gladness the growth of the young, with hoary sadness the decay of the old trees, "Moulding to beauty many a mouldering tower;" and in storm or sunshine investing with a more awful or a more peaceful character the aspect of the many-shipped sea, —even then, when the world of the senses was in its prime, and light and music did most prodigally abound in the air and the waters, in the heavens and on the earth, we rejoiced with yet a far exceeding joy, we longed with yet a far exceeding desire, we burned with yet a far exceeding passion, for all that was growing momently brighter and more bright, darker and more dark, vaster and more vast, within the self-discovered region of mind and spirit! There swept along each passion, like a great wind-there the sudden thought "Shot from the zenith like a falling star!" We wished not to "have lightened the burden of the mystery of all that unintelligible world!" It was the mystery which, trembling, we loved-awaking suddenly to the quaking of our own hearts, at solitary midnight, from the divine communion of dreams, that like spirits for ever haunted our sleep. ""Tis mind alone-bear witness, heaven and earth!— "Tis mind alone that in itself contains The beauteous or sublime!" Where are the blasts born that bring the clouds across the stars? Where are the thoughts born that bring clouds across our souls? The study of physics is sublime, for the student feels as if mounting the lower steps of the ladder leading up to God in the skies. But the metaphysics of our own moral, our own intellectual being, sublimer far! when reason is her own object, and conscience, by her own light, sees into her own essence! And where shall such studies be best pursued? Not alone in the sacred silence of the Academic Grove-although there should be their glimmering beginnings, and there their glorified but still obscurest end. But through the dim, doubting, and often sorely disturbed intermediate time, when man is commanded by the being within him to mingle with man, when smiles, and sighs, and tears, are most irresistible, and when the look of an eye can startle the soul into a passion of love or hate, then it is that human nature must be studied—or it will remain unknown and hidden for ever-must be studied by every human being for himself, in the poetry and philosophy of Life! As that life lies spread before us like a sea! At first, like delighted, wondering, and fearful children, who keep gazing on the waves that are racing like living creatures from some far-off region to these their own lovely and beloved shores, or still with unabated admiration, at morning, see the level sands yellowing far away, with bands of beautiful birds walking in the sun, or, having trimmed their snowy plumage, wheeling in their pastime, with many wild-mingled cries, in the glittering air-with here-there-yonder some vessel seemingly stranded, and fallen helpless on her side, but waiting only for the tide to waken her from her rest, and again to waft her, on her re-expanded wings, away into the main! Then, as the growing boy becomes more familiar with the ebb and the flow-with all the smiles and frowns on the aspect -all the low and sweet, all the loud and sullen, tones of the voice of the sea- -in his doubled delight he loses half his dread, launches his own skiff, paddles with his own oar, hoists his own little sail-and, ere long, impatient of the passion that devours him, the passion for the wonders and dangers that dwell on the great deep, on some day disappears from his birthplace and his parents' eyes, and, years afterwards, returns a thoughtful man from his voyaging round the globe! Therefore, to know ourselves, we sought to penetrate into the souls of other men-to be with them, in the very interior of their conscience, when they thought no eye was upon them but the eye of God. 'Twas no seclusion of the spirit within itself to take cognisance of its own acts and movements; but we were led over the fortunes and works of human beings wherever their minds have acted or their steps have trod. All sorrow and all joy, the calamities which have shaken empires, the crimes which have hurried single souls into perdition, the grounds of stability, just order, and power, in the great societies of men-the peace and happiness that have blossomed in the bosom of innocent life, the loves that have interwoven joy with grief, the hopes that no misery can overwhelm, the fears that no pleasure can assuage, the gnawing of the worm that never dies, the bliss of conscience, the bale of remorse, the virtue of the moral, and the piety of the reli gious spirit,-all these, and everything that human life, in its inexhaustible variety, could disclose, became the subjects of inquiry, emotion, thought, to our intellect seeking knowledge of human nature, to us a student desirous, in restless and aspiring youth, to understand something of his own soul-of that common being in which he lives and breathes, and of which, from no other source, and no other aiu, can he ever have any uninspired revelation. Is it wonderful then that we, like other youths with a soul within them, mingled ourselves and our very being with the dark, bright, roaring, hushed, vast, beautiful, magnificent, guilty, and glorious London! Coleridge, that rich-freighted Argosie tilting in sunshine over Imagination's Seas, feared not-why should he have feared ?-in a poem of his youth-to declare to all men, "To me hath Heaven, with bounteous hand, assigned That boast may not pass our lips! Yet what forbids us even now exultingly to say, that nature had not withheld from us the power of genial delight in all the creations of genius; and that she shrouded, as with a gorgeous canopy, our youth, with the beauty and magnificence of a million dreams? Lovely to our eyes was all the loveliness that emanated from more gifted spirits, and in the love with which we embraced it, it became our very own! We caught the shadows of high thoughts as they passed along the wall, reflected from the great minds meditating in the hallowed shade! And thenceforth they peopled our being! Nor haply did our own minds not originate some intellectual forms and combinations, in their newness fair, or august-recognised as the product of our own more elevated moods, although unarrayed, it might be, in words, or passing away with their symbols into oblivion, nor leaving a trace behind only a sense of their transitory presence, consolatory and sublime! Even then, in thy loud streets, O London! as the remembrance of Scotland's silent valleys came suddenly and softly upon our hearts, a wish, a hope, a belief arose that the day might come, when even our voice might not be altogether unlistened to by the happy dwellers there,haply faint, low, and irregular, like the song of some birdone of the many linnets-in its happiness half-afraid to tune its melodies, amidst the minstrelsy of Merle and Mavis with which the whole forest rings! up Often do we vainly dream that Time works changes only by ages-by centuries! But who can tell what even an hour may bring forth? Decay and destruction have "ample room and verge enough," in such a City; and in one year they can do the work of many generations. This century is but young -scarcely hath it reached its prime. But since its first year rolled round the sun, how many towers and temples have in ever-changeful London "gone to the earth!" How many risen whose " statures reach the sky!" Dead is the old King in his darkness, whom all England loved and reverenced. Princes have died, and some of them left not a name— -mighty men of war have sunk, with all their victories and all their trophies, vainly deemed immortal, into oblivion!-Mute is the eloquence of Pitt's and of Canning's voice !-In that Abbey, the thought of whose sacred silence did often touch his high heart, when all his fleet was moored in peace, or bearing down in line of battle, now Nelson sleeps !-And thousands, unknown and unhonoured, as wise, or brave, in themselves as good and as great as those whose temples fame hath crowned with everlasting halo, have dropt the body, and gone to God. How many thousand fairest faces, brightest eyes, have been extinguished and faded quite away! Fairer and brighter far to him whose youth they charmed and illumined, than any eyes that shall ever more gaze on the flowers of earth, or the stars of heaven! Methinks the westering sun shines cooler in the gardenthat the shades are somewhat deepened—that the birds are not hopping round our head, as they did some hour ago that in their afternoon siesta they are mute. Another set of insects are in the air. The flowers, that erewhile were broad and bright awake, with slumbering eyne are now hanging down their heads; and those that erewhile seemed to slumber, have awoke from their day-dreams, and look almost as if they were going to speak. Have you a language of your own-dear creatures-for we know that ye have loves? But, hark, the Gong-the Gong! in the hand of John, smiting it like the slave of some Malay-chief. In our Paradise there is "fear that dinner cool," mortal man must eat-and thus endeth "OUR MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM." THE MAN OF TON. A SATIRE. [JUNE 1828,] WHAT a noble poem would that be which did justice to its name of London, a Satire! The highest kind of satire belongs to the highest kind of poetry. Isaiah and Jeremiah were satirists—and is London not another Babylon? But those bards were prophets—the generations now are the uninspired sons of little men. Yet let no poet but of the highest order stir up with a long pole the wild beasts in that den of many cages, whether he desires to show up and off lions, bears, tigers, panthers, ounces, jaguars, hyenas, wolves, asleep or feedingor desires, by some gentler touch, to exhibit in their natural attitudes and postures zebras, quaggas, nylghaus, antelopes, kangaroos, opossums, apes, and monkeys-standing boldly or gracefully as if in their own African or Asiatic deserts, or sitting anomalously on their hurdies, as if in New Holland or Van Diemen's Land, or swinging all agrin and a-chatter over bar and to wire, as if gathering a "pretty considerable snatch of nuts, I guess," in the woods of the New World," and then right slick away," in terror of Jonathan's rifle, paid for at five dollars a-day by a naturalist in Philadelphia. Dr Johnson's London, a Satire, is a noble poem. But his great moral genius was constrained in composition by the perpetual parody on his powerful prototype, Juvenal. To have shown so much genius and so much ingenuity at one and the same time, to have been so original even in imitation, places him in the highest order of minds. But his range was here circumscribed; for he had to move parallel with the Roman— finding out in every passage corresponding and kindred sins, -and in order to preserve-which he did wondrously-the similitude "To bridle in his struggling muse with pain, Which long'd to launch into a nobler strain." |