Of man, of nature, and of human life" as they are by the necessity of their being-and who can blacken beyond the truth the character of sin and guilt "that makes the nature's groan?" We are not among the number of those, who from "golden urns draw light," and then make a display of their borrowed lustre-an audacious trick of many a mean-spirited thief, imagining that the world will admire his head as if it shone like that of Christopher among the Mountains, while children, at first scared by the glimmer in the hedge, soon scorn the illuminated turnip. We steal from no man bert Croft, the frog, that, with that bull in his eye, puffed himself up till he realized the fable. Thomas Campbell somehow or other missed it-the only miss he ever made-and when one poet goes wrong about another, he is neither to "haud nor to bin'," and flings the stones and gravel from his heels in a style that shows it would be the height of imprudence to attempt to follow. Bulwer alone has written worthily about "one among the highest, but not the most popular of his Country's Poets." And with a crowquill delicately nibbed by Mrs Gentle, two years ago, we copied in our Oberonic calligraphy, on the flyleaf of this our Diamond Edition, this fine and philosophic criticism from "The Student." creations of two worlds are round "Standing upon the grave-the him, and the grey hairs of the mourner become touched with the halo of the prophet. It is the time and spot that dignify and consecrate the leshe has chosen wherein to teach us, son: it is not the mere human and earthly moral that gathers on his tongue. The conceptiou hallows the work, and sustains its own majesty in every change and wandering of the verse. And there is this greatness in his theme-dark, terrible, severe― Hope never deserts it! It is a deep and gloomy wave, but the stars are glassed upon its bosom. The more sternly he questions the World, the more solemnly he refers its answer to Heaven. Our bane and antidote are both before him; and he only arraigns the things of Time before the tribunal of Eternity. It is this, which, to men whom grief or approaching death can divest of the love and hanmonitor his majesty, but deprives him kerings of the world, leaves the great of his gloom. Convinced with him of the vanities of life, it is not an ungracious or unsoothing melancholy which confirms us in our conviction, and points with a steady hand to the divine SOMETHING that awaits us beyond; 'The darkness aiding intellectual light, And sacred silence whispering truths divine, And truths divine converting pain to peace.' "I know not whether I should say too much of this great poem if I should call it a fit Appendix to the Paradise Lost.' It is the Consolation to that Complaint. Imagine the ages to have rolled by since our first parents gave earth to their offspring, who sealed the gift with blood, and bequeathed it to us with toil :-imagine, after all that experience can teach-after the hoarded wisdom and the increasing pomp of countless generations-an old man, one of that exiled and fallen race, standing among the tombs of his ancestors, telling us their whole history, in his appeals to the living heart, and holding out to us, with trembling hands, the only comfort which earth has yet discovered for its cares and sores the anticipation of Heaven! To me, that picture completes all that Milton began. It sums up the human history, whose first chapter he had chronicled; it preacheth the great issues of the Fall; it shows that the burning light then breathed into the soul, lives there still; it consummates the mysterious record of our mortal sadness and our everlasting hope. But if the conception of the Night Thoughts' be great, it is also uniform and sustained. The vast wings of the inspiration never slacken or grow fatigued. Even the humours and conceits are of a piece with the solemnity of the poem-like the grotesque masks carved on the walls of a cathedral, which defy the strict laws of taste, and almost inexplicably harmonise with the whole. The sorrow, too, of the poet is not egotistical, or weak in its repining. It is the great one sorrow common to all human nature-the deep and wise regret that springs from an intimate knowledge of our being and the scene in which it has been cast. That same knowledge, operating on various minds, produces various results. In Voltaire it sparkled into wit; in Goethe, it deepened into a humour that belongs to the sublime; in Young it generated the same high and profound melancholy as that which excited the inspirations of the Son of Sirach, and the soundest portion of the philosophy of Plato." Here is a passage that itself justifies even such an eulogy-for where is its superior-we had almost said its equal-either in poetry or philosophy throughout the whole range of the creation of English genius? "How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, A worm! a god! I tremble at myself, And in myself am lost! At home a stranger, What can preserve my life? or what destroy? "'Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof, Of subtler essence than the trodden clod; For human weal, Heaven husbands all events: The last paragraph is admirablebut the first is wondrous-and would have entranced Hamlet. "I have of late (but, wherefore, I know not) lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises: and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave, o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" The ghost of one," in form and moving, how express and admirable," was gliding through his imagination -and he knew that what was once "its smooth body," "A most instant tetter barked about Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust;' his mother, whom that ghost, when in the body "Would not beteem the wind of heaven Visit her face too roughly now forgetful of " the buried Majesty of Denmark," and soaking "in the rank sweat of an incestuous bed; "the serpent that did sting his father's life now wearing his crown; "confusion worse confounded among all the holiest thoughts and things that had made to him the religion of his being beneath all that horrible and hideous oppression-and in the revealed knowledge of possibilities of wickedness in nature, otherwise beyond the reaches of his soul," he thought of heaven and earth, and man-and spoke of them still as glorious and godlike-while there was quaking in his soul an ineffable trouble never more to be appeased, stirred up from its unfathomed depths by the voice of the dead disclosing deeds that changed the face of the firmament, and into worse than "beasts that want discourse of reason," turned the creatures God had formed after his own likeness, "magnanimous to correspond with Heaven." But not Shakspeare-not Young, ever drew such a picture of MAN as the one now emerging from the still deep waters of our memory-by whom painted? One of the Masters in Israel. "And first, that he hath withdrawn himself, and left this his temple desolate, we have many sad and plain proofs before us. The stately ruines are visible to every eye, that bear in their front (yet extant) this doleful inscription: "Here God once dwelt." Enough appears of the admirable frame and structure of the soul of man, to show the divine presence did sometime reside in it, more than enough of vicious deformity, to proclaim he is now retired and gone. The lamps are extinct, the altar overturn'd. The light and love are now vanisht, which did the one shine with so heavenly brightness, the other burn with so pious fervour. The golden candlestick is displac't, and thrown away as an useless thing, to make room for the throne of the Prince of Darkness. The sacred incense, which sent rowling up in clouds its rich perfumes, are exchang'd for a poisonous hellish vapour, and here is, instead of a sweet savour, a stench. The comely order of this house is turn'd all into confusion. The beauties of holiness into noisom impurities. The house of prayer, to a den of thieves, and that of the worst and most horrid kind, for every lust is a thief, and every theft, sacrilege; continual rapine and robbery is committed upon holy things. The noble powers which were design'd and dedicated to divine contemplation and delight, are alienated to the service of the most despicable idols, and employ'd unto vilest intuitions and embraces; to behold and admire lying vanities; to indulge and cherish lust and wickedness. What, have not the enemies done wickedly in the sanctuary! How have they broken down the carved work thereof, and that too with axes and hammers; the noise whereof was not to be heard in building, much less in the demolishing this sacred frame. Look upon the fragments of that curious sculpture which once adorn'd the palace of that great king: The reliques of common notions; the lively prints of some undefaced truth; the fair ideas of things; the yet legible precepts that relate to practice. Behold! with what accuracy the broken pieces shew these to have been engraven by the finger of God, and how they now lie torn, and scatter'd, one in this dark corner, another in that, buried in heaps of dirt and rubbish. There is not now a system, an entire table of coherent truths to be found, or a frame of holiness, but some shiver'd parcels. And if any, with great toil and labour, apply themselves to draw out here one piece, and there another, and set them together, they serve rather to show how exquisite the Divine workmanship was in the original composition than for present use, to the excellent purposes for which the whole was first design'd. Some pieces agree, and own one another; but how soon are our enquiries and endeavours nonplust and superseded! How many attempts have been made since that fearful fall and ruin of this fabrick, to compose again the truths of so many several kinds into their distinct orders, and make up frames of science, or useful knowledge; and, after so many ages, nothing is finisht in any one kind. Sometimes truths are misplac'd, and what belongs to one kind is transferred to another, where it will not fitly match; sometimes falsehood inserted, which shatters or disturbs the whole frame. And what is with much fruitless pains done by one hand, is dasht in pieces by another; and it is the work of a following age to sweep away the fine-spun cobwebs of a former. And those truths which are of greatest use, though not most out of sight, are least regarded. Their tendency and design are overlookt; or they are so loosen'd and torn off, that they cannot be wrought in, so as to take hold of the soul, but hover as faint, ineffectual notions, that signify nothing. Its very fundamental powers are shaken and disjointed, and their order, towards one another, confounded and broken. So that what is judg'd considerable is not consider'd. What is recommended as eligible and lovely, is not loved and chosen. Yea, the truth which is after godliness, is not so much disbeliev'd, as hated, held in unrighteousness, and shines as too feeble a light in that malignant darkness which comprehends it not. You come amidst all this confusion, as into the ruin'd palace of some great prince, in which you see here the fragments of a noble pillar, there the shatter'd pieces of some curious imagery, and all lying neglected and useless among heaps of dirt. He that invites you to take a view of the soul of man, gives you but such another prospect, and doth but say to you, behold the desolation, all things rude and wast. So that should there be any pretence to the divine presence, it might be said, If God be here, why is it thus? The faded glory, the darkness, the disorder, the impurity, the decay'd state in all respects of this temple, too plainly show the Great Inhabitant is gone.' From "The Living Temple" of John How! Sometimes we have fears about our memory - that it is decaying; for, lately many ordinary yet interesting occurrences and events, which we regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, have been slipping away almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the merry, and, worse, the merry upon the mournful-confusion, by no fault of ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces-tears where smiles were a duty as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded and religion hallowed a sacrifice of tears. Yet we forget no beautiful or glorious passage-in prose or verse-that had been committed to memory, either by the heart or by the soul—and, like another star stealing through the sky to join its constellation-lo! another Light of Song. "On man, on nature, and on human life, Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed; And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes The good and evil of our mortal state. Of blessed consolations in distress; Of moral strength, and intellectual power; Of the individual mind that keeps her own To conscience only, and the law supreme Of that intelligence which governs all; I sing fit audience let me find, though few!' Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such Nor aught of blindest vacancy-scooped out As fall upon us often when we look Into our minds, into the Mind of Man, My haunt, and the main region of my song. Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves (And the progressive powers perhaps no less |