littleness of all other men's attainments and pursuits: and, as the fall of Corinth and Carthage increased the wealth and influence of Marseilles, in the expiring fragments of former ages we read the rudiments of a glory, that shall never perish. But in the contemplation of the Colosseum, the agony of debasing passions acquire redoubled strength, if not a new existence: no tears of generous enthusiasm are shed; reflection knows no graceful pause; dazzled by riches, variety, power, and magnificence,-not splendid and imaginative, but sullen and expansive,-the soul seems to brood, as it were, over ruin and desolation, upon which the glory of chivalry has never shone. VII. LONDON. This vast city,-containing a population, equal to that of the entire island, in the days of Cæsar,with the exception of great monuments of antiquity, affords more objects for a sublime mind to contemplate, than any other on the surface of the globe. There is no where such freedom and comfort; it is the centre of the useful arts; the temple of science; and MAN is seen in the highest state of dignified cultivation and power. In one spot we see all the wonders of mineralogy'; in others the splendour of vegetables'; in another we turn from the busts of Trajan,3 Hadrian, Severus, and the elder Gordian; the colossal head of Marcus Aurelius; and trophies, found upon the plains of Marathon; to behold the tenants of deserts and forests, quitting their recesses to dwell with man1; British Museum. 2 The Botanic Gardens. 3 British Museum. to partake of his virtues; to feel the benefit of his guardianship; and to be the objects of his care, his admiration, and endearment. Here the lion plays with the spaniel, and the tiger sports, as it were, with the kid. To this spot every country seems to have sent a representative. Panthers from Buenos Ayres; tigers from Algiers, Ceylon, and Seringapatam ; hyenas from Abyssinia; elephants from Africa; and lions and lionesses from the jungles of Hindostan.All sleeping, while man is active; and roving the slender circuits of their cells, when the whole of civilized life are buried in profound repose.-Presenting, in the heart of the greatest of cities, the sublimest spectacle of savage nature, that the world exhibits! Poor olated, longand mea”). VIII. 1 Next to the associations of Rome, are those of Paris. Entering that city, what melancholy reflections mingle with sentiments of awe and admiration : since more important events have occurred within its walls, than in any other city, if we except Rome, Babylon, and Jerusalem. So many instances of magnanimity; so many crimes; a successive theatre for the best and worst of men; so many massacres. Brissot; Roland; Robespierre and Danton; the virtues of Malesherbes: the crimes of Mirabeau; the spot where Louis was beheaded; the massacre of September; Napoleon. And what examples of eloquence! how many sublime instances of affection, and all the nobler passions! how many of treason, insurrection, rebel lion, and murder! So many monuments, attesting the spirit of the age; so many of the proudest institutions disorganized: how many a specimen of art destroyed; and replaced by those of other nations and of other ages. Every feeling of the human heart in exercise; man in his noblest and in his meanest attitudes! Science, ignorance, virtue, crime, occupying the same page: the mother, the wife, the sister; the lover, the son, the father; the husband, and the friend:-frivolity; wisdom; rapacity; honesty; wealth; penury; all ranks levelled, and again restored: the successive theatre of the noblest and the meanest of motives; an arena for wild beasts, in the form of men; and an Atheneum for the loftiest flights of human intellect. Throwing a magic mantle over every thing, the mind becomes poetical; the heart sensitive:-the Bastile; the confederation; the Champ de Mars;-so many instances of martyrdom; fidelity; devotion; and patriotism. Here royalty, republicanism, oligarchy, democracy, and anarchy, had successive trials. Here liberty received more fatal stabs from democracy, than it had ever received from tyranny. Here the public mind was elevated; now enervated; now sublimed; now debased; now palsied; now irritated; now electrified ; now invigorated; now poisoned; now barbarized; and again civilized! The greatest generals; the most intriguing statesmen; the most energetic writers! The same men philosophers to-day, and worse -far worse, than barbarians to-morrow. CHAPTER II. These reflections are produced by that power of association, which alone produces all our ideas of beauty and sublimity. The secluded Vaucluse, rich in a grand assemblage of sublime objects, becomes more endeared to the eye of taste, when we reflect, that among those woods, those rocks, upon the banks of those torrents, the elegant and accomplished Petrarch composed his celebrated Sonnets. For, enamoured of the muses, as Professor Richardson remarks, in his Observations on Shakespeare's Dramatic Characters, "we traverse the regions, they frequented, explore every hill, and seek their footsteps in every valley. The groves of Mantua, the cascades of Anio, are not lovelier than other groves and cascades; yet we view them with peculiar rapture; we tread as on consecrated ground; we regard those objects with veneration, which yielded ideas to the minds of Virgil and Horace; and we seem to enjoy a sort of ineffable intercourse with those elegant and enlightened spirits." From the same source springs the satisfaction, we derive, in reading many of the ancient ballads and legends of the Scottish, Spanish, and Provençal poets. We assimilate our age with theirs; and by comparing their language and customs, their sentiments and misfortunes, with our own, we draw resemblances at our discretion; collateral emotions of pleasure are elicited from the simplicity of their manners and sentiments; and our misfortunes are tempered by the artificial magnitude of theirs. II. It is this divine faculty of association, that enables those, whose natural perception of beauty has been improved by a cultivation of the imagination, to derive so much more pleasure from scenes of Nature, than the ignorant or unfeeling; the man of the world or the pedant; the soldier or the statesman. Walking in his garden, the man of taste almost fancies, he sees Vertumnus and Pomona, hiding themselves among the fruit trees.-The vale he peoples with flocks and shepherds, resembling those, which have often delighted him in the Bucolics of Virgil, the Idyllia of Theocritus, the pastorals of Drayton, or the Idylls of Gesner. If he rise to the mountain, he compares its towering summit to that of Pelion, Hymettus, or Citharon; and if he wander among rough and misshapen rocks, his imagination renders them more wild and savage, by groupes of salvatorial images. When he descends to the glen, the dingle, or the forest, fawns, dryads,' and hamadryads, peeping from their green vistas, appear to attend him at every step. If he rove on the banks of a river, near a fountain, or on the shores of a lake, he hears the language of the Naiads in the murmuring of waters :-if he repose on the edge of a fantastic crag, jutting over the sea, he listens to the warbling of the winds, and almost fancies he hears the music of syrens, whose forms were made, not in the figures of women and fishes, as Boccace supposes, but in those of fishes 1 Dryades formosissimas, aut nativas fontium nymphas, de quibus fubulatur antiquitas, se vidisse arbitrati sunt.-P. Martyr. Dec. i., lib. 5. |