen rapt in the zeal of partizanship and restless 
 struggle for pre-eminency. And in this fever of 
 aspiring sectaries, it was easy to foresee the stealthy 
 form of Popery, with its ready bait, false wile, and 
 specious reasoning, winning its unsuspected way over 
 minds too jealous of surrounding competitors to detect 
 the not-unpalatable poison of the dissembling Phy- 
 sician, or to scrutinize the artful artillery wherewith 
 the citadel of Belief is frequently besieged, — a siege 
 so cunningly contrived and conducted, that the pro- 
 selyte's surrender is often startling to himself, and 
 seemingly unreal as ' a phantasma or a dream.' " 
 
 E. — " You have alluded to the Church of Rome as 
 to a spiritual physician. In palmier days she was, 
 in that capacity, most accommodating in her dispen- 
 sary, and considerate in her c^u-es: but she insisted 
 on the patient's faith in her all-sufficiency, and vwtue 
 went not out from her where this credulity was wanting. 
 Por the rest, she had soul-salves at all prices — the 
 * Johnson. 
 
COLLOQUY II. 99 
 
 costliest, of course, the most mollifying; and herbs 
 in infinite variety — the bitter for the ascetic and the 
 destitute, and sweeter-savoured for the rich devotion- 
 less. And in the matter of preparing for an easy 
 purgatorial probation, the standing prescription in 
 her pharmacopoeia was — The needy, lacerate; the 
 wealthy, pay. This was her mode of treatment in 
 the olden time, when men had lost sight of Freedom 
 and were reconciled to their bonds; ere any mind 
 enslaved had risen up, resolved to burst the manacles 
 which bound it; and ere those who subsequently 
 spake their abhorrence of chicanery so deadly in its 
 consequences, had provided holier healing for human 
 maladies, ' purged the general weal,' and ' cleansed 
 the stuifed bosom of that perilous stuff' which had 
 sapped the sord's vitals, eclipsed the divine penetration 
 of its eye, and degraded the thoughtful allegiance 
 of reason to a spiritless and automatic routine. A 
 daring sway, that Church of Rome's ! a di'ead respon- 
 sibility, that of her representatives!" 
 
 C. — " Dread, indeed, is the accusation against her; 
 for her guilt has not been the simple concealment of 
 truths divine, she has distorted and deformed them; 
 fi-om the lighthouse to which men's souls looked for 
 a pure religious ray upon the path of their pilgrimage, 
 she suspended a deceptive beacon: her government 
 was a mystery of iniquity; her ceremonies were an 
 
100 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 empty pageant; her calendar became a populous 
 mythology ; her overthrow was a recovery of sight to 
 the blind!" 
 
 E. — " Apprehensive episcopalians are of opinion 
 that the Papacy has agents in the protestant priest- 
 hood; — that the upas-tree has taken root here, at 
 home, and is spreading far and wide its baneful in- 
 fluence. In short, those who boast of seeing very 
 clearly indeed down the vista of futurity, distinguish 
 dreadful things : — ^honest protestant churchmen aghast 
 at the expose of secretly-spreading differences; our 
 dear old Mother in dismay at the desertion of her 
 surpliced servants; and pseudo-protestant clergymen 
 wrangling for precedency in saluting the Pope's toe ! 
 It is quite consoling to reflect, that predictions in our 
 day are not invariably infallible." 
 
 C. — " Society is never without a morbid company 
 of members who are ever busy in making troubles, 
 independently of those they were born to, and whose 
 life is a continued ' ague-fit of fear.'* To them ' of 
 comfort no man speak,' rather ' of graves, of worms, 
 and epitaphs,' — " 
 
 E. — " Monomaniacal forestallers of grief, who insist 
 
 that msufiicient for the day is the evil thereof; are 
 
 over-exquisite in casting 'the fashion of uncertain 
 
 evils ;'t and receive 'comfort like cold porridge.' J 
 
 * Richard ii. Shakspeare. f Comus. X Tempest, act ii. 1. 
 
COLLOQUY II. 101 
 
 'Tis lamentable that in despite of ' saint, sage, and 
 sophist/ and the painful schooling of Experience, the 
 votaries and victims of ' squint Suspicion' are so many. 
 — But you were observing that — " 
 
 C. — " These, if they discern or fancy they discern a 
 cloud on the horizon's verge, though it be no bigger 
 than a man's hand, foretel a certain and an immediate 
 covering of the entire firmament. Nay, there are 
 minds so strangely constituted, that they will peer 
 many times (if necessary) into the dim distance, in 
 quest of that shadowy omen at which, having seen, 
 they profess to ' sorrow as men without hope.' The 
 force of prejudice is immense ; and ' he who would 
 leap over the hedges of custom had need be well 
 mounted.'* It is Prejudice which views unwillingly 
 the movement going on in the Church — a movement 
 almost entirely defensible by the churchman's charter, 
 the Book of Common Prayer, and yet inveighed 
 against as a symptom fraught with danger. Supple- 
 mentary and whimsical appendages to the jJi'escribed 
 Order, may be condemnable, especially if adjuncts to 
 ceremonies themselves non-essential and sometime 
 disused. Of the thousand tongues of E-umour many 
 are set in agitation by ultra-finical precisians; but 
 many others are murmuring over a revival most com- 
 mendable. Against the prejudices of late and present 
 * Aaron Hill. 
 
102 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 times one miglit almost as well expect favour for 
 Lucifer as for Laud; yet Laud must not be mistaken 
 into vice,* or be condemned and dismissed unlieard. 
 ' Ever since I came in place/ lie said, at the bar of 
 tlie house of peers, ' I have laboured nothing more 
 than that the external publick worship of God, so 
 much slighted in divers parts of this kingdom, might 
 be preserved, and that with as much decency and 
 uniformity as might be. For I evidently saw that 
 the public neglect of God's service in the outward 
 face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated 
 to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true 
 and inward worship of God, which, while we live in 
 the body, needs external helps, and all little enough 
 to keep it any vigour.' 
 
 E. — " The eifort was indisputably laudable; — upon 
 the judiciousness of its manifestation opinions differ." 
 
 C. — " Those among the clergy who make a. prin- 
 ciple of unity, and who most earnestly strive to enable 
 the Church ' to realize the daily supervision of her 
 children,'t are the most suspected of the priesthood. 
 I impute no papistical prepossessions where they are 
 vehemently alleged to exist ; and when I meet with 
 expressions which the ^ scandalously nice' adduce as 
 evidence of treachery, I lament the unguardedness 
 of the learned, who frequently excite suspicion in the 
 * Essay on Criticism. Pope. f Bishop of Winchester. 
 
COLLOQUY II. 103 
 
 illiterate^ by apparent more than by actual incon- 
 sistencies. The man who is familiar with the history 
 of the Reformation, must disapprove in part; but it 
 arouses the alarm of the ignorant, to hear that event 
 reprobated, with which he has been instructed to 
 connect the rescue of ' pure Religion and undefiled' 
 from the prison-house of Popery and the dense at- 
 mosphere of long-accumulating Error. But assuming 
 that favorers of the Popedom — nay, that apostates 
 are at this hour subtly striving to re-infuse Romanism 
 into the Anglican faith, by what instrumentality would 
 their design be most eifectually accomplished ? Would 
 it be best promoted by intellectual progression or 
 retrogression? Have we of the tiers-etat attained, 
 indubitably, an intellectual vantage-ground superior 
 to Jesuitical jugglery? — ^might not the sly sybil whine 
 into bondage the compliant multitude? The old 
 appliances of persecution and the anathema seem but 
 little calculated for a modern taming process.'''' 
 
 E. — " Why, as to the mind's retrograde movement 
 the old lady in scarlet and her shaven sons would 
 have firstly to close the flood-gates of Literature ; and 
 those literary ushers-in and whippers-in, the book- 
 publishers, could, 'ere a man might say, Behold!' 
 whistle together a tolerably deep-mouthed opposition. 
 The meridian might of depraved Rome was co-existent 
 with the midnight of the intellect; — it was over slaves^ 
 
104 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 groping slaves, that she held the most arbitrary sway. 
 There is not a layman in England who would more 
 strenuously advocate a proper docility to the Church 
 than would I; yet, I say it solemnly, may God forbid 
 our relapsing again into a state of mental prosternation, 
 in the imbecility of which it is impossible that He 
 can take pleasure. You mention casuistry and per- 
 secution among the instruments which, in an impro- 
 bable case, the popish priesthood might put in opera- 
 tion. When dissenters — who are never guilty of 
 obstinate adherence, tractable lambs ! — when tlieij meet 
 humble men of the Isaac Ashford* stamp, who are 
 determined to walk in the ' sober light' of the Church, 
 their designation of such character is higot. Now 
 with such an innate bigotry towards protestantism 
 our countrymen are, I believe, too deeply imbued, to 
 imbibe venom while, from the great Halls of spiritual 
 Medicine, there issue so many keen discriminators 
 and denouncers of what is base and surreptitious. 
 Then as to persecution — it is a system of policy as 
 cruel in its operation as it is eventually fatal to the 
 cause which it is intended to serve. Its very inter- 
 ference in the promotion of theological unity is a 
 sufficient condemnation of the tenets it would advance; 
 and yet in this particular field of contention, its exer- 
 cise has been at once more sanguinary and self- 
 * The Parish Register. Crabbe. 
 
COLLOQUY II. 105 
 
 destructive than in any other sphere. It is an equivocal 
 instrument in the business of salvation, which slays 
 the body because the soul refuses to be saved in the 
 manner prescribed; as he would be considered a 
 dangerous physician, who should overcome the im- 
 bibitions scruples of his patient by the administration 
 of a lasting quietus. The swords of the magistrate 
 and of the minister are of a contrary temperament : — ■ 
 allegiance to spiritual authority, enforced by civil 
 power, may possibly be made to assume the semblance 
 of ^ peace — but there is no peace.' If we ask. What 
 h.a.s force effected for (avowedly) a spiritual Religion, 
 we find a reply in the defeat of the system : and this 
 result was inevitable ; for Barbarism can never be the 
 divinely-accredited representative of Benignity, and 
 a process at which our human nature shudders, is 
 little calculated to reconcile our divine. And if we 
 seek to justify the cruelty of the agents by the con- 
 tents of their credential, we find the Potentate's 
 command — ' Put up thy sword into the sheath!' and 
 this rebuke of violence to him whose mantle has been 
 clauned as the vest of spiritual supremacy, and whose 
 weapon, in the unrestrained hands of his successors, 
 has since deluged Christendom with gore, in glory 
 of the Restorer of Malchus !" 
 
 C. — " Aye, the records of Rome are too indelibly 
 stained with characters which have but one expressive 
 
106 CHAPTEfl IV. 
 
 meaning through all time, to make the enlargement 
 of her sheep-fold a welcome sight to the world. — 
 May Heaven preserve mankind from her maternal 
 mercies! The effect of distance is to diminish mag- 
 nitude ; and now, in the calm adoption of any creed 
 or tenet, we are forgetful of the fiery trials of faith, 
 when absolute conformity was enforced by torture. 
 Looking back upon this or that crowded scene with 
 an eye which a lack of interest enervates or inter- 
 mediate objects divert, our sight is beclouded and 
 dim; but let us preserve a special focus and a steady 
 gaze, and our emotions of awe and horror become as 
 vivid in the distant retrospection of these atrocities, 
 as were theirs who had them in immediate review." 
 
 E. — " The places which should have illumined 
 the benighted, were themselves sitting in darkness; 
 the declared home of Christianity — which can never 
 exist apart from Charity, Commiseration, and Mercy 
 — became an ' habitation of Cruelty;' and 
 
 ' Victory sickened, ignorant vvliere to rest.'* 
 
 Upon human tenderness the tale of her terrible 
 triumphs falls freezingly — it acts like ice upon the 
 heart. In a little book, brought to me by my god- 
 daughter many months ago — the Nun, was it not, 
 Mary? — illustrative of that serious mistake, a monastic 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
COLLOQUY II. 107 
 
 life, there occurs a, recital of the discipline resorted 
 to in the case of two sisters, whom the powers of 
 darkness had influenced to assert the transcendental 
 authority of scripture over tradition. The narrative 
 is related by one of the victims, and is invested, in 
 many of its details of suflering, with an air of unre- 
 pining sufferance and meekness, truly pathetic. — 
 No exaggeration of inflictions, nor show of super- 
 natural endurance, nor sickly suppliance for sympathy, 
 but a dispassionate revelation, bearing on its surface 
 and in its secrets the impress of authenticity. A 
 picture which cannot have failed to excite holy pity, 
 is that wherein the exiled nuns are represented in 
 a cell, lit by a sad and solitary lamp, and — saving 
 the Presence wliich no barriers may exclude — are 
 visited only by a spectral female attendant, cold as 
 if carved from alabaster. One is bowed with the 
 weight of years and the tyrannies of the holy Mother, 
 and is in sickness, and not far from the strange bosom 
 of Mercy; the other is occupied in administering 
 solace from a purer source than the fountains of 
 traditionary record; and over her dungeon-divinity 
 time elapses unheeded and unknown : 
 
 ' Seasons return, but not to tliem returns 
 Day or the sweet approach of even or morn.' 
 
 This loneliness, and ignorance of day and night. 
 
108 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 suggest an idea of desolation, which, if not divinely 
 redeemed from despair, would thrill through every 
 feeling, as the type of Innocency in eternal abandon- 
 ment : as it is, Humanity, incredulous, inquires if such 
 recited cruelties can ever have been realized by sen- 
 tient beings, and they, too, of the finer-fibred creation ! 
 Oh, if the accents of oppression ascend from the 
 prisons of the bound, and if every wrong has its 
 regarded complaint and its revenge, how fearful a 
 retribution must be in reserve for these enormities ; 
 — perpetrated, too, by zealots, whose stony seclusion 
 could not shut out the worst part of their nature, while 
 it often perverted the best; and whom the incentive 
 of an oifended superstition did sometimes transform 
 to furies — in furtherance of the Christian ymVA/" 
 
 C. — " It is not the least of many and great privi- 
 leges peculiar to the age in which we Kve, that 
 dread no longer interferes in exercises spiritual; that 
 the scruples of Conscience are respected; and innu- 
 merable vagaries, which it would be difficult to affiliate 
 to Conscience, are tolerated on the mere assumption 
 of that honored but hacknied patronymic. But this 
 privilege of exemption from dread, in which all 
 classes may and do participate, operates, I apprehend, 
 but feebly, as a stimulant to general thankfulness. 
 The episcopalian portion of the community are de- 
 ficient in this feeling, and ' see no beauty, that they 
 
COLLOQUY II. 109 
 
 should desire' their Churchy, for her tolerancy to the 
 turbulent, and for that soothing strain of hope, which 
 refuses to ' shut the gates of Mercy/ where more 
 denunciatory creeds would, sometimes savagely, en- 
 throne Despair* As it regards the non-conforming 
 body, it is not easy to conceive that thankfulness could 
 very keenly exist in connection with the ubiquity of 
 scruple and morbid sensitiveness of conscience which 
 prevailed of late. The immunities permitted to sec- 
 tarianism by the conciliatory spirit of past ages, and 
 rightly esteemed by their immediate recipients as 
 privileges, are declared by their enlightened successors 
 to be mockeries — partial ameliorations serving only 
 to render all restraint intolerable. A little while ago 
 how many religious malecontents made it their un- 
 pleasing occupation to invent fictitious grievances, 
 tuning their imagination to the sighs of capti-vdty and 
 the sound of chains." — 
 
 E. — " Not hoisting the red cap of revolution or the 
 mitred cap episcopal, on a pole chequered with sixteen 
 hundred isms, but an ' old hat, with the humour of 
 forty times forty fancies prick't in't.' f — A dull trope, 
 this, and interruptive ; but Will must have his way." 
 
 C. — " The blaze of modern liberaHsm confuses 
 old-established ideas of freedom, and manifests that 
 
 * In allusion to the service for the Burial of the Dead. 
 t Taming of the Shrew, act iil. 2. 
 
110 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 to be tyranny, whicli not long since was toleration. 
 They who had been accustomed to regard Conscience 
 as the inflexible reprover of moral obliquity, were 
 bewildered at the contrariety of its developments. 
 In the dissentient religious world, (with one honorable 
 exception,) the strife had ceased to be for correctness 
 of creeds — the absorbing aim was closeness of con- 
 federacy ; and advancing into the political boundary, 
 (it was a ' narrow bank' and scarcely perceptible that 
 separated the two spheres,) the lamb of spiritual 
 meekness and the lion of avowed republicanism might 
 be seen in most affectionate salutation. The war-cry 
 of the heterogeneous host has, however, died away 
 in the distance; and to the defeated and dispersed 
 tribes is left the sorry — and, let us hope, the salutary 
 reminiscence, of an inglorious and 
 
 ' Vaulting ambition, whicii o'erleapt itself.' " 
 
 " Whatever," said E. with much seriousness, "may 
 be the defalcation of others' gratitude for the peace 
 which now attends the outward practice of Religion, 
 our duty is clear. Although by casual discussion 
 frequently entrame, it does not agreeably consort with 
 my disposition, to recur to scenes in human history in 
 which the actors have played unseemly parts; but I 
 derive the charm of music from the story of good deeds. 
 You, who have sternly reprehended the indiscriminate 
 
COLLOQUY II. Ill 
 
 enlistment and chameleon-livery of Conscience, would 
 frown, were I to arrogate her sacred sanction to an 
 objection I entertain against entering, myself, into 
 the survey and the scrutiny of depraved human 
 character. I would hardly dare to dignify this ob- 
 jection by the designation of ' conscientious;' but it is 
 nevertheless strengthened by grave admonitions, ad- 
 dressed to ' Reason's ear ;' and I fortify it by this 
 ' Keflexion Morale' of ]\Iadanie Deshoulieres : 
 
 ' Toujours vains, toujours faux, toujours pleins d'injustices, 
 
 Nous crions dans tous nos discours 
 Centre les passions, les foiblesses, les vices, 
 
 Ou nous succombons tous les jours.' 
 
 I have often thought upon a saying of Horace Wal- 
 pole age, reverting to a design of Horace Walpole 
 jeune : — it not only illustrates aptly, but touchingly, 
 the sharp and summary judgment of character which 
 the young form; — the calm and clement adjudication 
 of the old. ' In my youth,' he says, ' I thought of 
 writing a satire on mankind; but now, in my age, I 
 think I should write an apology for them. Several 
 worthy men, whom I know, fall into such unexpected 
 situations, that to me, who know these situations, their 
 conduct is matter of compassion and not of blame.' 
 Besides, conscious of our passions and their propen- 
 sities, we plunge into a position we should avoid, in 
 
112 CHAPTER lY. 
 
 arraigning before ourselves our fellow-men, vile tliough. 
 tliey be : the poor culprit, Mr. C, is wont so eagerly 
 to usurp tbe judgment-seat, and— an outlawed criminal 
 himself — proceeds as with clean bands to accuse and 
 to condemn! 
 
 * And what were we, frail creatures as we are, 
 If the All-merciful should mete to us 
 With the same rigorous measure wherewithal 
 Sinner to sinner metes?' 
 
 " 0, Charity ! " continued the rapt Elder, with still 
 devouter earnestness and abstraction, " 0, Charity! 
 thou maiden whose chiefest majesty is in thy meek- 
 ness, who shrinkest from sapphire thrones to j)reside 
 at the hearths of the humble, and that art the 
 herald of all heavenly things! — Celestial Visitant, 
 whose proudest banner is the palm, and whose richest 
 trophy is peace ! — thou that wert the first-born of the 
 children of Eternal Love, and that art the joy of 
 seraphs and the spirits of the saints; that keepest 
 concord among the harps of the angel-band, and from 
 ' the high and holy place' speakest Peace to the sons 
 of men! — fair Child of our Father, God, how frail 
 a temple hast thou in our froward hearts! When, 
 O pure Spirit, when shall that sterile soil become 
 luxuriant with fruits of thy planting? How long 
 shall we boast that thou hast made thy home in our 
 
COLLOQUY II. 113 
 
 breast, and that thou hast therein an altar which is 
 inviolate, and that we are at one with the vast family 
 of the flesh, and yet so oft awaken to a contest that 
 comes not from thy dwelling, and passions that cannot 
 have kindled in tliy sanctuary, and dark distrustfulness 
 not born of thee, which tell us bodingly that thou, 
 white-mantled Maid! art not the habitant of our 
 troubled sphere, but art still a stranger to our fallen 
 race. Thou hast tuned thy lyre at the eternal fount, 
 and glorified thy song with glad tidings ; but when 
 shall thy feet be beautiful upon the mountains, that 
 we may view thy vesture, and know thee from the 
 phantom we now vainly clasp, by the deep unsullied 
 love that shall have found a dwelling-place within us ?" 
 
COLLOQUY III. 
 
 A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 " Death makes no conquest of this Conqueror; 
 For now he lives in fame, though not in life." 
 Julius CcBsar. — Shakspeake. 
 
 Having attained this stage of intimacy and confidence 
 with the tenant of Ivy Lodge, I thenceforth made a 
 weekly pilgrimage thither, with admirable regularity. 
 A lawyer's protestation of disinterestedness is so often 
 considered and treated as a matter of levity, that I 
 have long since declined protesting by it ; and do not, 
 therefore, assert for the steady constancy of my move- 
 ments that charm which inflexible self-devotion derives 
 from the evident absence of self-interest. Were I not 
 constrained by the consciousness, that a complaint 
 urged by so impotent a limb as am I, against that 
 gross moral injustice (unfortunately not an indictable 
 ofience,) which the legal body sustains, in the ceaseless 
 suspicion which attaches to the actions and assevera- 
 tions of so overwhelming a majority of its members, 
 
116 CHAPTER V. 
 
 I would certainly labor hard to blow tlie cruel douht 
 in every censorious and contumelious eye, till the 
 pains and ]Denalties of ophthalmia should have wrought 
 remorse. The moral mischief which has been done by 
 "squint Suspicion" is incalculable; and the chronicles 
 of the law would, probably, demonstrate its amount 
 more amply and more accurately than those of any 
 other profession not under the immediate cognizance 
 of the police. Faculties cannot be borne for ever 
 meekly, where to the frail bearer is always imputed 
 a brow of bronze; nor can clearness in office preserve 
 its immaculacy, exposed to the perpetual stigma of 
 collusion. I have been a regretful witness to repeated 
 proofs, that virtue frecpiently mistaken for vice, has 
 been vitiated; and I know members of the profession 
 who, had fine feeling not been rendered callous by 
 indiscriminate sinister accusations, might even to this 
 day have held it as cordra honos snores to come de- 
 signedly in contact with a quiet country gentleman's 
 dinner-table; and tax him, a non-inviting host, for a 
 passing opinion, proffered en mangeant. 
 
 I merely hint, currente calamo, at the injustice of 
 including the innocent and guilty in one sweeping 
 verdict, and leave it with the lord chancellor, ad 
 referendum ; trusting that, after a careful investigation 
 of cause and eifect, a corrective measure may a]3pear 
 feasible, and be announced with the next law -reforms. 
 
CHAPTEK Y. 117 
 
 My Ivy Lodge days were marked with white stones ; 
 oh! very happy were those hebdomadal hours. Four 
 or five summer evenings had I wandered about the 
 precincts of the EhTer's tranquil abode, listening at 
 times to panegyric, for which a thousand objects in 
 his path supplied him with as many themes. The 
 effervescence of a thankful heart is always euphonious, 
 but old age wondrously mellows its effect, and E. 
 loolied the gratitude he spake; his was no rotatory 
 or conventional phraseology, no " goodly outside" to 
 vacuity, no odious nasal twang signifying nothing, 
 but an incontrollable effusion emanating from the glad 
 perception of " good in every thing." Of continuous 
 colloquy we had little, or if he " talked the flowing 
 hour," I was distrait: — under " skiey influences," the 
 luscious Summer pleaded for so large a portion of the 
 eye and ear, that garrulity, nathless its eloquence, 
 was outrivalled; and it was a more delightful task to 
 emulate feminine eulogy, pronounced upon a favorite 
 flower, than to extend a patient hearing to senescence, 
 although enthusiastic. And when came Night's dewy 
 reminder that the fair world was subject to vapours 
 and its inhabitants to consumption, then, within doors, 
 I arrested the commencing Elder upon his own con- 
 fession, that " Poetry, however sublime, was never 
 so effective alone, as when wedded to Music;" so the 
 Godfather resigned himself, in listening attitude, to 
 
118 CHAPTER V. 
 
 the lich, feeling melodies of Mrs. Hemans — concords 
 of sweet sound entrancing to " old men and children," 
 but very dangerous to " young men and maidens" 
 pledged to the principle of celibatic independence. 
 And five nights — such nights as make me think the 
 " faithful witness" in her dotage now, and the lesser 
 lights degenerating — five oriental nights had mantled, 
 firstly with carmine caught from the sun's adieu, and 
 then with the pale hue borrowed from the pensive 
 moon, that quiet umbrageous retirement, and the 
 Old Man's voice had been subdominant; — heard 
 now and then, in rapturous comment, in the lull of 
 strains sweet as if wafted over violet-beds, but very 
 variously burdened, — now hopeful, now despondent, 
 — as the theme of song had sprung forth in bright 
 sunshine of soul, or in its sombrous shadow. 
 
 In this transitory condition, however, we know that 
 ^^ nought is lasting;" and mankind are pretty well 
 agreed that enjoyment is lamentably short-lived: — 
 the converse state is not so ephemeral; indeed, there 
 is a distressing disproportion between the time to 
 laugh and the time to mourn. E. seemed strongly 
 of opinion that there was a season for talking as well 
 as a season for singing, and on the sixth evening 
 his countenance decidedly portended discussion. A 
 portly volume of Shakspeare was lying open upon 
 the table, implying recent perusal of the Winter's 
 
CHAPTEK V. 119 
 
 Tale : the book had been a costly copy of the Poet, 
 and the evidence of a broken back and innumerable 
 scraps of paper projecting irregularly from its margins^ 
 made it questionable if, in the Elder's library, it 
 were an equal sinecurist with its supporting-shelf. 
 Notwithstanding the fealty which every English man 
 and woman owes to Shakspeare, I would, just then, 
 have declined paying prosaic tribute to any one, 
 (always excepting our E.oyal Mistress, the Queen, 
 upon whom may Heaven ever smile!) and would 
 have still said, 
 
 " Let rich music's tongue 
 Unfold imagined happiness;"* 
 
 but there was a deliberate purpose in the Elder's 
 manner which forbade remonstrance ; and looking at 
 and listening to the earnest Ancient, I became quickly 
 reconciled. Would, only, that I could do his style 
 and manner greater justice. 
 
 The Elder, extolling incidentally the exhaustless 
 mines of poetic wealth which modern publication has 
 compressed in waistcoat-pocket editions of Shakspeare 
 and Milton, adverted to the master-minds themselves : 
 
 E. — " I would shrink abashed from a supposed 
 critical stricture on the works of Shakspeare and 
 Milton; for, making no pretension to a correct judg- 
 * Romeo and Juliet, act ii. G. 
 
120 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ment, and valuing wliatcver yields mc profitable plea- 
 sure or leads to the knowledge of myself, fifty years of 
 admiration of what I approve as ' good,' have left me 
 neither leisure nor inclination to * argue much of evil.' 
 But to my uninstructed eye their appears a pervading 
 characteristic in the productions of each of these 
 illustrious minds, wherein (despite occasional aber- 
 rancy) we recognize Shakspeare as to this world its 
 proper oracle, and Milton as the oracle of other worlds 
 to this. The one, in his delineation of men, seems to 
 have ascended on an eagle's wing, and with stronger 
 than an eagle's eye, to have scanned the mazy line 
 of human character to its utmost verge, touching, in 
 its remote extremes, the angels who keep and those 
 who kept not their first estate : — the other, aiming at 
 things unattempted,' and advancing into spheres 
 untrodden, appears to have sped upon the pinions of 
 a spirit to the centre of the Triune council, and shared 
 in the secrets of the Eternal. Shakspeare unveils 
 the home of passion in man, and depicts its every 
 gradation, from the depths of the terrible and the 
 vile, to the eminence of the tender and virtuous : — 
 Milton assumes a similar sovereignty over spiritual 
 Avorlds, from the profoundest conclave of the apostate, 
 to the sublimest concourse of the adoring ; in awful 
 ubiquity, we find him now an accessary to the designs 
 of Heaven, and now arevcaler of the dark deliberations 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 121 
 
 of fiends. Neither Shakspeare, in his universe^ nor 
 Milton in his, has submitted to Kniits, or confines, or 
 demarcation; but each reigns in the infinite. And 
 as with their several portraitures of life it was ex- 
 pedient to connect the scenery and circumstance of 
 its exhibition, therefore the visible creation found a 
 master-limner in the one, and the regions of the 
 glorified and rebellious in the other: and this traceiy 
 of subordinate objects illustrates admirably in one 
 case the varied loveliness of the seen; and, in the 
 other, harmonizes with the imagined grandeur of the 
 invisible." 
 
 C. — " Around the brow of the most popular of that 
 exalted Two, how strenuous and spreading is the 
 disposition to weave fresh laurel !" 
 
 E. — " True; and that, too, contemporary with the 
 decadence of the represented drama. The Poet's 
 conceptions come not now, or rarely come, ' bodied 
 forth' in eloquent personification; and the Poet's 
 page is the almost-exclusive mirror which reflects his 
 greatness. Yet therein lies a magnetic influence 
 preventing in us the decay of admiration, and, like 
 medicine of indestructible virtue, retaining its pro- 
 perties ' in every clime, and travel where we may ;' 
 for now are the isles afar allying themselves in con- 
 fraternity with the islanders at home, to sempiternalize 
 the name and fame of Shakspeare ! Nor must there 
 
122 CHAPTER V. 
 
 be a withered leaf in that Man's coronal, while the 
 
 earth has a green tree or living flower upon its 
 
 surface, and a living hand to cherish and redeck the 
 
 chaplet !" 
 
 C — " The ejaculation of Hamlet iipon his poisoned 
 
 sire, 
 
 ' Take him for all in all, 
 
 I shall not look upon his like again,' 
 
 is now become of every-day appropriation, and is 
 not therefore any longer the especial elegy of departed 
 eminence. But may it not with singular propriety be 
 applied to its author? — in emphatic identification vdth 
 this Poet peculiarly, can we hope to ' look upon his 
 like again?' " 
 
 E. — " If of this ' brief candle,' mortal life, the 
 ' better part be burnt out,' * probability might oppose 
 the advent of a Shakspeare secundus ; but that same 
 Nature, who ' hath framed strange fellows in her 
 time,'t endows no man with authority to predicate 
 the character of her future achievements. However, 
 ' no perfection in reversion shall have a praise in 
 present,'J and we may diligently devote our praise to 
 excellency which our eyes have seen and our hands 
 handled. But the beam of assured belief of heaven, 
 wherewith the merciful Creator sustains the anxious 
 
 * o 
 
 2 Henry iv. act i. 2. f Merchant of Venice, i. 1. 
 
 :[: Troilus and Cressida, iii. 2. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 12U 
 
 creature, — a beam which shines brightest upon mor- 
 tahty's expiring embers, and whose divine consolation 
 and guidance cheered the Poet, inspires us also — not 
 with the wavering trust of renowned men of old, with 
 whom a future life was hypothetical, and whose souls' 
 desires for a reunion with seers who had gone before 
 were burdened with misgivings — but with the ' sure 
 and certain hope' of looking upon himself again, in 
 a better country, and under a fairer aspect than that, 
 when, 
 
 ' Beaten and chopped with tamed antiquity,'* 
 
 William Shakspeare, the mortal, bewailed the marring 
 touch of Time." 
 
 C. — " The human heart, which is the ' haunt and 
 main region' of every poet's pen, consists of so much 
 which, as Wordsworth asserts, is essential to it and 
 eternal there, and these inseparable and immutable 
 qualities have been so comprehensively and, very 
 frequently, so inimitably treated by Shakspeare, that 
 Nature, as far as we are able to conceive her capacity 
 for illustration, could hardly furnish materials for 
 another mind like his, whose empire should be vast, 
 and yet natural. In its physiological proportions a 
 •contracted sphere, in its spiritual attributes a realm 
 * Shakspeare, Poems. 
 
124: CHAPTER V. 
 
 of undefined dilatability, it might of this moral me- 
 tropolis of poets, the heart, be said, 
 
 ' a crooked figure may 
 Attest, in little place, a million ;'* 
 
 and Shakspeare seems as if by ]Srature chosen and 
 commissioned as Delineator General of our race, and 
 thus supremely delegated, to have gone forth un- 
 dauntedly over the expansive and uneven territory 
 of the sentiments and passions of mankind. The 
 Poet has often availed himself of auxiliary aid, and 
 frequently adventures, vvdth no deceptive self-reliance, 
 beyond the boundary of the natural; but tuitliin that 
 boundary has he left space for a future Shakspeare ; 
 — for one who, like his sovereign self, would be 
 * cabinned, cribbed, confined,' in a kind of colony of 
 character ; one to whose discursive disposition it would 
 be a natural and unconquerable necessity to follow 
 in the track of men, wherever Nature dictated ?" 
 
 E. — " Thou art unmindful, O Querist, that Nature, 
 of whom thou speakest as in some parts absolute from 
 the beginning, is, in other parts, most evanescent. — 
 Beveal, I adjure thee, before this, our other auditor, 
 after whom it is that well-discerning Will hath, by 
 the mouth of Hamlet, designated Frailty ;-\ and then, 
 * Henry v. Chorus. 
 f " Frailty, thy name is Woman'" Hamlet, act i. 2. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 125 
 
 admire th.e fitness of a feminine appellative for tliat 
 volatile Dame, wliom thy imagination clotli mistakenly 
 picture as an antique quakeress, clad in unvarying 
 russet, fashioned in starched propriety, and vested 
 Avith perdurability. Thy device savoureth too much 
 of demureness, friend! Believe it, Nature, though 
 turned of her six thousandth year, is not a straight- 
 laced, crimp-bodiced grandam, of orders grey; — alas 
 for manifold goodmen whom it painfully concerneth, 
 doth she not, — lacking that staidness which might be 
 expected in a mother of millions, — doth she not by 
 example countenance, in mothers of vinits and of tens, 
 an itching after new apparel? Pardon this levity, 
 most grave and reverend Signer, but the excessive 
 gravity of your latter interrogation too much o'er- 
 tasked my impertm-bability; but know, that with a 
 personage ycleped Folly, in a play of Ford,* I might 
 truly say, ' I love not any whom I laugh not at : pretty 
 strange humour is't not?' and you might properly 
 reply, with a certain Raybright, ' To any one that 
 knows you not, it is.' You suspect the cajJability 
 of Natm-e to furnish illustrative material for another 
 Shakspeare, the first having so comprehensively dealt 
 with the permanent passions of the mind; yet the 
 process of time, which may not materially alter essen- 
 tial attributes, continually ditersifies their development; 
 * The Sun's Darling-, act i. 1. 
 
126 CHAPTER V. 
 
 and in the changed aspect we sometimes fail to re- 
 cognize the individual. The constituent parts of a 
 kaleidoscope are identically the same in each of its 
 fortuitous conformations; but the effect of the least 
 commotion is manifested by a changed figure. The 
 word which more than any other characterizes our 
 condition, is progression ; and Coriolanus, when he 
 thus accuses a fickle mob, 
 
 ' With every minute you do change a mind,'* 
 
 supplies the whole world with a text on instability. 
 In these mundane mutations the poets find their 
 'occupation;' and perhaps it is matter for rejoicing 
 that these mutations are not few or far between, sup- 
 posing that Nature were to have always her quiver 
 full of minstrel-children: monotony. Sir, must have 
 made them warble in a fiat key; things would have 
 died in description and looked dusky in song; detail 
 must have engendered ennui by disgusting minuteness,. 
 Poor Nature herself would have had to endure an 
 inquisition, her inquisitors being her own infants ; and 
 they being often '^ gravelled for lack of matter,'t the 
 old gentlewoman's hairs must, metaphorically, have 
 all been numbered. What a weary session would 
 impatient man have had, before a faded drop-scene! 
 But since our lot is cast where all are at once spec- 
 * CorioIanuSj act i. 1. t As You Like it. iv. L 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 127 
 
 tators of and actors in a revolving panorama, tedium 
 is not ; and now, exempted from * dropping buckets 
 into empty wells,' or giving superfluous coatings to 
 previously-painted lilies, ceaseless configurations sup- 
 ply fresh, materiel for the Poet, who can with reason 
 only murmur when 
 
 ' Change grows too changeable — without being new.' 
 
 The fitful Shelley — a * wandering star,' sometimes 
 obscure, at others, coruscating with intense brilliancy 
 — has written so beautifully on this fertile theme,, 
 that I am irresistibly tempted to repeat his lines on 
 
 ' MUTABILITY. 
 
 ' We are as elouds that veil the midnight moon; 
 
 How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, 
 Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon 
 
 Night closes round, and they are lost for ever: 
 
 ' Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings 
 Give various response to each varying blast. 
 
 To whose frail frame no second motion brings 
 One mood or modulation like the last. 
 
 'We rest — A dream has power to poison sleep: 
 
 We rise — one wandering thought pollutes the day:; 
 
 We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep, 
 Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: 
 
 ' It is the same I — For, be it joy or sorrow. 
 
 The path of its departure still is free : 
 Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow j 
 
 Nought may endure save Mutability.' 
 
128 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The last line is a paradox and a proverb. But to 
 
 return to tlie Swan of Avon et a nos moutons : — 
 
 while circumstance changes, character will change, 
 
 and vice versa; and he who is endowed with the 
 
 divine afflatus, will never fruitlessly invoke the Muse 
 
 so long as day by day unprecedented feats, fancies, 
 
 and frailties excite us to exclaim, 
 
 ' Can such things be. 
 Without our special wonder?'* 
 
 " Midway between the creator and the copyist there 
 is a ground which Shakspeare nobly occupies. I mean 
 by his creations those of his productions which are 
 altogether or chiefly ideal, and by his copies such as 
 are representations of individual character ; but it is 
 to his art of conformation that I allude as to a central 
 ability; — his skill in selecting from the varied soil 
 of humanity, portions of clay of various color and 
 consistency, but lm7nan nevertheless and therefore 
 congruous, and then fabricating these elements into 
 man or woman v/ith such facile grace and consum- 
 mate verisimilitude, that — the ecstasy of admiration 
 having subsided into calm — we ask, with such surprise 
 as the knowledge of his measureless power to charm 
 permits, 
 
 ' What impossible matter will he make easy nextP'f 
 C. — " A Quarterly Reviewer has helped us to com- 
 * Macbeth, act iii. 5. f Tempest, ii. 1. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 129 
 
 prehend the function to which you allude: he says 
 of the mind of Shakspeare, that it was as * a magic 
 mirror, in which all human nature's possible forms 
 and combinations were present, intuitively and in- 
 herently; not conceived, but as connatural portions 
 of his OAvn humanity.' " 
 
 E. — " Would it be just — could admiration so con- 
 sent to dwarf the attributes of glorious William 
 Shakspeare, as to say, that where he did not create, 
 he copied? Was it among women, to the extremest 
 
 degree 
 
 ' Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,' 
 
 that he found the original of that witching Rosalind ? 
 — well, by the way, for the peace of the 'bosoms' 
 lords' of all ye gallants under forty, that Rosalinds are 
 rarce aves ! Was it after ' a child of our grandmother 
 Eve, a female ; or for our more siveet understanding, 
 a tooman^* that he drew the wife of Macbeth? But 
 apart alike from creation and from conformation, and 
 where the Poet may be said to have drawn from a 
 definite design supplied by Nature, even here do we 
 not involuntarily acknowledge, as our eye is arrested 
 at one or other of the master-strokes wherewith his 
 pages abound, 
 
 ' It is the witness still of excellency !'t" 
 C. — " His pages do, indeed, abound with treasures. 
 
 * Love's Labour Lost, act i. 1. t Much Ado about Nothing, ii. 3. 
 
 s 
 
180 CHAPTER V. 
 
 It is not with. Shakspeare as with others^ illustrious 
 in poetic annals, whose beauties are comparatively rare 
 and sometimes cumbrously imbedded ; in Shakspeare 
 their ' sensible, warm motion,' is everywhere percep- 
 tible : we have not far to follow the Sowings oihis most 
 potent pen, before the heart pauses with delectable 
 or dread emotion. Were ever the glowing offspring 
 of Imagination so profusely generated, and seemingly 
 so inadvertently? — the giving ' a local habitation' to 
 a thousand childi'en of his fancy, appears to have no 
 more impoverished his resources, than does the cease- 
 less current of a mountain-spring exhaust its source. 
 It is the question of a celebrated living writer, in 
 reference to the Poet's mental fecundity, (I am not 
 certain that I repeat it literally,) ' Had Shakspeare 
 lived until now, could he have exhausted his ideas?'*" 
 E. — " Of a verity never, never were orient pearls 
 so much, at random strung, as by Immortal William! 
 How is it that, in speaking of this Giant among the 
 Great, and with voices, too, touched with veneration, 
 we dare to syllable his deathless name, as though we 
 were his comrades or his friends ? Is there witchery 
 in JVilliam, which Joht has not? or, as we regard 
 
 * If I have misquoted the Jearned and elegant author whose 
 interrogation I intended to iterate, I supplicate mille pardons. My 
 ' Student' is on a visit, at a distance; and circumstances, which are 
 often despotic, insist at present so urgently on dispatch, that its 
 recall would be unprofitable for correction. 
 
A FEW WOKDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. lol 
 
 in their works the Poetic Potentates thus severally 
 surnamed, is our attachment — to one, impetuous ; to 
 the other, timorous in its advances — swayed by dis- 
 tinctive personal characteristics? Necker declared 
 himself to be ' thunderstruck with the familiarity' of 
 certain, who spoke of their Pascal, their Corneille : 
 Pascal, illustrious in the high-priesthood of Piety, was 
 the candidate for a more incorruptible crown than the 
 Muse's ; but of a greater than Corneille, I — nay we, we 
 British-born, a ' band of brothers' in our heartfelt 
 homage to that Compatriot who hath no compeer, we 
 talk of him as of an elder brother, because we feel that 
 his noble nature would have scorned no fellowship 
 which the known traits of that same noble nature had 
 prompted in honest hearts. His pen, the pregnant 
 channel of poetic thought, continually wins you to the 
 Poet, who carries admiration, and affection with it, by 
 a coup-de-grace, downy as a butterfly's wing. What 
 feminine fortress could for a fortnight hold out against 
 a style of archery such as — aimed by single shafts — 
 
 ' Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way 
 Of starved people."* 
 
 Contrast, for a moment, this finely-feathered arrow of 
 Lorenzo with the blunted clothyard of bluff Harry V. 
 Dr. Johnson, I believe, would rather have dispensed 
 
 * Merchant of Venice, act t. 1. 
 
132 CHAPTER V. 
 
 with Shakspeare's exhibition of the bold king in forma 
 proci; but the lion of Bolt-court sleeps, and therefore 
 inferior animals may more freely disport in ^that 
 Realm of Opinion, which no law can reach.'* I 
 would not yet exchange that sang froid suit of Harry, 
 for a hundred specimens of more rarified sentimen- 
 tality; 'tis a unique, and therefore estimable exposition 
 of a brave, burly Briton, who would ' die 'tis true,' 
 but for love, by the Lord, no!' Certes, in Will's 
 coloring, that Conqueror out of his corslet is ' the 
 best king of good-fellows;' and many thanks to the 
 Warwickshire Wizard for a peep at fond-heartedness 
 under ' a stubborn outside and aspect of iron.' 
 
 ' I speak to thee plain soldier. — And while thou liv'st, dear Kate, 
 take a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy; for he perforce must 
 do thee rig^ht, because he hath not the gift to woo in other places: 
 for these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into 
 ladies' favors — they do always reason themselves out again. What! 
 a speaker is but a prater ; a rhyme is but a ballad; a good leg will 
 fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a 
 carl'd pate will grow bald; a fair face w'lW wither; a full eye will 
 M'ax hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon, or, 
 rather, the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright, and never 
 changes, but keeps his course truly. And what say'st thou then to 
 niy love ? Speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee.' 
 
 " Kate naturally asks of her royal father's superior, 
 ' Is it possible dat I should love the enemy of France?' 
 
 and liberal Hal replies by a tnorceau of rather pungent 
 
 perplexity— 
 
 * Bulwer. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEAKE. 133 
 
 ' No ; it is not possible that you should love the enemy of France, 
 Kate : but in loving me you should love the friend of France ; for I 
 love France so well, that / will not part with a village of it — I will 
 have it all mine: and, Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, 
 then yours is France, and you are mine. 
 
 ' Kath. — / cannot tell vat is dat.' 
 
 And when, at last, the 'phis belle Katherine et divine 
 deesse'' finds the ' plain soldier' irresistible, and sur- 
 renders, provided ' it shall please le roy son pere," 
 Harry Plantagenet's portrait-painter displays a con- 
 quering sovereign's smile, with great significancy : 
 
 ' Nay, it will please him well, Kate ; — it shall please him, Kate.' 
 
 " To return again to Shakspeare general. Never 
 was there a pioneer who inarched by a less circuitous 
 route to the heart's core, or with more facility recorded 
 its mazy workings and windings serpentine. He seems 
 to have possessed a passport — a singular privilege 
 of entree, of permanent validity, in virtue of which he 
 penetrated without impediment to the springs of 
 human action, though they were deeper by fathoms 
 than the love of Rosalind;* and though many others, 
 not unknown to poetic fame, have sounded and re- 
 ported these hidden springs, whose reports have often 
 been enveloped in obscurity weU-nigh profound as 
 the springs themselves, — yet list to mighty Will, and 
 you have their most lucid exposition, deepest meaning, 
 * As You Like it, act iv. 3. 
 
134 CHAPTER V. 
 
 truest import. Familiar with the world within world, 
 man, as with the hornbook of liis infancy, 
 
 ' Turn liim to any cause of policy, 
 The gordian knot of it he will unloose 
 Familiar as his garter.' 
 
 You alluded to the multiplicity of poetical beauties 
 which distinguishes the page of Shakspeare, and to 
 the apparent inadvertency "with which they were 
 dispersed. Numerically, they are, indeed, a lovely 
 legion; and in their careless, unstudied disposition, 
 resemble (list, oh! Mary!) 
 
 ' a forest-bank in Spring, 
 All flushed with violets and anemones.'* 
 
 Are there any stores like unto Will's, from which 
 admirers, entering with a cacoetJies excwpendi, return 
 so laden with goodly proofs of Genius, Fancy, Wis- 
 dom ? Open the massy volume of that 
 
 ' Bear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame,' 
 
 and over every of its prolific pages may we not each 
 eagerly exclaim, with Fortinbras, 
 
 ' I have some rights of memory in this kingdom !'t 
 
 " It is not possible satisfactorily to specialize beauty, 
 where, as in that teeming treasure-house, the Works 
 
 * Mrs. Hemans. f Hamlet, last scene. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 135 
 
 of Sliakspeare^ its developments are innumerable as 
 to the eye of childliood appear the stars of heaven. 
 The casual quotation of passages from his works I 
 dislike, though Coleridge, in asserting Shakspeare's 
 unrivalled excellence, stated that ' proof positive' 
 of that pre-eminency would be afforded by such a 
 criterion: but the plan is objectionable; if the gem be 
 estimable it should retain its author's setting. I 
 tolerate no vagrancy here, (continued E. laughingly, 
 laying his hand on the volume before him,) not even 
 vagrant admiration: nay, I would conceal air-guns 
 among these priceless leaves, that should explode 
 upon fingers filching for Excerpta. Seriously — (you 
 may say to me, as Goneril to her poor old father, 
 
 ' As you are old and reverend, you should be wise*) — 
 
 seriously, then, is it satisfactory to turn Memory 
 adrift here, like a cockle-boat on a shoreless sea ? is it 
 not better far to sail leisurely round these flowery 
 coral rocks, — to float slowly and admiringly over 
 beds of shining pearl?" 
 
 C. — " While your faculty of speech is recruiting 
 strength, I frankly plead guilty of trespassing and 
 poaching, against the statute you would establish. 
 The Ivy Lodge quota of luxurious leisure is not, be 
 it remembered, common to many; and in that one 
 * King Lear, act i. 4. 
 
136 CHAPTER V. 
 
 volume there is, to those to whom readmg is a relax- 
 ation from the toil of life, ' the labor of an age in 
 piled' leaves. A casual spoil of yesterday I found 
 in an expression of Goneril's father : 
 
 ' O, how this mother swells toward my heart! 
 Hysterica passio ! down, thou climbing sorrow, 
 Thy element's below!'* 
 
 In this exclamation there is a remarkable example 
 of the rhetorical figure, prosopoeia : 
 
 ' Down, thou climbing Sorrow!' 
 
 It would be difficult to adduce many instances in our 
 tongue of personification more terse and emphatic; 
 yet on the Poet's page it occurs but as an ordinary 
 ebullition of the passionate Lear; — there is no flourish 
 of trumpets in its neighbourhood, announcing that a 
 king was about to make a right royal use of language. 
 But the utter absence of oratorical ostentation is one 
 especial characteristic of this voluminous author." 
 
 E. — " ! what ineffable modesty may be beholden 
 here, in union with transcendent majesty! — what 
 wondrous ownership of almost superhuman genius, 
 and entire abstinency from pretension ; — the giant's 
 strength, exercised with girlish gentleness. Heard 
 you ever this Poet, who, if inexhaustible versatility 
 of mind might be allowed to justify self-complacency, 
 * King Lear, act ii. 4. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 137 
 
 might have lorded it as the Emperor of Egotists — 
 yet where he himself may be suspected of the parole, 
 heard you ever a prelude or coda to a passage how- 
 soever grand or brilliant, which could be detected in 
 resolving into ' I am Sir Oracle ?' Is not the tenor 
 of the Poet's personal plea, 
 
 ' Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts?'* 
 
 Was he not speaking for himself, when ' admired 
 Miranda' accounted modesty as 'the jewel in her 
 dower ?'t Mark, and inwardly digest, this speaking 
 picture from the Winter's Tale,+ of feeling too deep 
 'for words upon their streams to bear:' the king 
 Leontes receives intelligence of his long-lost daughter; 
 and the scene is with the king and an attached lord : 
 
 ' There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very 
 gesture: tliey looked as they had heard of a world ransomed or one 
 destroyed: A notable passion of wonder appeared in them: but the 
 wisest beholder that knew no more than seeing, could not say if the 
 importance were joy or sorrow; but in the extremity of the one, it 
 must needs be.' 
 
 The allusion to a cause of wonderment so grand as 
 the loss or rescue of a world, sheds an halo of solemnity 
 over this picture, which, as it essays to portray the 
 intensity of parental joy, does not shock religious 
 feeling by irreverent misplacement. But let us turn 
 from the painting to the artist. Has he reserved 
 * Henry v. Chorus. f Tempest, iii. 1. % Act v. 2. 
 
 T 
 
138 CHAPTER V. 
 
 tliis description for the pomp of royal recitation?^ — 
 lias he allotted it to the humblest even of his heroes ? 
 Nay, it comes from one of the dramatist's third-class 
 personcB, a gentleman; — one of the Shaksperian school, 
 though, who is not ^loth to cast away his speech, 
 having taken great pains to con it,'* but who pre- 
 faces this unlabored and exquisite recital with the 
 apologetical assurance, 
 
 ' I make a broken delivery of the business.' " 
 
 C. — " The patient endurance of Hermione, queen of 
 Leontes, in that same play, has always appeared to me 
 an admirable exemplification of a noble woman's de- 
 portment under the keenest anguish known to virtue — 
 the suspicion of its fidelity. In seasons when intense 
 feelings rush into the heart like converging and 
 convulsive waves, drowning its utterance, the eye 
 frequently supplies a timely conduit from the swelling 
 flood. No '^holy moisture,' however, relaxes the 
 tense, tearless suiFerings of Hermione; and in the 
 place of that fluent relief to speechless sorrow, we 
 have the eloquent protestation of vilified Innocency : 
 ' Good my lords, 
 I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
 Commonly are ; the want of which vain dew 
 Perchance shall dry your pities : but I have 
 That honourable grief lodged heke, tvMch burns 
 Worse than tears drown.' f " 
 
 * Twelfth-Night, act i. 5. t Winter's Tale, ii. 2. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. lo9 
 
 E. — "A seeming echo from the very fount of grief! 
 but of grief so uninterpretable, that in listening to 
 those excellent accents of an injured Woman's woe, 
 we may be said to incline our ear but to a parable- 
 The misery of Hermione is of no oral kind — it must 
 be borne incommunicably because it cannot be told: 
 and as it is the privilege of woman's nature to be sus- 
 ceptible of a finer because more sinless order of joy 
 than man'sj is not more poignant woe, alas ! its contin- 
 gent penalty? It is an occasional effect of the excess 
 of sorrow to torpify and deaden the mind's emotions ; 
 and it is to Massinger, I think, that we owe this 
 exquisite delineation of such an effect : 
 
 ' Her cheek of youth was beautiful, 
 Till withering sorrow blanch'd the bright rose there; 
 But Grief did lay his icy finger on it. 
 And chill'd her to a cold and joyless statue.' 
 
 But in Hermione there is a confiict of strong passions 
 which prevents her acute anguish from lapsing into 
 lethargy. For it is the agony of one grand affection 
 which sometimes subsides into stupor — the violence 
 of an isolated passion which, from a state of perilous 
 perturbation, declines to passiveness: in Hermione 
 it is not solely the scorned wife who suffers wrong; it 
 is also the loving mother, from whom her babe is torn, 
 and she left desolate in her degradation. And well 
 might her unweeping bosom hum with its parching 
 
140 CHAPTER V. 
 
 burthen of 'honourable grief!' — sad spectacle to the 
 imagination, a woman's breast made thus a battle- 
 field for conflicting calamities — a prey, not to the 
 ruthless, rapid outrages of a dismantling march, but 
 to the scorching fury of a lasting strife. Ah ! it is a 
 sorry sight to see, on this world's billows, a frail fabric 
 of this our ' glassy essence,'* driven through the surge 
 of sorrow by the gale of Passion; but more heart- 
 rending is it, when hurricanes of Grief meet and con- 
 tend, and lash that surge into sleepless tumult within 
 the feeble frame of woman !" 
 
 C — " Although few of us resemble Genevevef in 
 preferring songs whose burden is grievous rather than 
 joyous, there is a grandeur in the grief of Hermione, 
 which we contemplate admiringly, as the enthusiastic 
 artist the fascinating features of a chef-d'ceuvre. It is, 
 in truth, a study, the character of Hermione, of Sorrow 
 majestic in mould and symmetry: — how different in 
 the sanctity of her distress is this cruelly-divorced wife, 
 to the clamorous widow Constance ! % Hermione long- 
 ing for her father's presence in her tribulation, ' for 
 pity, not revenge;' Constance, in boisterous impre- 
 cation — " 
 
 E. — " Call the expression of that ardent mother's 
 heart tiehement, not boisterous. Count it pragmatical 
 
 * Measure for Measure, ii. 2. f In Coleridge's lines on "Love." 
 % King John. Shakspeare. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 141 
 
 if you will, but I interpose an objection to ' clamour' 
 also, as descriptive of tlie boly energy of an anguished 
 mother's love — and it is from anguished love that the 
 fervor, sometimes the fearful fervor, of Constance 
 derives its prime impetus. Ah ! that maternal instinct, 
 which dwells in many mothers as a profound affection, 
 seldom seen in strife, is in Constance developed in 
 the throe and paroxysm of quick passion; her heart 
 is at it were a volcano, from whence, mingling with 
 the anathemas of indignant wrong, her mother's love 
 gushes like terrific torrents of lava, and you wonder 
 that her bosom is not burned by its indwelling fire. 
 
 but a mystery of mysteries is, in the abstract, a 
 Mother's love I — of many human feelings unfathomable, 
 the most fathomless. Well ajErms one who knew its 
 intensity, 
 
 ' There is none — 
 In all this cold and hollow world — no fount 
 Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within 
 A Mother's heart!'* 
 
 1 protest that in all the copious chronicles which tell 
 us of the heart's purest sensations and sympathies, I 
 hear no thrilling tones of 
 
 ' The still, sad music of humanity,' 
 
 which move me more mightily than does this ' Beauty 
 
 * Mrs. Henians, 
 
142 CHAPTER V. 
 
 of History,' told, I fancy, with intenser pathos in 
 the French tongue than in ours : its brief exordium 
 likewise justifies recital : — 
 
 " ' Quelle plume pourroit peindre toutes les scenes 
 de douleur ou de joie qui se passent dans le sein 
 d'une mere! Qui pourroit decrire ses tendres sol- 
 licitudes pour I'objet de sa tendresse; ses allarmes, 
 ses agitations, lorsqu'elle est en danger de le perdre; 
 son desespoir lorsqu'elle Fa perdu? La femme d'un 
 noble Venitien, ayant vu mourir son fils unique^ 
 s'abandonnoit aux plus cruelles douleurs : un religieux 
 tachoit de la consoler. — * Souvenez-vous,' lui disoit-il, 
 ' du patriarche Abraham, a qui Dieu commanda de 
 plonger lui-meme le poignard dans le sein de son fils, 
 et qui obeit, sans murmurer.' ' Ah ! mon reverend 
 pere,' repondit-elle, ' Dieu ti'auroit jamais commande 
 ce sacrifice a une mere!' " 
 
 C. — " Nor would any but a mother's heart have 
 suggested the impossibility of God's requiring such 
 a sacrifice. How many tender tales are told of ma- 
 ternal love, the most unquenchable and unselfish of 
 the aifections ; and often how unrequited is it by the 
 object of its solicitude — solicitude which, in its quality 
 of long-sufiferance, is of all human properties the near- 
 est of kin to the divine attributes of pitying patience 
 and freeness to forgive ; to the marvellous tenacity of 
 maternal above all other tenderness it belongs, to live 
 
A WORD EN PASSANT UPON MRS. HEMANS. 14o 
 
 on through despisal and rejection and long acquaint- 
 ance with grief. Shakspeare, in Lear,* has made the 
 maddened king invoke a malediction upon Goneril, 
 which, dire in its import, affords proof of the un- 
 bounded degree in which the Poet was conversant 
 with the anatomy of the moral feelings, and with their 
 respective vulnerability to the shafts of Calamity : 
 
 ' Turn all her mother's pains and benefits 
 To laughter and contempt; that she may feel 
 How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
 To have a thankless child!' 
 
 " Of those who have most touchingly depicted the 
 heaven-moidded lineaments of maternal love, con- 
 spicuous is the Poetess whose affirmation of a mother's 
 heart being the sole earthly fount of deathless love 
 you just now repeated. ' Unused albeit to the melt- 
 ing mood,'t I remember well, that on first reading^ 
 her lines on the subject of ' Flowers and Music in a 
 Room of Sickness,' — " 
 
 E. — " 'Build there, carpenter — the air is sweet !'J" 
 C. — " — strange symptoms of ' my mother came 
 into mine eyes,'§ and ' made me play the woman. '^ 
 " It is impossible,' remarked an eloquent preacher' 
 whom I recently heard, ' it is impossible to possess 
 without grief, if not without passion;' and it does- 
 
 * King Lear, act ii. 4. f Othello, v. 2. % Troilus & Cressida, iii. 2, 
 § Henry v. act iv. 6. ^ Henry viii. act iii. 2. 
 
144 CHAPTER V. 
 
 indeed appear inevitable to the abode of impetuous 
 
 and pure Love, that Sorrow also should have its 
 
 dwelling there. No light or easy yoke was that oi 
 
 the affections to this most passible Poetess, with whose 
 
 lay of love there ever mingled ' an under-music of 
 
 lament r the tears of her love and sorrow ' flow into 
 
 one another like crystal rivers,'* which bear along 
 
 an ark magnificent, from whence proceeds awhile the 
 
 voice of repining, anon of resignation, and then of rapt 
 
 anticipation. Her allusions to the land which ' Sorrow 
 
 and Death may not enter,' are, for the most part, 
 
 glowing images of beatitude ; and she is impressive as 
 
 Young in her spiritual communings and intercourse 
 
 between the soul and its Source. Thus, when the 
 
 hopeful Mother would reassure her Lilian of recovery 
 
 and of ' going forth with the day-spring,' the latter 
 
 responds — 
 
 ' Hope it not I 
 Dream it no more, my mother! — there are things 
 Known but to God and to the parting soul 
 Which feels his thrilling summons.' 
 
 " Over many of her paintings there is the mingled 
 gorgeousness and sadness of an autumnal eve; for 
 before her spirit's eye mantling shadows sometimes 
 gathered, obscuring Hope's radiant smile; but a vision 
 like hers, divinely fostered, could not long be dar- 
 * Massinger. 
 
A PASSING COMMENT UPON YOUNG. 
 
 145 
 
 kened by tlie winter-clouds of Life and Death ; and 
 as she advanced nearer to the Everduring Spring, O 
 it is cheering to know that, 
 
 ' hour by hour, her soul's dissolving shroud 
 Melted to radiance like a silvery cloud.'*" 
 
 E. — " The Muse awarded to Mrs. Hemans a plume 
 from the loveliest and a tone from the sweetest of the 
 birds of Paradise, — ^before the plumage but after the 
 song had suffered by the Fall, else had her strain 
 been joyous as her tones are brilliant: now, however, 
 hath she and Sorrow severed their alliance, and no 
 longer doth her joy and love flow forth in ' broken 
 music;' for now hath her emancipated spirit attained 
 its apotheosis, 
 
 * Where fiery passion-clouds have no abode, 
 And the sky's temple-arch o'erflo.vs with GoD.'t 
 
 " You mentioned the author of the Night Thoughts 
 in remarkmg upon one of the rich veins in the mine 
 of melody bequeathed to us by Mrs. Hemans — I mean 
 that elevated tone in which she dilates on Life, and 
 Death, and Immortality. E,everting for a moment to 
 Young, — how impressively has that deep Thinker on 
 those tremendous themes portrayed that momentous 
 junction of life with death, to the realization of which 
 * Poet's Dying Hymn. + Despondency and Aspiration. 
 
146 CHAPTER T. 
 
 each one, in his own person, is surely but reluctantly 
 advancing. Among much that may be turgid and 
 bombastic in the Thoughts of Young, there are also 
 startling outbursts of language, wherein the heaven- 
 aspiring soul speaks vernacularly, — ebullitions of the 
 overwrought and struggling spirit, which have no 
 sympathy with the parade of words that may precede 
 and follow it, and which must not suffer deterioration 
 by the suspicion of such a sympathy: it would be 
 unjust to the Poet and unprofitable to ourselves, to 
 confound those fruitful oases with the quagmires by 
 which they are not seldom surrounded. For my own 
 part, I only perceive the Poet in these significant 
 places — only recognize his voice when oppressed and 
 dwarfish faculties seem to have been long grappling 
 with gigantic meaning, and to have broken suddenly 
 into almost-superhuman utterance. His grand con- 
 ceptions wrestle in manacles as it were, till their 
 moment of mental manumission, and then the Poet's 
 spirit really ' speaks with his tongue.' I adverted to 
 Young's delineation of the ' union redoutahle de la 
 mort et de la vie.'* We may survey many galleries 
 of poetic and prosaic pictures without lighting upon 
 a representation of man going down to silence and 
 the dust, more graphic than this : — 
 
 * Madame de StaeL 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 1-iT 
 
 ' Life's little stage is a small eminence, 
 Inch-high the grave above — that home of man 
 Where dwells the multitude: we gaze around. 
 We read their monuments — we sigh — 
 And while we sigh we sink, and are what we deplore; 
 Lamenting or lamented all our lotl' 
 
 There is no waste of canvas or color here — but how 
 effective is the painting ! 
 
 " In the Night Thoughts of Young, the Poet often 
 contemplates and sometimes confronts the Last Enemy; 
 and over the pages which record this spectral inter- 
 course there hovers a weird influence — a charnel- 
 house effect — a gaunt semi-reality of the sable Foe, 
 which, if it be all but unreal mockery, does never- 
 theless ' feelingly persuade us what we are.'* Young 
 summons ' spirits from the vasty deep,' and, more 
 potent than Glendower,t they come at his bidding, 
 and at their approach we mvoluntarily ' commune 
 with our hearts, and are still.' Many other poets 
 have likewise reported ghostly meditation upon death 
 as conditional, and ghostly converse with Death as 
 personal; and in Shakspeare — who not only pursued 
 the vicissitudes of life to the grave and gate of death, 
 but returned with the spirit to assert its wrongs — 
 in his unfailing phrase-book of all our human feelings, 
 we find frequent and earnest conjectures upon that 
 condition to which we approximate, whose secrets 
 * As You Like it, act ii. L t 1 Henry iv. act iii. L 
 
148 CHAPTER V. 
 
 man learns only when he ceases to be .mortal. And 
 these conjectures are conceived in various terms of 
 doubt or definite expectancy, correspondent to the 
 degree in which vague surmise or assured faith pre- 
 vailed in the individual conjecturing. Yet, whether 
 the soul be left to wander through an uncharted uni- 
 verse at the dictate of its own untaught theories, or 
 whether it be guided by precepts which cannot err, 
 and which for ever point to a resting-place encircled 
 by rivers of joy, — tjet does the immortal soul, a con- 
 scious Renegade from Innocency, recoil from its last 
 Retreat : 
 
 ' The wide, th' unbounded prospect lays before us, 
 But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.'* 
 
 Dread instinct, which trembles at the barrier that 
 separates us from bliss; but dread beneficently per- 
 petuated, to restrain the religious from impatience, 
 the rash from precipitancy. Alas! alas! were not 
 man's Creator his Controller also, how many unpre- 
 pared creatures would, in fanatic or romantic impulse, 
 have hurried from the hallucinations or danced from 
 the delights of this world, to the instant and inter- 
 jninable destiny of the next!" 
 
 C. — (After a pause.) — " The famous soliloquy in 
 Hamlet is, probably, Shakspeare's grandest and most 
 * Cato. Addison. 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. 149 
 
 conspicuous embodiment of that funereal order of 
 thought to which you have most exchisively alluded 
 — the inquiry which starts instinctively from the soul, 
 in reference to its destination at death. — 
 
 ' To die — to sleep ; 
 No more? — and, by a sleep, to say we end 
 The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks 
 
 That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation 
 
 Devoutly to be wish'd. To die; to sleep; 
 
 To sleep! — perchance to dream! Aye, there's the rub: 
 
 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 
 
 When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
 
 Must give us pause.' 
 
 But all such questionings are most definitely answer- 
 able at the bar of Conscience, by the code of Truth ; 
 and Shakspeare has arraigned at that tribunal crimes 
 so various in magnitude, and reported mental conflicts 
 so multifarious, with a pen so vivid, that in entering 
 upon the subject with him, ' the world seems all 
 before us,' and — " 
 
 E. — " Therefore will we choose one only illustration 
 of a conscience in revolt, the mutterings of murderous 
 Macbeth. When I think of them I am sensible of a 
 penchant for the perpendicular in ' each particular 
 hair' of the scanty remnant left to me ; yet, start not, 
 meek Maiden ! for thou, that knowest ' not the doc- 
 trine of ill-doing,' * canst little comprehend the torture 
 * Winter's Tale, act i. 2. 
 
150 CHAPTER V. 
 
 which e'en here treads hard on guilt — unimaginable 
 to thy timidity is the cowardice begot by crime. — 
 
 * One cried, ^God bless us!' and, 'Amen!' the other; 
 As they had seen me with these hangman's hands. 
 
 / could not say ' Amen,' 
 When they did say ' God bless us!' 
 
 ' Lady Macbeth. — Consider it not so deeply. 
 
 ' But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen 9' ' 
 
 Ah! Mr. C.^ were all our designs invariably referred 
 to the high court of equity that sits within, and its 
 decrees made absolute in our actions, soon would 
 shoals of a certain species of fish — by some naturalists 
 called the land-shark — offend, by stagnancy, the air 
 at Westminster and elsewhere. Mourning, ye gowned 
 gentry! mourning, with Othello, your occupation gone, 
 are there many who, in grievous destitution of chattels, 
 might righteously compute as their own, hoth 
 
 ' Their robe and their integrity to heaven ?' 
 
 " Now were you to forswear Ivy Lodge for ever, 
 as the penalty of its occupier's prolixity, I could 
 not forbear mentioning a colloquy in Measure for 
 Measure, between the noble Isabella and her brother 
 Claudio : the circumstances are her dishonor, or the 
 alternative, his death. ' The dread of something after 
 
A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE, 151 
 
 death' unmans him, and he quails like a coward in 
 shuddering hesitancy between opposing evils ; — before 
 him are shadowy horrors ; behind, the urgent, lofty, 
 and sometimes-indignant honor of his sister. ' Death,* 
 murmurs the reluctant sacrifice, 
 
 ' Death is a fearful thing. 
 
 ' Isabella. — And shamed life a hateful. 
 
 ' Aye, but to die, and go we know not wherej 
 To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; 
 This sensible, warm motion to become 
 A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit 
 To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
 In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; 
 To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
 And blown with restless violence round about 
 The pendant world ; or to be worse than worst 
 Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts 
 Imagine howling! — 'tis too horrible! 
 The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
 That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
 Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
 To what we fear of death.' " 
 
 The garrulous old man identified himself so per- 
 fectly with the shrinking Claudio in the recital of this 
 fine passage, that when he resumed his original 
 character I borrowed from the Sun's Darling of Ford 
 — a play from which he had previously quoted — an 
 exclamation of Raybright ; 
 
 " ' Your eyes amazed me first, but now mine ears 
 Feel your tongue's charm !' " 
 
15S CHAPTER V. 
 
 E. — " Nay, the praise be great and glorious Will's. 
 But now, liaving dwelt at tolerable length, upon the 
 dread of death and the timidity of wisdom, turn we 
 for a moment to what my friend Folly might have 
 laughed at as something like ' the bravery of igno- 
 rance.'* Know, firstly, then, that besides enjoying 
 the confidence of these slumbering dependents in wiry 
 confinement, and sundry domesticated animals of which 
 I am in some instances sole proprietor and in others 
 patron, I have the honor to be on excellent terms 
 with at least a dozen urchins of my neighbours. The 
 hour is long since gone when the mere imagery of 
 grace and beauty had power to charm — when I feasted 
 Fancy on the regimen of Robbie Burns, ' the admiring 
 a fine woman ;'t and long hath the sage Maximist, 
 great William of immortal memory, convinced me 
 that goodness is loveliness, and ' Virtue is beauty. '+ 
 And with these changed feelings I keep pace with 
 lamented Letitia Landon in love of the frank, fond 
 heart — the ' sprightfulness, the fair cheeks and full 
 eyes'§ of boyhood. It would warm you. Sir, in a 
 December morning, to see the rosy fronts and guile- 
 less humour of the fellows of whom I spoke, upon 
 whom I confer a brief happiness by a smile, a penny, 
 and a pat on the head; and how pitiable the pale, 
 
 * The Sun's Darling, act i. 1. f Letter to Thomson. 
 
 :J: Twelfth-Night, iii. 4. § Jeremy Taylor. 
 
CHAPTER V. 153 
 
 precocious boys in town appear, to these, my jocund 
 younkers ! The mother of one of them — a reckless, 
 ruddy rebel, rising five — told me a few weeks ago, 
 that the child came home upon a cloudy afternoon, 
 with a serious look imusual. He had just witnessed 
 a funeral; and a resolution was founding itself upon 
 an apprehension which the funeral, taking place at 
 that hour, had excited. Presently, with a countenance 
 as portentous as if he had been an avant-courier of the 
 earthquake, he expressed to his mother a solemn 
 protest against being buried in the afternoon of a 
 winter-day — in case he should'' nt get to heaven lefore 
 dark!" 
 
 The sixth stroke towards ten was sounding, when 
 E.'s veteran retainer announced the vehicle in which 
 his daughter-in-baptism was accustomed to migrate 
 to and from Ivy Lodge. There was a striking con- 
 trast in the physiognomical aspects of the Elder and 
 his servant; for while the former was habitually 
 mirthful, there was a settled sedateness in the face 
 of the latter which remained unruffled, either by 
 smile or frown, under the raillery of liis voluble but 
 kind superior. His gesture, too, was desperately 
 methodical ; evincing none of that submission to im- 
 pulse which ever animated the demeanor of his master. 
 On that declining plane of our mortal term, where- 
 from, when man brings his years to an end, he 
 
154 CHAPTER Y. 
 
 slides into the grave, it was hard to say which of the 
 two was foremost ; but if the domestic were "^ under 
 authority," he did not appear to derive contentment 
 in the especial circumstance of contiguity with a 
 clime in which distinctions cease — in the prospect of 
 a situation without servitude, or such as is perfect 
 freedom. If his were a gravity impressed by con- 
 templation of the grave — and a thoughtless man would 
 not long have sojourned with E. — the object of his 
 contemplation must have been hung with branches of 
 yew and cypress, to which he was advancing through 
 a vale of tears ; to the Elder, in whose tone when con- 
 versing upon " the inevitable hour" there was neither 
 timer nor presumptions confidence, the narrow-house 
 seemed garlanded more than sadly closed in with 
 evergreen. This was the outline of his argument: 
 — " It is not meet that guests-expectant of a Great 
 King, such as is He who claims our souls' allegiance 
 — that children journeying to the home of a Father, 
 who waits to welcome them by a better name than 
 sons — should march mournfully to their eternal man- 
 sions ; and though we lay our bodies down to moulder 
 for a while in the vestibule of the Sovereign's court — 
 at the threshold of the home of spirits — hath not One, 
 mighty to save, prepared at infinite cost a pathway for 
 the disembodied divinity, by which it mounts through 
 the else trackless space to its celestial father-land? 
 
CHAPTER V. 155 
 
 The dust importunes us in tlie pleadings of natural 
 alliance, and our voices catch a gloomy tone from its 
 importunity; while we, meantime forgetful that we 
 are but temporary aliens from angelic fellowship, sad- 
 den the hours of our exile, by suspending our harps 
 upon the willows, instead of sounding them to songs 
 of thankfiilness for that measui'eless gift of promise — 
 life in the land of Love — whereof, to the grateful, the 
 earnest of possession is sometimes anticipated, through 
 the inspiration of Heaven's prime legate, Hope ! 
 
 ' Wliy should we, then, with an untov/ard mind, 
 And in the weakness of humanity, 
 From natural wisdom turn our hearts away, 
 To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears, 
 
 »And, feeding- on disquiet, thus disturb 
 The calm of nature with our restless thoughts ?'*" 
 
 The stroke was on six, I said, when Mary was 
 favored with an injunction to move: whereupon E. 
 rejoined, 
 
 " Now fie, say I, upon thy pestilent punctuality, 
 punctilious Ben! who, nathless that our pates have 
 whitened in company, hast no consideration for my 
 comfort — positively none! Harkee, Benjamin the 
 inflexible! since Mr. C, in unappreciable kindness 
 to thy grim-visaged nephew, has chosen to be my 
 bonny half-bairn's charioteer, I suspect thou hast, 
 
 I* The Excursion, Wordsworth. 
 
156 CHAPTER V. 
 
 in gratitude to him, propelled the movements of the 
 clocks, sir. — Now it contenteth the responsible tenant 
 of the Lodge to keei^ up with the age — nay, Ben, to 
 jog along a little in the rear, having cheerful co-mates 
 in our ivied exile. But, O Watchman set in alabaster, 
 what of the night?" 
 
 Benjamin replies, and makes his exit; and the 
 Elder changes his key. 
 
 " Within those stolid and impassive outworks there 
 beats a brave heart and warm; and if Benjamin were 
 taken from me, then indeed should I be bereaved. 
 If there are two living creatures who understand 
 each other hetter than do Ben and I, it would gratify 
 my curiosity to see them. — My pleasantry passes by 
 him, as you observe, like an idle wind; and though I 
 indulge in it at times too freely, I never disturb his 
 serenity nor affright his propriety. Once, only, did 
 he dubiously regard me — it was when, in gardening 
 operations, I professed mj'self to be almost a proselyte 
 to the Wordsworthian theory of a sentient principle 
 in plants: at what to him appeared the monstrous 
 
 * faith, that every flower 
 Enjoys the air it breathes,' 
 
 Ben twisted his countenance to such an expression 
 of adamantine infidelity, that, rather than endanger 
 the issue of a writ De Limatico inquirendo, at the suit 
 
CHAPTER V. 157 
 
 of my servants, I suiFer Benjamin to remain in un- 
 molested herbal heathanism. But we are deserting 
 our Idol of the evening without one ' Praise and Peace 
 be to thee, Poet-King !' — anon of thee. Monarch of 
 the Muse's Sons! And bless thee, darling Child — 
 Mary avourneen ! Look now, the sky is one wide smile, 
 but chastened, for the glittering orbs are in adoration, 
 could we but hear them. Or rather, is it not the 
 boundary of the Blest we see above us? and what 
 we count as shining stars, are they not angels' eyes — 
 bright, but full of pity as they gaze on a scene which 
 the presence of ilieir God does not gladden? — Aye, 
 herein lies the secret of the pensiveness of Night. — 
 Surely at this moment is God beautifying and hallow- 
 ing the world with his blessing; and living things are 
 breathing — scarcely breathing is the hushed Earth — 
 as conscious of the effluence of Heaven. A fond 
 farewell, sweet Mary! — forget not the Old Man's 
 many errors in thy prayers !" 
 
COLLOQUY IV. 
 
 CONCERNING, CHIEFLY, 
 
 " THE BLIND OLD MAN, AND HIS IMMORTAL STORY 
 OF A LOST PARADISE." 
 
 It would be a mode of proceeding quite un-English, 
 to enter upon several consecutive colloquies, -without 
 commenting on the state of the weather. Moreover, 
 when, without violating Truth to gratify Patriotism, 
 a compliment ca7i be paid to the cHmate of his 
 country, it is a Briton's duty to do so; for foreign 
 calumnies upon our native skies are permitted to 
 provoke undue contumely firom a people incontinently 
 prone to grumble among themselves, at much that 
 invigorates their individual constitution and national. 
 Touching that basely-traduced atmospherical pro- 
 duction, called Enghsh weather, we owe an immense 
 amount of gratitude to that more dauntless class of 
 Nature's minstrels, who, leaving gentler poets to tune 
 their paeans to stars and zephyrs, proclaim the sterner 
 
160 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 charms of hail, snow, wind, storm, and vapour. And, 
 because eccentric and half-anomalous, among this 
 " dauntless" band, let us elect the mild Cowper, for 
 himself and clan, as the recipient of our gratulations. 
 It is pleasure, slightly tinged with pity, to find the 
 valiant valetudinarian — bold in seclusion, timid in the 
 shock of men — scourging the pleasant vices of the 
 herd, which he, " a stricken deer," had quitted; — 
 right comfortable is it, to see him putting upon his 
 country a commanding aspect which he could not 
 put upon himself; and to hear him thus venting the 
 healthy vigor of his English heart, before one of the 
 gloomiest of national pictures — 
 
 " Though thy clime 
 Be fickle, and thy year most part deform'd 
 With dripping rains, or wither'd by a frost, 
 I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies, 
 And fields without a flower, for warmer France 
 With all her vines, nor for Ausonia's groves 
 Of golden fruitage and her myrtle bowers." 
 
 Now in the creed of one at least (and of the least) 
 of liis compatriots, of few pleasanter sensations is this 
 cold hut of human clay susceptible, than when the 
 genial sun melts all the heart within it into a gladness 
 so diffusive, that after inundating all surrounding' 
 objects with its viewless flood of joy, it extends a 
 large flow of compassion to those blinded masses 
 abroad, who imagine the Indomitable Isle to be en- 
 
CHAPTER VI. 16X 
 
 veloped in perpetual hrouillards. If our variations do 
 frequently outstrip the almanack, and carry despair 
 to elderly gentlemen subject d V ennuyeuse maladie, ce 
 de conserver la sante par tm trop grand regime,^ do 
 tliey not also afford to our native autliors a topic so 
 inexhaustible, that every fact which may occur, or 
 fiction which may be conceived, can, in description, 
 be furnished with express circumambient drapery and 
 decoration? There is in Britons a proverbial power 
 to hear, — a property which pleases our statesmen and 
 has puzzled our foes; and the British skies possess a 
 similar quality in an eminent degree ; for those of any 
 other country, having had to withstand an equal share 
 of chiefly-abusive remark, would have been worn out 
 by commentators. The canopy of Britain being more 
 notable for the variety of its patterns than for their 
 scenic sublimity, we have no artistes whose especial 
 forte is firmamental; — there are, however, several 
 literary aerial limners, of exquisite touch, within the 
 United Kingdom of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, 
 — on whose august person may " the heaven rain 
 odours," and, on her loyal realms, abimdance and 
 the spirit of Contentment. 
 
 The individual who presumes, by thus pream- 
 bidating, to delay the enthusiastic Elder's entry, (the 
 privilege of an uninterrupted parley after that event 
 * La Rocliefoucauld. 
 
162 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 being exceedingly hopeless,) has advocated more dis- 
 heartening causes than that which now, in defence of 
 his country, and without " consideration" of any kind, 
 he undertakes on behalf of the climate of his client. 
 He addresses, of course, a wise and discriminating 
 jury ; and contends, of course with deference, that to 
 an English subject upon whose amiable temperament 
 the evidence of sociality has a soothing eifect, and 
 who (perchance not having cared " to unsphere the 
 spirit of Plato,") may, in the lower walks of practical 
 philosophy, be contenting himself by simply making 
 the best of his condition at all times and in all places, 
 to such an one it cannot be merely reconciling, it 
 must be a matter of active rejoicing, that the Four 
 Seasons which preside over his country's year, and 
 exercise extensive influence on his country's weal, 
 should present, as they do, a truly edifying example 
 of mutual good feeling in their intercourse with each 
 other. Now this disposition is rarely found in a 
 limited coterie, where separate interests strongly 
 prevail, and jealoiisy is prompt to rise at ofiicious 
 intermeddling. Our Seasons maintain a most cordial 
 intimacy, and exchange visits and compliments, sans 
 ceremonie; and that lively movement of barometrical 
 mercury at which a maledictory man might rail, the 
 complacent jury I have the honor to address would 
 delight in, as an incontestable token that one of the 
 
CHAPTER VI. 163 
 
 subdominant three was on a visit to the regnant 
 Season. Where, too, in this " low-thoughted " sphere, 
 a small number of functionaries attain alternatively a 
 chief and brief authority, their individual period of 
 pre-eminency is very nicely marked: — our British 
 Seasons scorn a duration of presidency so accurately 
 defined: — there is a noble free-and-easiness in each 
 one's entrance upon duty, and exit from it, that 
 expands the ideas to reflect upon. And in this habit 
 of intervisitation one with another, the more sanguine 
 of the panel before which I am privileged to plead, 
 will immediately recognize the interest which the 
 entire Quaternity take in the affairs of Earth, under 
 different control. It may not be absurdly unreason- 
 able to regret, that when the veteran (though volatile) 
 Herald of Father Christmas looks abroad out-of-season, 
 there should be a cramping influence in his eye, which 
 at one period leaves shrubs, etc. in a state of nudity 
 when additional clothing is commonly preferred; and, 
 at another period, creates a panic on the banks at 
 which pale snowdrops sicken and go off in convulsions, 
 — which staggers itinerant melodists in mid-air, ex- 
 cites a general shudder among nestlings, and hurries 
 many a newly-perfected chrysalis to a bourne from 
 whence no butterfly returns. His occasional visits to 
 the mellow matron, Autimm, are, socially, beneficial, 
 as reminders to the benevolent in high places that 
 
164 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 in lower places the large family of Penury will soon 
 look longingly for 
 
 " little, nameless, unremember'd acts 
 Of kindness and of love ;"* 
 
 and if, in the liberality of his old heart, he acts as 
 proxy for the infant Spring, who can scowl at courtesy 
 commendable though cold? Howbeit, fair ladies and 
 judicious gentlemen of the jury, in social reciprocity 
 the Rulers of the British Year exercise dominion: 
 — by-and-by (is not pertness natural to the very, 
 lo&ry pretty?) the bright-eyed Spring bids laughing 
 defiance to her bald-headed Predecessor, who (in the 
 natural irritability of age,) blows chillingly upon her 
 cheek of smiles, sometimes even to their scattering; 
 — and, later, (can there exist a heart which such 
 solicitude affects not?) how often do we perceive the 
 ardent Summer adventuring into the realm of retiring 
 Autumn, to bless with one more kiss the Earth's 
 frail offspring, ere Autumn commits them to the cold 
 arms of Winter ? 
 
 The loving Summer retired from active duty in 
 1841 with blushing honors thick upon her. A fiat 
 had gone forth, benedictory to the harvest and the 
 store, and she responded cheerily to His benevolent 
 will whose minister she is: — the burdened fields, 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
CHAPTER YI. 165 
 
 therefore, stood so thick with corn, that the churl 
 might have found their rejoicing contagious, as by 
 hill-side and lowland the ripening grain bent its 
 burnished head to the soft breeze. It was making 
 glad the heart of man, and kept time to its low con- 
 gratulatory chant in these gentle undulations, as at 
 sweet music, lovely Lady, you may have swayed your 
 own fair form, impulsively. 0, Wordsworth ! chief 
 among the wise who proclaim a sentient attribute in 
 whatsoever the Inscrutable hath endowed with life, 
 a glorifying creed is thine, and is not visionary. — 
 Conscious, by the demonstrations of science, that we 
 are in contact with fecund animation, though to the 
 eye invisible, is it Wisdom which contemns the pro- 
 bability that we are dwellers in a vocal universe, 
 because upon our drowsied sense no audible accents 
 fall? If the eye be veiled from the perception of an 
 animated, why may not the ear be deafened to an 
 articulate world? Constructed and capacitated as we 
 now are, the Eternal " hath done wisely to conceal " 
 from this, our orbed observatory, a view as much too 
 vivid for our comfort as for our comprehension; for 
 how much greater latitude of emotion should we 
 require above that which we possess, if to the Kttle 
 microcosm, man, the vast and busy creation were 
 suddenly manifested in all its marvellous operations. 
 But this acquisition of intelligence is wisely reserved 
 
166 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 for a period when awe and wonder shall be excited 
 by many mighty discoveries, beside those pertaining 
 to our terrestrial sojourn: yet, among those dis- 
 coveries, thy faith, persevering Interpreter of the 
 Invisible and Inaudible! shall, doubtlessly, approve 
 its demonstrator and defender to have possessed a 
 vision clarified above his contemporaries, — a mind 
 whose ideality was less a baseless fabric of the fancy 
 than the outlines of a grand reality, which the rolling 
 away of cataract and cloud from human sight shall 
 leave disclosed, in the fulness and perfection of a 
 divine development. 
 
 Towards the close of an Autumn day, (of which 
 digression has so procrastinated the description, that 
 now I decline it altogether,) the Elder, in a rustic, 
 ivy-covered garden-seat, was luxuriating in the light 
 of a setting sun, the quivering song of the more wake- 
 ful or belated of the feathered quire, and the company 
 of rosy-tinted but well-nigh wearied flowers. 
 
 "Ah!" said he, on observing me, " is not this a 
 season and a scene in which, if ever, we may imagine 
 the primal state of our first progenitors, when, seated 
 in a sinless sanctuary, and sheltered by their Maker's 
 smile, they watched this wondrous receding of Day 
 and solemn approach of Night? But I was gazing 
 slothftiUy when I saAV you — 
 
 ' Thought ivas not — in enjojraent it expired' 
 
CHAPTER VI. 167 
 
 as I sat imbibing the still spirit of the spectacle-^ 
 for it is eminently one of those, whereof 
 
 ' The colours and the forms are unto us 
 An appetite — a feeling and a love 
 Which have no need of a remoter charm 
 By thought supplied, or any interest 
 Unhorrovv'd from the eye.'*" 
 
 I expressed regret that, by obtruding, I had broken 
 the spell which had bound him in so blissful a state 
 of bondage. 
 
 E. — " Save your regrettings for a more deserving 
 occasion: I prefer quick feelings to supine; — silent 
 felicity engenders indolence of thought, and that 
 which is now voluptuousness, presently degenerates 
 to vapidity. How potent are external influences 
 upon the mind — so various, too, in their effects, that 
 the inner world of the feelings makes its diurnal 
 revolution, and exhibits a different phase at morn, 
 and noon, and eve, and night. When I go out in the 
 fresh vigor of the morning, and am in health, I feel 
 to this day something of the exidtation of my early 
 life, when Care went not up with me at morn into the 
 high places, and every ecstatic throb of the heart, 
 could it have spoken, would have 
 
 ' Bless' d God for the mountains I't 
 
 'Mornings are mysteries,' says an old poet:+ their 
 * Wordsworth. f Mary Howitt. t Honry Vaughan. 
 
168 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 effect of light and air stirred up electrically the whole 
 
 inert and latent joy within me, and my mood was wildly 
 
 thankful; — the wildness has somewhat abated, owing 
 
 to ' auld acquaintance' with him of whom (pointing to 
 
 his forehead,) these indentures witness, aided by the 
 
 circumstance of having here no hills to climb ; yet my 
 
 out-door morning feelings could not, even now, be 
 
 called serene. 
 
 " It is very different in this holy hour of eve, when 
 
 the West summons every eye to witness this gorgeous 
 
 pageantry of the Sun's descent, and Earth regards 
 
 her life-giver's departure in admiration mute — for the 
 
 sadness of a farewell prevails, and living things look 
 
 anxiously upon their source of life, and seem to 
 
 dread his going down, as if there were a danger of 
 
 his not returning. We feel no predominant passion 
 
 now to 'bless God for the mountains;' our paramount 
 
 praise is for the hope of glory; and, that yielded, in 
 
 sober gratitude for all this shadowing forth of Might 
 
 and Mercy, we pour the full heart of adoration forth 
 
 in strains like these — too majestically-moving for my 
 
 befitting utterance during the abandon of the morn : — 
 
 ' These are thy glorious works, Parent of good ! 
 
 Almighty! thine this universal frame, 
 
 Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then? 
 
 Unspeakahle, who sitt'st above these heav'ns 
 
 To us invisible, or dimly seen 
 
 In these thy lowest works; yet these declare 
 
 Thy goodness beyond thought, and power divine.' " 
 
CHAPTER VI. 169 
 
 The Old Man's voice discoursed eloquent music, 
 but he looked unutterable meaning — as though, 
 
 ' with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony and the deep power of joy, 
 He saw into the life of things.'* 
 
 " The sweet face of the Night" had solemnized his 
 manner, and he retained a peculiar gravity; — his 
 varieties of feeling were exceedingly remote, but were 
 always expressive and never extravagant; — they were 
 not "piteous revolutions." It seemed as if the hymn 
 from which he had quoted in the garden had supplied 
 him adventitiously with a text whereupon to descant; 
 for on adjourning to the interior he opened the Para- 
 dise Lost, and commenced devoutly : 
 
 £. — " Entering on this Poem we feel, or ought to 
 feel, that we are in sacred precincts, and that at its 
 elevated threshold we should put away from us the 
 defilement of mean associations. Resigning ourselves 
 to an atlantean and adventurous Guide, we are carried 
 to the black and sulphurous abyss of anarchy, — are 
 wafted through infinite space, — and ascend, ' by de- 
 grees magnificent, beyond the wall of heaven.' — 
 But the way, which is sometimes drear and dark, is 
 at other times labyrinthine and obscure ; and well it 
 is if, where we cannot move by sight, we firmly pro- 
 ceed by faith ; for lore which the Omniscient withheld 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
170 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 from ' holy men of old,' He has not in these latter days 
 communicated ; and therefore Milton, in the process 
 of an argument, anticipatory of man's creation and 
 historic of his fall, has found himself in occasional 
 embarrassment in 'vindicating' the Eternal. — And 
 necessarily so ; for His thoughts are not our thoughts, 
 and who hath been His counsellor ? In the Father's 
 address to the Son,* for instance, contemplating the 
 seduction of our Sire by satanic guile, the Poet is in 
 one of those inscrutable involutions of 'foreknowledge, 
 ■will, and fate,' which Inspiration has not elucidated, 
 and which is, consequently, inexplicable by human 
 reason. Now that the original terms of obedience have 
 been revoked by rebellion, our present terms oi faith 
 are based on this partial concealment of the plan of 
 Providence ; for there could be no exercise of credence 
 if all that concerns our hope and trust were manifest. 
 Yet how ample the foundation prepared for the 
 fabric of our faith, would we not crowd and cumber 
 it with our prejudices and gainsayings. Beset by the 
 machinations of a mighty Foe, are we not bidden 
 to confide boldly in a more puissant Friend? 
 
 • O ! but man ! proud man, 
 Most ignorant of what he's most assured,' 
 
 protests ! — cavils with his Creator ! The tenant of an 
 * Paradise Lost, book iii. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 171 
 
 hour, in his tabernacle of clay, engages in controversy 
 with the self-existent Architect of the universe — im- 
 pugns the Mind of which his loftier part is now but 
 a polluted essence! Oh! disclaiming impious com- 
 parison, next among marvels to the love of God, is 
 the presumption of the outcast, man, 
 
 " The abstract contemplation of a lost paradise 
 incites to a fruitless lament for felicity we never 
 knew, which, however, gives way to a profound 
 contentment, when we summon to the side of our 
 pining souls the reinforcements provided by our Re- 
 ligion, which, ordinarily, we permit to remain too 
 much in ineiFective reserve. In the strife we have 
 hourly to sustain we draw not largely enough upon 
 our almighty Ally, who, though we too oft forget, 
 remembers ever that we are but dust: and considering 
 that our hearts' instinctive craving is for a consolation 
 they cannot find in the world's corrupted cisterns, it 
 is curious that they should leave comparatively for- 
 saken the fountain which flows with the only efficient 
 solace for the sinking spirit. Marshalling the host of 
 evidences which Heaven has unrolled before the ken 
 of humanity, the mind erects itself as it were on an 
 impregnable rampart, from whence it placidly regards 
 the petty perplexities of life, and arms its hopes with 
 weapons which, wrought in a celestial armoury, scatter 
 this world's disheartenments swiftly as at the sword 
 
172 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 of Michael the rebel angels fled. I delight in the 
 assertion, and in its reiteration, that ' there is nothing 
 so reasonaUe as Religion :' — assuredly there is nothing 
 so protective, for the feeble being whose reliance 
 it is, ' gathers a force and faith under him, which 
 nature of itself could never attain ;'* — there is nothing 
 so consolatory, for ' it creates new hopes when all 
 earthly hopes fail;'t — there is nothing so ennobling, 
 for the ceaseless employment of the religious man is 
 that of ' fitting up his mind and preparing it for a 
 glorious abode ;'+ — and, in reference to a quality 
 seldom made the subject of special avowal, ' you may 
 depend upon it religion is, in its essence, the most 
 gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, 
 if unmixed with cant, and I know nothing else that 
 will, alone. '§ 
 
 " I soijietimes think, that in the dread Day of Award 
 Silence will for a moment seal the lips of the redeemed, 
 while, with sublimated glance, they survey the various 
 pathways whereby the ardent seekers after Truth 
 have attained their goal, and what impediments they 
 have battled with and beaten, and dispiritings sur- 
 mounted : but silence may endure but for a moment ! 
 —the amazing Love that ransomed, and righteous 
 Judgment that adjudicates, shall awaken in Heaven's 
 
 * Lord Bacon. f Sir Humphrey Davy. 
 
 J Vicar of Wakefield, ch. 29. § Coleridge's Table-Talk. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 173 
 
 ' new possessors' a spontaneous and accordant shout, 
 so mighty that through the realm of God their rapture 
 shall drown in its loud resonance the minstrelsy that 
 ceases never to magnify the Most High. For the 
 harp and lute of those who never knew distrust of 
 soul or sorrow of heart cannot rival their voice which 
 triumph animates; the blessings of those whose high 
 estate has shut out woe, must be overborne by theirs 
 to whom the transition is from anguish to bliss; the 
 adoration of those to whom Justice has never been 
 obscured, shall certainly be overwhelmed in their 
 acclamations, who, once, it may be, dubious, shall 
 view the All- Adorable in the sanctity and glory of 
 His most perfect * vindication.' 
 
 " And if there be one attribute that, more than any 
 other, the Great Judge will be jealous to present 
 in all the refulgency of righteousness, it will be (as I 
 humbly conceive) His justice : — in an apportionment 
 involving interests so tremendous. He will not leave 
 the shadow of a right to complain; and where rewarded 
 Virtue shall applaud, rejected Vice shall be speech- 
 less. We reverence Justice here: — even in the 
 marred visage we detect majestic lineaments; and 
 lifting our imaginations to its divine excellency, who 
 would not acknowledge it as an attribute worthy the 
 jealous guardianship of the Godhead. Imagine, for 
 a moment, the exercise of omnipotence, in awful 
 
174 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 isolation from justice. An arm that had fashioned 
 and sustained an animated world by the sole authority 
 of its strength, yielding to no loftier guidance in its 
 terrible and arbitrary volition — such an arm, in its 
 subsequent liuman creation, could scarcely have woven 
 the ennobling principle of a right discernment with 
 the elements of its new-constructed creature. But 
 it is a consideration demanding from every thoughtful 
 soul its extremest capacity of thankfulness, that the 
 absolute sovereignty which is enthroned on high, is 
 irradiated by manifold benign attributes, and that the 
 allegiance which the Supreme might have enforced 
 by the overwhelming influence of power. He invites 
 by a condescending love: and although He would 
 convince the hearts of all men by the restraining 
 assurance, that He is * the Almighty God,' pursuing 
 the impenitent with His vengeance; yet is He more 
 desirous to be sought as ' the Lord from whom are 
 mercies and forgivenesses.' And recognizing Him as 
 the infinite '^ I am' of every conceivable perfection, it 
 was evidently essential to the purpose for which the 
 prime object of this lower world was designed, that 
 the made should be moulded in a distant but distinct 
 resemblance to the Maker. Thus, a true and sacred 
 sense oi justice became a constituent in the mysterious 
 combination, Man; and this judiciary attribute, as all 
 may testify, has survived every vicissitude of time 
 
CHAPTER VI. 175 
 
 and all the antagonism of sin; and will, we are assured, 
 be with each one of us in the assembled quick and 
 dead, to vindicate, at that thronged tribunal, the 
 integrity of the divine decision. 
 
 " I know of no scepticism or scruples from certain 
 apparent incongruities which meditative men have 
 told me debar them from a devout acceptation of the 
 creed on which our souls' hopes are founded; — that 
 infinite Perfection, armed with a controlling power, 
 is yet permissive of the propagation of Evil; that 
 Purity, although it abhors and denounces, coerces not. 
 I am not confounded by the sufferings of the virtuous, 
 the sorrows of the good, the seeming exemption of 
 the vile, the ostensible ease of the indiiFerent, the 
 occasional perplexity of the inquiring. These are 
 incidents contingent with, and partly constituting, 
 the probationary process by which, through privation 
 and discouragement, we are re-fitted for Paradise. 
 — I have found my questionings of possibility most 
 prone to rise, over the chronicles of God's compas- 
 sion: His infinite power is a visible property; His 
 bounty is both visible and tangible; but that 'the 
 Brightness of his Glory' should have assumed 
 our nature, and in it have endured rejection from 
 those whom He came to ransom; — that in virulence 
 and violence He should yet have summoned no awe- 
 struck legions from the realms of light, to avenge the 
 
176 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 indignities their celestial Cliief was enduring at the 
 
 hands of men, in order that he might snatch them as 
 
 brands from the burning; — that though the penalty 
 
 of the prodigious enterprise was a sustenance of the 
 
 Curse, under which he who bore it must yield his 
 
 heart's blood, now in protracted passion through the 
 
 imperceptible pore, and then in sacrificial agony 
 
 through the gaping wound; — that immaculate and 
 
 infinite Compassion, without demeaning the divinity, 
 
 should taste of death in its most degraded form, 
 
 that earth's grovelling ingrate might be exalted among 
 
 ' the enthroned gods in sainted seats,' — is an exaction 
 
 upon the faith of a contemplative mind which might 
 
 disturb it with incredulity, were the records less 
 
 trustworthy which relate, to selfish men, the mystical 
 
 vastness of the divine sympathy. 
 
 " One especial moral springs from the meditation 
 
 of this marvellous oblation of Love — 'tis the trusting 
 
 all to Him. There can be no sympathy in heaven 
 
 with the self-sufficient. From the hour of that most 
 
 daring insurrection in Thine own abode, has it not 
 
 been seen, that, 
 
 ' Merciful Heaven! 
 Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, 
 Splitt'st the unwedgable and gnarled oak 
 Than the soft mj^tle?'* 
 
 * Measure for Measure. Shakspeare. 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. i i i 
 
 " I have perambulated far from the Poem, in all 
 this; but serious thoughts flow naturally from its 
 solemn theme, and forcibly to divert or counteract 
 their current is ill beseeming a man who cannot be 
 far distant from ' an abiding city, a place in another 
 country, where he must rest or else be restless for 
 ever.'* Let us however enter, for a little while, this 
 Lost Paradise, at whose exterior we have thus lin- 
 gered. 
 
 " Yet, pausing for a brief moment at its entrance, 
 is it not beyond expression interesting, to review, 
 through the medium of truthful history and apocry- 
 phal tradition, the process by which this stupendous 
 poetic pyramid was reared— a structure so unapproach- 
 able in the grandeur of its symmetry, that the solitary 
 achievements of others — imposing when solitarily 
 surveyed — appear insignificant if brought into juxta- 
 position with it. There exists an indestructible cluster 
 of the habitations of Poesy, distinguished by various 
 charms; but they shrink into shadow when viewed 
 by an eye which the contemplation of dimensions so 
 vast has distended and enlarged. ' It is not the great- 
 est of heroic poems, only because it is not the Jlrst,' 
 says Dr. Johnson; but stands it not unparalleled in 
 its sublimity f From what we know of Milton's self- 
 dependency, I fancy there was never a Poet who, 
 
 * Taylor. 
 
178 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 conscious of having consummated a great work, of 
 which many co-operating causes might tend to mar 
 the reputation at the period of its completion, con- 
 fided so assuredly in ultimate appreciation, as did 
 this illustrious man. The contrast between Milton 
 and Shakspeare in this respect, is remarkable: the 
 latter sensitively shrinks from posthumous notoriety; 
 and in his poems almost painfully protests against 
 being made a candidate for the plaudits of posterity : — 
 
 ' O if (I sajO you look upon this verse, 
 Wiien I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
 Do not so much as my poor name rehearse. 
 Lest the wise world mock.' * * 
 
 And again, 
 
 ' O, lest your tme love may seem false in this, 
 That you for love speak well of me untrue. 
 My name be buried where my body is. 
 And live no more to shame nor me nor you. 
 For I am shamed by that which I bring forth.' 
 
 If thou hast ears to hear, O Shade of Shakspeare ! 
 know that the ' wise world ' persists in a contrary 
 notion. But ' the blind Old Man' whose intrepidity 
 urged him beyond ' the flaming bounds of place and 
 time,' knew no distrust in his reliance on succeeding 
 ages. He had built for himself (and consciously,) a 
 ' live-long monument,' had fore-sepulchred himself in 
 the reverent remembrance of those who should come 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 179 
 
 afterwards, had graven in the EoU of the Renowned 
 
 the name of ' Milton/ in characters which the failure 
 
 of intelligence might obscure, but which the flight 
 
 of Time could not efface. And so — (I speak of him 
 
 as moved by ' fond hopes of glory/) — upheld by the 
 
 conviction that he had left to posterity a fame which 
 
 they ' would not willingly let die,' he could move 
 
 on serenely towards death, with the placid dignity 
 
 of a mighty man whom the Past had instructed and 
 
 the Future stimulated to regard contemporaneous 
 
 approbation as subsidiary. For him, 
 
 ' Enough, if something from his hand had power 
 To live, and act, and serve ihe future hour;'* 
 
 and a guarantee for the lastingness of his fame he 
 might have found in the theme which he had chosen j 
 for man's interest in it was ' infused at the creation 
 of the kind,' and for ever will it closely ' come home 
 to men's business and bosoms;' — long as a sentient 
 being (conversant with the Poet's language) resides 
 in this lower world, to mourn his alienation from a 
 better, so long will that sublime story be reverently 
 perused, which treats 
 
 ' Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the world and all our woe. 
 With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
 Restore us, and regain the blissful seat' 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
180 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 " The Poet's theme involves our grandest interests, 
 and his illustration of it caught inspiration from its 
 grandeur. As he conceived and prosecuted its ' argu- 
 ment,' a matter of universal concern was removed so 
 far beyond the sphere in which human reason and 
 imagination are wont to dilate, that had it not been 
 sustained by a gigantic intellect it would have pro- 
 voked reproach; — he explored regions so distant in 
 their character from this ' dim spot which men call 
 Earth,' — assumed a cognizance of beings between 
 whom and us so great a gulf is fixed, that had his 
 design been undevout, he might have been censured 
 for temerity. To ' vindicate' the Infinite to the finite 
 is the high office of His ambassadors, effected by the 
 simplicity of His word; but here we witness the 
 Deity vindicated to the child of dust, by a basement 
 and partial outwork of truth, built upon and filled in 
 by a fancy which, though fallen and fallible, was 
 abashed to no arrestive degree by the consciousness 
 of frailty — confined mthin no boundary of being ; — 
 free in volitation as though disembodied; wiser than 
 Uriel, nigh to God — than Satan, chief in hell; — with 
 buoyancy to soar to sublimest heights, with gravamen 
 to descend to profoundest depths, with elasticity to 
 expand over all space; — above, in awful proximity 
 with the Presence in whose radiance the angels veil 
 —beneath, in dread vicinity with the Arch-fiend at 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 181 
 
 whose voice ' the hollow deep of hell resounds:' — 
 these are associations that enter into Milton's jus- 
 tification of God, — a justification ' justified only by 
 success.'*" 
 
 C. — " Numerous are the opinions that take pos- 
 session of our minds without a substantial title, and 
 (probably from getting into company with our pre- 
 judices,) become exceedingly difficult to dislodge. 
 One of such has accustomed me to attribute to the 
 blindness of Milton more than his commentators have 
 attributed, of the sublimity and profundity of the 
 Paradise Lost. Next to the extinction of ' the heaven- 
 lighted lamp' of reason, the saddest sensual depriva- 
 tion known to man is generally esteemed to be the 
 loss of sight: the absence of no other sense appeals so 
 movingly to our common sympathy ; there is no pathos 
 like the plea of the blind. But if we estimate the 
 mind as our chief endowment, and esteem its culture 
 as our chief concern, we shall perceive how different 
 are the degrees of misfortune dependent on the period 
 at which the faculties of the mind's principal agent are 
 suspended. The eloqiient lamentations of Milton in 
 his ' irrecoverable darkness,' both in his Great Poem 
 and in Samson, dissolve the heart by their intense 
 and pervading plaintiveness : in his sonnet to Cyriac 
 Skinner the spirit of complaint retires before the 
 * Dr. Johnson. 
 
182 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 spirit of resigned submission to ' Heaven's hand and 
 will/ and takes even a tone of triumph, from self- 
 approving (and somewhat 'stern) exaltedness of zeal'* 
 in ' Liberty's defence.' But the visual viaduct to 
 Milton's mighty mind was not obstructed until vast 
 resources had been conveyed by that channel to a 
 most capacious reservoir. The veil fell upon his eye 
 at a period when sight, as an auxiliary to the mind, 
 had performed, and well performed, its function; — 
 Wisdom was not ' shut out ' at that main entrance, 
 till after long and laborious aggrandisement had so 
 profusely stored the intellectual treasury with mul- 
 tifarious gems, that there needed a respite from ac- 
 cumulation. When, therefore, night came, it afforded 
 a season for the assortment, disposition, and develop- 
 ment of the treasures that had been amassed by the 
 industry of the day. JVhat augmentation of grandeur 
 the Poet's conceptions acquired by the mental ab- 
 stractedness resulting from his blindness — to what 
 particular degree the pinions of his fancy were in- 
 vigorated by his ocular privation — may excite con- 
 jecture, to no very satisfactory ascertainment: yet, 
 that his imagination received anew energy to its eagle 
 wing — derived a portion of the vigor of its towering 
 flight and impetus of its descent, from very inability 
 to expend its strength in a visible and comparatively 
 * Prisoner of Chillon. B3 ron. 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 183 
 
 circumscribed sphere, I am disposed to be largely 
 credulous." 
 
 E. — " Political and religious feuds had lamentably 
 distorted and inflamed the judgment of those who 
 "were contemporaries with the Poet; and where the 
 practice on all hands was crimination and retort, the 
 Charity which ' endureth all things' could point ap- 
 provingly to few. In all communities there are, it is 
 to be feared, a numerous class of persons exceedingly 
 keen in discerning the judicial dispensations of Pro- 
 vidence, as they affect their feUow-creatures, and 
 in construing the divine intention in the infliction of 
 each calamity or apparent evil. — I have heard the 
 soi-disant humble, the self-satisfied pure in heart, 
 most odious oracles in coupling with a particular 
 sin, an especial affliction. Not to wander more from 
 the Poet, however, and in reference to your remarks 
 concerning the beneficial effect of his blindness upon 
 the character of his conceptions, I remember a noble 
 burst of his indignation at an insinuation made by his 
 enemies, that his great deprivation was a mark of the 
 divine displeasure. ' If the choice were necessary,' 
 he declares, ' I would prefer my blindness to yours : 
 yours is a cloud spread over the mind, which darkens 
 both the light of reason and of conscience ; mine keeps 
 from my view only the coloured surfaces of things, 
 while it leaves me at liberty to contemplate the beauty 
 
184 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 and stability of virtue and of truth. There is, as the 
 Apostle has remarked, a way to strength through 
 weakness. Let me then be the most feeble creature 
 alive, as long as that feebleness serves to invigorate the 
 energies of my rational and immortal spirit; as long as 
 in that obscurity in which I am enveloped, the light 
 of the divine presence more clearly shines!'* The 
 Poet appears in this to favor the supposition, that the 
 loss of sight was not detrimental to the faculties of 
 his mind." 
 
 C. — " Beneficial, rather than detrimental; and 
 greatly beneficial. The man of might was alone with 
 himself and with exalted thoughts : his was a lofty 
 imagination which, by a cause of profound sorrow, 
 was placed in fortunate isolation. I am surprised 
 that Dr. Johnson should have appropriated so incon- 
 siderable an amount oi probable effect to a circumstance 
 almost compelling the exploration of the fancy and 
 inciting to more adventurous enterprises a mind so 
 ill at ease in inactivity as was Milton's. Campbell, 
 too, alludes to his blindness, in no tone of confident 
 belief that ^ darkness aided intellectual thought:' — 
 speaking of the ^ congenial impressions' made on Mil- 
 ton in Italy by the frescos of Angelo and the pictures 
 of Raphael, he says they may ^ possibly have been 
 recalled in the formation of Milton's great poem, 
 * Second Defence for the People of England. 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 185 
 
 when his eyes were shut upon the world, and when 
 he looked inwardly for 'godlike shapes and forms." 
 But Sir Egerton Brydges is bolder, and asserts, that 
 ' his outward blindness did but strengthen his inward 
 light. Perhaps (he adds) but for this blindness his 
 creative faculties had not been sufficiently concen- 
 trated to produce his great poem. He was now shut 
 out from worldly distractions, and the day was as the 
 covering calm of night to him.' " 
 
 E. — " The calm of night, indeed, but not that 
 night whose fetters bind down our bodies in salutary 
 and soothing restraint, till ' Morn's rosy hand unbars 
 the gates of light,' and we go forth athirst again for 
 the elixir which Nature divinely and diffusely pours, 
 like a rich baptismal unction on the early brow of 
 Day. Alas! fruitless to Mm the upland walk for 
 ' unimpeded commerce with the sun,' as 
 
 ' Morn, her rosy steps in th' eastern clime 
 Advancing, sow'd the earth with orient pearl;' 
 
 before him Night sat for ever on her ebon throne — he 
 kindled no more at the rapture of the reawakening 
 world ; to Mm all uninfectious now ' the cheerful ways 
 of men,' the wild mirth of children, the glad face of 
 Nature, the regal sun and radiated cloud, — " 
 
 C. — " Pardon me for thinking that you breathe a 
 rather ' browner horror ' over the scene than belongs 
 
186 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 to it reasonably. You forget the willingness of Ms 
 submission to a ' feebleness' that did not militate with 
 mental vigor, and his own testimony that, so far from 
 paralyzing or prostrating the energies of his mind, it 
 caused an influx of diviner light. The alone loss 
 of sight (deranging no intellectual faculty or function) 
 would in any case revive Memory, and, in Milton's, 
 if it did not lend sportive vivacity to Fancy, it urged 
 it into the illimitable, and undoubtedly aided his con- 
 ceptiveness of the incorporeal." 
 
 E. — "^ Ay, but vivid as were Memory and Fancy, 
 the very vividness with which they reminded him of 
 what once had been rapture, must have made still 
 sadder the remembrance of ' a glory that had passed 
 away' from him, in this life, for ever. Although in 
 reference to his blindness he may occasionally 
 
 ' have writ the style of gods, 
 And made a pish at sufferance,' 
 
 I have no doubt his really-acquiescent mood was 
 transitory, and soon disturbed by the irksomeness of 
 that enduring eclipse which veiled from him 
 
 ' the silent looks of happy things.' 
 
 The sorrowing sympathy we feel for Milton in his 
 affliction, is a far profounder feeling than that spon- 
 taneous pity which ever stirs in presence of the blind ; 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 187 
 
 of him above all men it may be emphatically said, that 
 his heart knew its own bitterness in privation, as, in the 
 bodying forth of his sublime imaginings, no stranger 
 might intermeddle with its joy. In my opinion 
 you touch his ^ ark of grief too presumptuously. 
 There was little in Milton — in awful and magnificent 
 Milton — that was held in common with others ; there 
 might be a sameness of material elements, there was 
 evidently the same liability to ' all adversities which 
 happen to the body;' but as it regards men, he 'stood 
 
 ' Among them but not of them, in a shroud 
 Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.'* 
 
 Your especial idol has said of this remoteness from 
 the crowd, 
 
 ' Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart ;'t 
 and it is this intellectual isolation that excites, in me, 
 a disposition towards intense regretfulness before the 
 imaginary spectacle of the blind Poet. For, to thou- 
 sands in similar exclusion from the visible world, the 
 ' drop serene' which shuts out light, only enthrones 
 lethargy ', their hearts have ability to make an ' humble 
 heaven' with very scant appliances; their eye, even 
 in the day of its power, might have been an ' idle orb,' 
 as far as (like a spy, subserving the mind) it recon- 
 noitred the visible in order to strengthen and fortify 
 
 * Byron. f Wordsworth. 
 
188 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 the intellectual. But to the unquenched eye of Mil- 
 ton, Nature's silence was eloquent — ^her language 
 stirring and significant ; he ' heard a voice' where 
 others could not, and saw wonders in the waste 
 places ; the calm languor that to others ' idlesse might 
 seem/ had, for him, ' its morality.' By thousands 
 the transformations of the scene around them are 
 regarded with lack-lustre eye ; — ' seeing, they see not :' 
 — so that seed-time and harvest return, to them it is 
 all one, whether Nature array herself in the sheen 
 of spring-time, and strew their field-path with flowers, 
 and inundate the sunny air with song, and coax them 
 into contentment with her garden and wayside stories, 
 all oi promise — daily-perfecting ^rom«"se / or whether 
 she be attired in the half-mourning magnificence of 
 her autumnal apparel, when promise has ripened into 
 full fruition. But for him of whom we speak, these 
 changes had a potent charm; and when came 
 
 ' The SAveet season that bud and bloonie forth brings,'* 
 
 he would have it to be ' stubbornness' not to go out 
 and be eye-witness of the general joy. Profound, I 
 say again, and permanent must have been the plaint 
 of Milton while under the enduring cloud." 
 
 C. — " Wordsworth is no admirer of Gray; yet, 
 although I reverence devoutly the opinions of the 
 * Earl of Surrey. 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 189 
 
 great living Master, I cannot find an encomiastic tri- 
 bute to Milton worthy to be compared with the brief 
 allusion to the Poet and his loss of sight, left us by 
 that * consummate master of poetic diction :' — 
 
 ' Nor second he, that rode sublime 
 
 Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, 
 
 The secrets of the abyss to spy; 
 
 He pass'd the flaming bounds of place and time: — 
 
 The living throne, the sapphire blaze, 
 
 Where angels tiemble while they gaze, 
 
 He saw, but blasted with excess of light, 
 
 Closed his eyes in endless night.' " 
 
 £J. — " There is something Miltonic in that noble 
 motet — pity that so grand a swell should so soon die 
 away! But as it relates to the hero — the Eider on 
 seraph-wings, is it not a moving piece of mental 
 imagery, capable of metamorphoses stranger in their 
 reality than are many of the wonders of romance, that 
 blind Old Man seated in modest apparel beside his 
 lowly portal, in all the pitiable impotency of his 
 infirmity ; ' on evil days fallen, with dangers com- 
 passed, in darkness and solitude;' and then, (marvel- 
 lous contrast between corporeal imbecility and mental 
 puissance !) to view him as withdrawn from contact 
 with the strife of ' evil tongues,' as having entered 
 into synods of gods, and with intellect augmented by 
 archangelic intercourse, reporting 
 
 ' things invisible to mortal sight:' — 
 
190 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 nor uninteresting is it to reflect^ by what casual 
 instrumentality were recorded 
 
 ' The visions which arose without a sleep.'* 
 
 I humbly think, however, (an error, perhaps, of ' the 
 voluntary taste of common intellect,'!) that the current 
 of his august conceptions is sometimes prejudicially 
 diverted by extraneous supplies; — the main fluxion 
 is too much troubled by the tributary streams that at 
 frequent intervals come pouring into it from the 
 
 Pierian springs, 
 
 * which rush. 
 No rill, but rather an o'erflowing flood.'t 
 
 Turning, as we have done, from Shakspeare to Mil- 
 ton, — from effusions, literally effusions of simplicity, 
 to a production distinguished for scholarship, — the 
 transition is unfavorable (in my poor estimation) to 
 Milton, as it regards general effectiveness. There 
 is so magnetic a charm in the naivete of Nature's Peti 
 Did they both stand in breathing statuary, a natural 
 impulse would render before Milton the homage of a 
 reverent genuflexion; but, loving more and worship- 
 ping not less, we would approach that other Oracle, 
 as a Champion who had ' done the state some service' 
 might advance to the salutation of a smiling Queen. 
 
 * Lament of Tasso. Byron. t Sir E. Brydges. 
 
 X Cowper's Tiaiislation of Milton's Latin Poem to his Father. 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 191 
 
 I tliinlc I have previously mentioned to you a vene- 
 rable friend, who, with a love of poetry of which Age 
 has not chilled the ardency, is, strangely, little ' moved 
 by concord of sweet sounds,' and trusts, (in his own 
 quaint expression,) ' to find that heaven is something 
 better than a large orchestra.' His appreciation of 
 * glorious, untutored Will, and mighty, scholastic 
 John,' is genuinely British. — ' That ostentatious dis- 
 play of scholarship — that seizing upon every occasion 
 to let the world know how well he was acquainted 
 with all the realms of Art and Science, of classic and 
 romantic lore, which is continually visible in Milton — 
 is not at all to my taste (says he) ; but Willie's ' sweet 
 neglect ' of artistical embellishment — the ease with 
 which his pen transfixes ideal images of grace and 
 beauty, without casting carefully about for ' florid 
 prose or honied rhyme,' and yet so frequently ex- 
 quisite where seemingly unstudied — are features that 
 when the eye looks upon, it hves.^ He who thus 
 opineth was with me a few days since : he is a logician, 
 and has a habit of demanding 'proofs upon assertion, 
 which makes it advisable, before introducing to him 
 an hypothesis, to ascertain that it has legs to stand on. 
 During a cursory discussion upon Milton, I meekly 
 ventured to hint how fair a field might Moore have 
 found in Paradise, prior to our Ancestors' ejectment: 
 the pen that reported the Loves of the Angels, would 
 
192 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 not its current have chrystalized, and flowed in rain- 
 bow-liues, as it told of the Garden, when, as with the 
 yet-lingering pressure of the Creator's hand, it was 
 pronounced ' good,' and was blissful as are all things 
 which are born of God. 'Twas an evening lovely as 
 that we just now witnessed, when my ancient ally was 
 with me ; and the beautiful time so forcibly suggested 
 the primeval vesper-hour, ere Danger frowned through 
 the darkness to agitate Dread, and when, by gentle 
 graduation brooded over by the silver- winged Silence, 
 the young world sunk, in the languor of long hap- 
 piness to rest, in order to recruit its capacity of 
 enjoyment for the repletion of the morrow; — in all 
 the grandeur of its serenity, the time, I say, so much 
 impressed me, that when my companion left (unused, 
 albeit, to 'spend my prodigal wits in bootless rhymes*), 
 I could not abstain from lamely chasing the idea of 
 
 * Love's Labour liOst, v. ?. 
 

 'PO tranquillize th' ecstatic Hours, 
 A soothing iimber-sliade was given, 
 Whicli Day eterne liath not in Heaven; 
 Nor lent to Earth, unless that powers 
 Not infinite might wearied be 
 By o'er-prolonged felicity. 
 But who may paint, what accents tell, 
 The infant Sun's sublime farewell? 
 The splendor of day were palor now 
 To the fulgeucy of his fiei-y brow. 
 As, like a god with glory drest. 
 Whose robe illumed his couch of rest, 
 He sunk within the crimson'd West. 
 
 And now, the ruddy day-beams fleetly failing. 
 Night falls on Eden like a spirit's wing; 
 
 Fresh fragrance all th' odorous bow'rs exhaling. 
 Inspiring which their quires forget to sing: 
 z2 
 
194 NIGHT IN EDEN. 
 
 The shadow spreads, like vast narcotic shield, 
 And flowers breathe, in downy slumber sealed ; — 
 Fair children all, yet one supremely sweet, 
 
 With whom, on wakening from its first repose. 
 An am'rous sunbeam, raptured, chanced to meet. 
 And kissed the blushing flow'ret to a rose. 
 And streamlets rilled a softer tune 
 As o'er their ripples shed the Moon 
 A paler, scarce less lucid ray, 
 Than that which burnished them by day; — 
 And while each bliss-o'erburdened sense 
 Reclined in quietude intense. 
 There echoed from the etherial clime. 
 Strains such as when, in quires sublime, 
 To radiant harps, the gushing hymn 
 Bursts from the bright-eyed cherubim ; 
 While near at hand, and from afar. 
 Streamed melody from many a star: — 
 O ! had those stars been Luna's daughters. 
 They might have paused in their career. 
 Perchance have left their stellar sphere. 
 To linger over Eden's waters ; 
 For mirror'd shone each pearly gem 
 That glistened in Night's diadem, — 
 Each lovely in its lustrous throne, the sky. 
 
 As Vestal fair to Beauty's crown aspiring, 
 Seen by the light of her own jetty eye, 
 
 Ere dimmed by tears — or too devout admiring. 
 
NIGHT IN EDEN. 195 
 
 Night reigned : soft Zephyrs that by day 
 Did now in sportive dalliance stray 
 Where'er a new perfume had birth, 
 Would then in fragrance flee away 
 To tempt the mighty Sea to play. 
 Th' exulting Main, in giant mirth. 
 And joyous unison with Earth, 
 Toss'd high, in ecstasy, his spray. 
 But Rapture lulled itself to rest 
 When Phcebus Paradise had blest. 
 And Eden donned her night array, — 
 Then hush'd grew Ocean, placid Sleep 
 In star-lit slumber stilled the Deep. 
 
 'Twas an exquisite hour, that reign of Night, 
 
 So blissful and dreamy in its delight 
 
 That Earth might have longed for none other light; 
 
 Yet silence seemed a state forlorn 
 
 When, from the roseate East, the Morn 
 
 Rous'd, and redeck'd, that vernal scene 
 
 To vivid joy, in sparkling sheen; 
 
 And Eden wore so glad a smile, 
 
 It might e'en seraphim beguile. 
 
 V_^^4^^-^ 
 
196 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 C. — " The notion of tlie stars being daughters of 
 the moon, would hardly pass unscathed by the good- 
 humoured satire of your logical friend, I should think ; 
 nor would you escape censure from le heau sexe, for 
 the imputation of vanity conveyed under a figure (you 
 vs^ill excuse my candour,) rather difficult of digestion." 
 
 E. — " When I ' showed ' to the quaint comrade of 
 my youth this ' wandering' * of my old age, he fixed 
 on that identical figure for jocular criticism, remarking, 
 ' Your making the moon a mother of the stars suggests 
 the application of a popular phrase to comets, if you 
 include them in the number of Luna's children ; and 
 nothing can be easier to conceive, than the virtuous 
 astonishment of the better-behaved members of the 
 starry family at the wild ways of their erratic sisters. 
 I fancy I see the pale and prudish planets, looking 
 at a comet in its disorderly courses, like a maid from 
 the backwoods beholding the passing of a rail-train — 
 half-frighted, half-amazed; and senses so rarified as 
 yours are, might, I dare say, hear the cold virgins, 
 as the blazing comet swept rudely by them, making 
 inquiries as to the moon-mother's knowledge of its 
 whereabouts.' And then I was ungratefully attacked 
 by the bairn whose rearing I have superintended from 
 
 * ' O! where have I been all this time? — how tended, 
 That none, for pity, show'd nie how I wandered?' 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher. 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 197 
 
 babyliood, (and whose quibble you curiously re-ecbo^) 
 touching the offensive insiniiation of vanity aux dairies. 
 But I am happy to be able to repel your accusation, 
 that the figure is outre, unless you similarly impeach 
 great Milton; for in his paraphrase of the hundred and 
 thirty-sixth psalm, he mentions with the Creator's 
 
 works, 
 
 ' The horned moon that shines by night, 
 Among. her spangled sisters bright;' 
 
 and when you consider how, with ' inaudible and 
 noiseless step'* she moves, and watches, with more 
 than a sister's patience, through the long night-hours, 
 and enters (no respecter of persons, like her God !) 
 through the tiniest lattice, so it be cleanly and un- 
 curtained, and in sweet stealth advances till she kiss 
 the face of the sleeping, leaving him bright dreams 
 as her blessing; and how she passes away again, but 
 lingeringiy — oh! very lingeringly, to shine on other 
 slumbers, until that dazzling ' god who brings the 
 Day, mounts up,' and dissipates the visionary spell — 
 in its silvery structure too etherial to exist in the red, 
 rapturous riot of the rousing Day : — all this assiduity 
 and solicitude oi3Iadame la Ltine, Sir Censor, you will 
 admit to be more maternal than sisterly; so, unless 
 
 * ' On our quick'st decrees 
 The inaudible and noiseless step of Time 
 Steals, ere we can effect them. — Shakspeare, 
 
198 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 your hardihood would cast a stone at John Milton, 
 retract the charge of monstrosity in my describing 
 the moon as a mother — of many lovely daughters." 
 
 C. — " Mrs. Hemans would have made a glowing 
 picture of the Garden, before the arch-tempter had 
 wrought his work there, and ere our father trembled 
 at the voice of God. The scene is better suited for 
 the description of an imaginative and noble-natured 
 woman, than it is for man; for although woman is, 
 
 with him, 
 
 ♦ Fall'n, fall'n, fall'n, fall'n, 
 Fall'n from her high estate,' 
 
 the web of her life is far less mixed with ill than 
 his, and our fairest ideas of terrestrial purity connect 
 themselves with the stainless mind of woman. Ex- 
 empted far more than man, from the knowledge of 
 evil, and far more conversant with ' whatsoever things 
 are pure,' her qualifications to imagine and portray 
 a condition of innocency, are manifestly superior to 
 those of man. In her Despondency and Aspiration, 
 the highly-gifted Mrs. Hemans has poured out a 
 torrent of brilliant conceptions — a guarantee of her 
 power to have made a most luxuriant and living 
 landscape of Eden, in the flush of its first perfection." 
 E. — " When I read that Poem, I considered that, 
 all golden as is its language, great must have been 
 the injury inflicted on her thoughts, by subjection to 
 
TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. 199 
 
 the p7'oces-verhal necessary before the presentation of 
 an Idea to the public. But — tolerate this one last 
 remark — who may calculate the crippling effect of 
 clothing in words the imagery of the wonderful and 
 mighty mind of Milton 1 Is it debatable, think you, 
 —would it be by miy one contested, that the author 
 of the Paradise Lost, having no equal in the sub- 
 limity of his conceptions, had ever an equal suiFerer 
 from the deficiencies of language adequate to their 
 incorporation and expression — though Speech to him 
 was like a deep-toned shell,* struck by a prophet's 
 hand; — he was omnipotent over numbers. But the 
 mean mind in motion is still meaner when it records 
 that motion. Language and speech may communicate 
 much that stirs within; they may interpret ideas whose 
 outlines are defined — conceptions which dwell within 
 compass: but when the imagination hurries into the 
 far depths of a starry sky, or dives into the stirless 
 m^^steries of its own being, or rises in conjecture to 
 the sphere of its ultimate destiny — then Thought is 
 lost in the chaos of its own creations. For speech, 
 potent prerogative as it is, hath no part in the subtler 
 and intenser emotions which prevail, when the soul 
 holdeth holy-day beyond the barriers of earth, and 
 feels (heavenliest perception !) its affinity with a king- 
 dom and kindred higher and holier than itself. But 
 * Gray's Ode— The Death of Hoel. 
 
200 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 this rare, stirring sense of royalty has no audible 
 articulation, nor may the after-mind, subdued and 
 sunken, translate the characters of its shadowy crea- 
 tion: — all that survives the deluge of divine light 
 is known but as the bodiless visions of a dream — 
 as a bright and beautiful illusion, which a breath 
 destroyed!" 
 
 There are many things concerning the Elder in 
 these confabulations yet undisclosed, which I would 
 not willingly have to remain so— May'st thou, O gentle 
 Reader ! have ' thus far held on with him untired.' 
 But having now performed a ' vow,' with mine own 
 self recorded, and attained a page at which I promised 
 perseverance a resting-place^ I pause, to proceed by 
 a pathway through the press less tedious and laborious 
 than that to this point pursued. It is of pleasant 
 things I have to tell — mfer alia, of the days of passion 
 of that faithful, fond Old Man (though Sorrow sad- 
 dened these, but with a shade sweeter to the soul 
 than the sunlight of the smile of Joy) ; and why, then, 
 (as the tearless survivor of a termagant helpmeet 
 observed, in bidding her bearers more leisurely to 
 convey her silent remains to their long home,) why 
 should we make a toil of pleasure ? 
 
 I 
 
FROM THE PRESS OF J. LORDAN, ROMSE 
 
LbF< 
 
J 
 

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