And while I gaze, thy mild and plăcid light That in thy orb the wretched may have rest; Forget, in thee, their cup of sorrow here. IX. THE STARS.-DARWIN.' ROLL on, ye stars; exult in youthful prime; 148. LANDSCAPE BEAUTY. IT is easy enough to understand how the sight of a picture of the original nor is it much more difficult to conceive, how the ERASMUS DARWIN, an English physician, poet, and botanist, was born at Elton, in 1731, and after taking his degree at Edinburgh, pursued his professional career at Lichfield, from which place he removed to Derby, where he died in 1802. Dr. DARWIN was an original thinker, a great adept in analogies, and an able versifier. sight of a cottage should give us something of the same feeling as the sight of a peasant's family; and the aspect of a town raise many of the same ideas as the appearance of a multitude of persons. We may begin, therefore, with an example a little more complicated. Take, for instance, the case of a common English landscape-green meadows with grazing and ruminating cattle-canals or navigable rivers-well-fenced, well-cultivated fields-neat, clean, scattered cottages-humble antique churches, with church-yard elms, and crossing hedgerows,-all seen under bright skies, and in good weather. 2. There is much beauty, as every one will acknowledge, in such a scene. But in what does the beauty consist? Not certainly in the mere mixture of colors and forms; for colors more pleasing, and lines more graceful (according to any theory of grace that may be preferred), might be spread upon a board, or a painter's pallet, without engaging the eye to a second glance, or raising the least emotion in the mind: but in the picture of human happiness that is presented to our imaginations and affections; in the visible and unequivocal signs of comfort, and cheerful and peaceful enjoyment-and of that secure and successful in'dustry that insures its continuance-and of the piety by which it is exalted—and of the simplicity by which it is contrasted with the guilt and the fever of a city life; in the images of health, and temperance, and plenty which it exhibits to every eye; and in the glimpses which it affords to warmer imaginations, of those primitive or fabulous times, when man was uncorrupted by luxury and ambition, and of those humble retreats in which we still delight to imagine that love and philosophy may find an unpolluted asy'lum. 3. At all events, however, it is human feeling that excites our sympathy, and forms the true object of our emotions. It is man, and man alone, that we see in the beauties of the earth which he inhabits; or, if a more sensitive and extended sympa thy connect us with the lower families of animated nature, and make us rejoice with the lambs that bleat on the uplands, or the cattle that repose in the valley, or even with the living plants that drink the bright sun and the balmy air beside them, it is still the idea of enjoyment-of feelings that animate the existence of sentient beings-that calls forth all our emotions, and is the parent of all the beauty with which we proceed to invest the inanimate creation around us. 4. Instead of this quiet and tame English landscape, let us now take a Welsh or a Highland scene, and see whether its beauties will admit of being explained on the same principle. Here, we shall have lofty mountains, and rocky and lonely recesses-tufted woods hung over precipices-lakes intersected with castled promontories-ample solitudes of unplowed and untrodden valleys-nameless and gigantic ruins-and mountain echoes repeating the scream of the eagle and the roar of the cataract. 5. This, too, is beautiful, and, to those who can interpret the language it speaks, far more beautiful than the prosperous scene with which we have contrasted it. Yet, lonely as it is, it is to the recollection of man and the suggestion of human feelings that its beauty also is owing. The mere forms and colors that compose its visible appearance are no more capable of exciting any emotion in the mind than the forms and colors of a Turkey carpet. It is sympathy with the present or the past, or the imaginary inhabitants of such a region, that alone gives it either interest or beauty; and the delight of those who behold it will always be found to be in exact proportion to the force of their imaginations and the warmth of the social affections. 6. The leading impressions here are those of romantic seclusion and primeval simplicity; lovers sequestered in these blissful solitudes, "from towns and toils remote," and rustic poëts and philosophers communing with nature, and at a distance from the low pursuits and selfish malignity of ordinary mortals: then there is the sublime impression of the Mighty Powers which piled the massive cliffs upon each other, and rent the mountains asunder, and scattered their giant fragments at their base, and all the images connected with the monuments of ancient magnificence and extinguished hostility-the feuds, and the combats, and the triumphs of its wild and primitive inhabitants, contrasted with the stillness and desolation of the scenes where they lie interred; and the romantic ideas attached to their ancient traditions, and the peculiarities of the actual life of their descendants their wild and enthusiastic poëtry-their gloomy superstitions -their attachment to their chiefs-the dangers, and the hard ships, and enjoyments of their lonely huntings and fishingstheir pastoral shielings on the mountains in summer-and the tales and the sports that amuse the little groups that are frozen into their vast and trackless valleys in the winter. 7. Add to all this the traces of vast and obscure antiquity that are impressed on the language and the habits of the people, and on the cliffs, and caves, and gulfy torrents of the land; and the solemn and touching reflection, perpetually recurring, of the weakness and insignificance of perishable man, whose generations thus pass away into oblivion, with all their toils and ambition; while nature holds on her unvarying course, and pours out her streams, and renews her forests, with undecaying activity, regardless of the fate of her proud and perishable sovereign. JEFFREY.1 1. H 149. KILIMANDJARO. AIL to thee, monarch of African mountains, Who, from the heart of the tropical fervors, Feeding forever the fountains that make thee The years of the world are engraved on thy forehead; 2. Knowledge alone is the being of Nature, 'See Biographical Sketch, p. 287.- Sovereign (sův er in). 3. Floating alone, on the flood of thy making, Zone above zone, to thy shoulders of granite, And, giving each shelvy recess where they dally There, in the wondering airs of the Tropics 5. Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance, Tinted and shadow'd by pencils of air, Thy battlements hang o'er the slopes and the forests, Looming sublimely aloft and afar. Above them, like folds of imperial ermine, Sparkle the snow-fields that furrow thy forehead Desolate realms, inaccessible, silent, Chasms and caverns where Day is a stranger, Garners where storèth his treasures the Thunder, The Lightning his falchion, his arrows the Hail! 6. Sovereign Mountain, thy brothers give welcome : They, the baptized and the crowned of ages, Watch-towers of Continents, altars of Earth, Welcome thee now to their mighty assembly. |