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The bosom heaves !-In every clime
Each eye distils with holy tears,
To see how simple and sublime
The plan of Providence appears!

VI.

And when from towering cliffs we view,
With wondering eye and ravish'd breast,
Old Snowdon, capp'd with purple hue
Of sun-declining in the west.
And when at midnight's solemn hour,
The soul is dazzled with the blaze
Of countless orbs, whose matchless power
Hymns vespers to th' Eternal's praise;
Astonish'd, charm'd, and rapt, the mind
Springs from the earth and soars the skies;
Where pure,-exalted,—and refin'd,

To heaven's high throne it glorying flies!

IV.

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In a calm evening of summer,-a time, sacred to the indulgence of grief, and the study of wisdom,when we are seated on the decayed trunk of an oak,-or on the basis of a rustic monument, how does the mind love to recal the memory of those friends, who are gone to that mysterious country, "where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest!" At those moments, our memory, like a magic mirror, improves their features to those of manly beauty; their manners to a bland and amiable elegance; and their language to a persuasive and bewitching oratory. Virtues, which we loved, while exchanging the mutual offices of friendship, are heightened to enthusiasm; and even their foibles give additional splendour to their portraits.

In a retired spot of his domain, the survivor raises a column, at once expressive of his grief and friendship. To this hallowed spot he retires, at close of day, and exemplifies the motto of Shenstone, or the urn of the elegant and beautiful Maria !—Such was the conduct of Mason. With what mournful pleasure did he embellish his alcove with an urn and medallion of his friend, the melancholy Gray! A lyre was suspended over the entrance, inscribed with a motto from Pindar; and underneath was written on a tablet the following stanza from his celebrated elegy1:Here scattered oft the loveliest of the year,

By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble here,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.

V.

Aristotle was accustomed to say, that melancholy was ever attendant on superior genius; and, the more to confirm the truth of his observation, he instances the examples of Hercules, Plato, and Lysander. It was this gentle affection, that soothed the soul of Drummond among the rocks and cascades of Hawthornden; of Dyer, when wandering among the mountains of Cwm-Dyr; and of Petrarch, when, among the solitudes of Valchiusa, he formed the wish, that there his friends should raise his funeral urn.

Recurring, my Lelius, to the circumstance of your melancholy, let me recal to your recollection, that, as melancholy is the daughter of genius, and sorrow

First Edition.

the offspring of misfortune, both the one and the other may be productive of long and lasting happiness. No one will venture to assert, that vicissitude is an object of desire; but few will be hardy enough to deny, that vicissitude may be productive of essential good. For as some medicines are healing to the stomach, which are bitter to the palate; and as it is by bruising and dividing its particles, that cinnabar assumes a vivid brilliancy, and thence becomes vermilion; so, by the storms and trials of an adverse fortune, patience exalts itself into resignation, and resignation into gratitude.

CHAPTER II.

Plato gives it as his decided opinion, that all misfortunes, which bfeal a virtuous man, will ultimately redound to his advantage; either in the present or in a future state of existence1. And so assured am I of the truth and justice of this consolatory doctrine, that I esteem it a duty, imperative on polemics, to wave every disputed point in theology, in order to unite all men in the persuasion, that every misfortune occurring to the just, is a root, which will produce a harvest, far more than a thousand times commensurate with the evil, previously inflicted.

Riches and rank, grandeur and power, it is true, command the gaze and admiration of the vulgar; be that vulgar clothed in rags or in lawn, in ermine or

1 De Repub. x. Cic. De Lge. v.

in purple. But what gives their possessors a goût to enjoyment? What but that "felix infelicitas," which is mingled with our fate, and which operates as a a bitter on a satiated palate. Does any one recline upon the bosom of love, and find not his delight heightened, when he recals to mind the difficulties of his early passion? Thus sings the elegant and accomplished Sadi :

How oft, when far from her I lov'd,

I've wept the sleepless nights away!
The anguish, Sadi, thou hast prov'd,
Augments the raptures of to day!

As well may we expect to gather the fruit of the vine, before the tree has blossomed, as to expect happiness without first tasting of vicissitude. It is a cavern, my Lelius, through which all must pass, before they enter the Elysian fields. Had Flavius Boethius never been imprisoned by Theodore, he had never written his Consolation of Philosophy. Had Grotius never visited the Hague, he had never composed his treatise on the Truth of the Christian Religion. In the plenitude of absolute authority, the haughtiest despot, that ever disgraced a throne, has no power to imprison or enthral the mind. The captive, dead to all the world but himself, if possessed of virtue and a cultivated imagination, if once delighting in the noble and more beautiful scenes in the material world, or gratified in gathering food for meditation in the intellectual, still is free. His mind, which is a quarry, in

which he gathers riches, far more valuable, than either silver or gold, roves round the frontiers of the creation; while memory paints to his mental eye fields, rocks, mountains, and forests. Those objects, ever beheld with lively pleasure, and now remembered with melancholy satisfaction, charm and lull his anguish to repose. From Nature he looks up to Nature s God: breathes with a low and solemn voice the history of his wrongs: and rests securely satisfied, that no prayer, springing from a source so pure, is ever frowned upon. All his powers of association are brought into action; passages of his favourite poets are recited with energy; the principles of those sciences, to which he had been attached in his youth, are analysed and confirmed; he hears those airs in music, which once had power to charm him, again titillate his ear; those domestic landscapes, which once delighted him, are drawn with strict fidelity on his mental canvas while the paintings of Correggio, Claude, Poussin, and of Bassano, appear to decorate the walls and niches of his prison. Again in fancy he treads the abode of the great and the good; he beholds the marble columns of the rich, and the woodbine cottage of the indigent ;-he sighs at the music of the torrent ;-treads, with solemn footsteps, the mansions of the dead; or, with happy transition, reclines beneath the oak, that shelters his paternal dwelling. Now he becomes sensible of what he has lost by imprudence, or gained by experience ;—truth is seen in all its sober hue;-prejudice is dissolved ;

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