264 ON THE GENERAL DEFICIENCY OF SELF-OBSERVATION. dome, Now poising o'er ocean thy delicate form, On the sweet winds of Heaven, to thine own brilliant skies Thou hidest thy wings in a mantle of light; And I think how a pure spirit gazing on thee, Must long for that moment-the joyous and free When the soul, disembodied from Nature, shall spring -GRIFFIN. ; ON THE GENERAL DEFICIENCY OF SELF-OBSERVATION. ONE of the greatest difficulties in the way of executing the proposed task (the review of a man's past life) will have been caused by the extreme deficiency of that self-observation, which is of no common habit either of youth or any later age. Men are content to have no more intimate sense of their existence than what they feel in the exercise of their faculties on extraneous objects. The vital being, with all its agency and emotions, is so blended and absorbed in these its exterior interests, that it is very rarely collected and concentrated in the consciousness of its own absolute self, so as to be recognised as a thing internal, apart and alone, for its own inspection and knowledge. Men carry their minds as for the most part they ON THE GENERAL DEFICIENCY OF SELF-OBSERVATION. 265 carry their watches, content to be ignorant of the constitution and action within, and attentive only to the little exterior circle of things, to which the passions, like indexes, are pointing. It is surprising to see how little self-knowledge a person not watchfully observant of himself may have gained, in the whole course of an active, or even an inquisitive life. He may have lived almost an age, and traversed a continent, minutely examining its cariosities, and interpreting the half-obliterated characters on its monuments, unconscious the while of a process operating on his own mind, to impress or to erase characteristics of much more importance to him than all the figured brass or marble that Europe contains. After having explored many a cavern or dark ruinous avenue, he may have left undetected a darker recess within where there would be much more striking discoveries. He may have conversed with many people, in different languages, on numberless subjects; but, having neglected those conversations with himself by which his whole moral being should have been kept continually disclosed to his view, he is better qualified perhaps to describe the intrigues of a foreign court, or the progress of a foreign trade; to depict the manners of the Italians, or the Turks; to narrate the proceedings of the Jesuits, or the adventures of the gypsies; than to write the history of his own mind. If we had practised habitual self-observation, we could not have failed to be made aware of much that it had been well for us to know. There have been thousands of feelings, each of which, if strongly seized upon, and made the subject of reflection, would have shewn us what our character was, and what it was likely to become. There have been numerous incidents, which operated on us as tests, and so fully brought out our prevailing quality, that another person, who should have been discriminatively observing us, would speedily have formed a decided estimate. But unfortunately the mind is generally too much occupied by the feeling or the incident itself, to have the slightest care or consciousness that anything could be learnt, or is disclosed. In very early youth it is almost inevitable for it to be thus lost to itself even amidst its own feelings, and the external objects of attention; but it seems a contemptible thing, and certainly is a criminal and dangerous thing, for a man in mature life to allow himself this thoughtless escape from selfexamination. 266 ON THE GENERAL DEFICIENCY OF SELF-OBSERVATION. We have not only neglected to observe what our feelings indicated, but have also in a very great degree ceased to remember what they were. We may wonder how we could pass away successively from so many scenes and conjunctures, each in its time of no trifling moment in our apprehension, and retain so light an impression, that we have now nothing distinctly to tell about what once excited our utmost emotion. As to my own mind, I perceive that it is becoming uncertain of the exact nature of many feelings of considerable interest, even of comparatively recent date; and that the remembrance of what was felt in very early life has nearly faded away. I have just been observing several children of eight or ten years old, in all the active vivacity which enjoys the plentitude of the moment without "looking before or after;" and while observing, I attempted, but without success, to recollect what I was at that age. I can indeed remember the principal events of the period, and the actions and projects to which my feelings impelled me; but the feelings themselves, in their own pure juvenility, cannot be revived so as to be described and placed in comparison with those of later life. What is become of all those vernal fancies which had so much power to touch the heart? What a number of sentiments have lived and revelled in the soul that are now irrevocably gone! They died like the singing-birds of that time, which sing no more. The life we then had, now seems almost as if it could not have been our own. We are like a man returning, after the absence of many years, to visit the imbowered cottage where he passed the morning of his life, and finding only a relic of its ruins. Thus an oblivious shade is spread over that early tract of our time, where some of the acquired propensities which remain in force to this hour may have had their origin, in a manner of which we had then no thought or consciousness. When we met with the incident, or heard the conversation, or saw the spectacle, or felt the emotion, which were the first causes or occasions of some of the chief permanent tendencies of future life, how little could we think that long afterwards we might be curiously and in vain desirous to investigate those tendencies back to their origin. -FOSTER. I HEAR the sobbing rain, As if the Heavens weep at Autumn's breath The idle wind is still, A spectral vapor haunts the barren earth; Upon our teeming joys there comes a chillThe chill of Winter's dearth. What if the tinted woods With outward loveliness are gay and fair, As if around them blushing Summer broods, Yearning to linger there! What if their beauteousness At death's cold touch is strangely glorified ! Their leaves will crumble soon to nothingness, Or else be swept aside. Their change is type of all, The hectic loveliness forebodes decay, All that we love and prize, Changeth like leaves upon our toilsome way Man's hoarded wealth, but dust before his eyes Passing, like life, away. O leaves and blossoms, fall! An after-life shall rise from out the gloom; The Autumn mists are but the outward pall, That hides perennial bloom. O children of decay! Swept by the blast and trodden by the rain, Your scattered dust shall eloquently say, That naught will fall in vain. THE NEW YEAR. IN a few hours we shall have entered on a new y barely ninety degrees distant from us at the presen It landed on the eastern extremity of Asia just a rising from our breakfasts this morning; and it has across the backwoods of America, in its seven-leagued boots, and careering over the Pacific in its canoe. The past year has witnessed many curious changes, as a dweller in time; the coming year has already looked down on many a curious scene, as a journeyer over space. It has seen Cochin-China, with all its unmapped islands, and the ancient empire of Japan, with its cities and provinces unknown to Europe. It has heard the roar of a busy population amid the thousand streets of Pekin, and the wild dash of the midnight tides as they fret the rocks of the Indian Archipelago. It has been already with our friends in Hindostan; it has been greeted, we doubt not, with the voice of prayer, as the slow iron hand of the city clock indicated its arrival to the missionaries at Madras; it has swept over the fever jungles of the Ganges, where the scaled crocodile startles the thirsty tiger as he stoops to drink, and the exposed corpse of the benighted Hindo floats drearily past. It has travelled over the land of pagodas, and is now entering the land of mosques. Anon it will see the moon in her wane, casting the dark shadows of columned Palmyra over the sands of the desert; and the dim walls of Jerusalem looking out on a silent and solitary land, that has cast forth its interim tenants, and waits unappropriated for the old predestined race, its proper inhabitants. In two short hours it will be voyaging along the cheerful Mediterranean, greeting the rower in his galley among the isles of Greece, and the seaman in his barque embayed in the Adriatic. And then, after marking the red glare of Etna reflecting in the waves that slumber around the moles of Syracuse,-after glancing on the towers of the Seven-hilled City, and the hoary snows of the Alps, after speeding over France, over Flanders, over the waves of the German Sea, it will be with ourselves, and the tall ghostly tenements of Dun-Edin will re-echo the shouts of the High Street. Away, and away it will cross the broad Atlantic, and visit watchers in their beacon-towers on the deep, and the emigrant in his log-hut, among the brown woods of the west; it will see the fire of the red man umbering with its gleam tall trunks and giant branches, in some deep glade of the forest; and then mark, on the far shores of the Pacific, the rugged bear stalking sullenly over the snow. Away, and away, and the vast globe shall be girdled by the zone of the new-born year. |