The ASH is a manly tree, but "dreigh and dour" in the leafing; and yonder stands an Ash-grove like a forest of ships with bare poles in the docks of Liverpool. Yet like the town of Kilkenny

"It shines well where it stands;"

and the bare grey-blue of the branches, apart but not repulsive, like some cunning discord in music, deepens the harmony of the Isle of Groves. Contrast is one of the finest of all the laws of association, as every philosopher, poet, and peasant kens. At this moment, it brings, by the bonds of beauty, though many glades intervene, close beside that pale grey-blue leafless Ash-Clump, that bright black-green PINE Clan, whose "leaf fadeth never," a glorious Scottish tartan triumphing in the English woods. Though many glades intervene, we said; for thou seest that BELLE ISLE is not all one various flush of wood, but bedropt all over--bedropt and besprinkled with grass-gems, some cloud-shadowed, some tree-shaded, some mist-bedimmed, and some luminous as small soil-suns, on which as the eye alights, it feels soothed and strengthened, and gifted with a profounder power to see into the mystery of the beauty of nature. But what are those living Hills of snow, or of some substance purer in its brightness even than any snow that fades in one night on the mountain-top! Trees are they--fruit-trees--The WILD CHERRY, that grows stately and widespreading even as the monarch of the wood--and can that be a load of blossoms! Fairer never grew before poet's eye of old in the fabled Hesperides. See how what we call snow brightens into pink--yet still the whole glory is white, and fadeth not away the purity of the balmy snow-blush. Ay, balmy as the bliss breathing from virgin lips, when, moving in the beauty left by her morning prayers, a glad fond daughter steals towards him on the feet of light, and as his arms open to receive and return the blessing, lays her innocence with smiles that are almost tears, within her father's bosom.

"As when to those who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow Sabaean odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the Blest; with such delay Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league, Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles."

Shut your eyes--suppose five months gone--and lo! BELLE ISLE in Autumn, like a scene in another hemisphere of our globe. There is a slight frost in the air, in the sky, on the lake, and mid-day is as still as midnight. But, though still, it is cheerful; for close at hand Robin Redbreast--God bless him!--is warbling on the copestone of that old barn gable; and though Millar-Ground Bay is half a mile off, how distinct the clank of the two oars like one, accompanying that large wood-boat on its slow voyage from Ambleside to Bowness, the metropolitan port of the Queen of the Lakes. The water has lost, you see, its summer sunniness, yet it is as transparent as ever it was in summer; and how close together seem, with their almost meeting shadows, the two opposite shores! But we wish you to look at BELLE ISLE, though we ourselves are almost afraid to do so, so transcendently glorious is the sight that we know will disturb us with an emotion too deep to be endured.--Could you not think that a splendid sunset had fallen down in fragments on the Isle called Beautiful, and set it all ablaze! The woods are on fire, yet they burn not; beauty subdues while it fosters the flame; and there, as in a many-tented tabernacle, has Colour pitched his royal residence, and reigns in glory beyond that of any Oriental king. What are all the canopies, and balconies, and galleries of human state, all hung with the richest drapery that ever the skill of Art, that Wizard, drew forth in gorgeous folds from his enchanted loom, if ideally suspended in the air of imagination beside the sun-and-storm-stained furniture of these Palaces of Autumn, framed by the Spirit of the Season, of living and dying umbrage, for his latest delight, ere he move in annual migration, with all his Court, to some foreign clime far beyond the seas! No names of trees are remembered--a glorious confusion comprehends in one the whole leafy race--orange, and purple, and scarlet, and crimson, are all seen to be there, and interfused through the silent splendour is aye felt the presence of that terrestrial green, native and unextinguishable in earth's bosom, as that celestial blue is that of the sky. That trance goes by, and the spirit, gradually filled with a stiller delight, takes down all those tents into pieces, and contemplates the encampment with less of imagination, and with more of love. It knows and blesses each one of those many glorious groves, each becoming, as it gazes, less and less glorious, more and more beautiful; till memory revives all the happiest and holiest hours of the Summer and the Spring, and re-peoples the melancholy umbrage with a thousand visions of joy, that may return never more! Images, it may be, of forms and faces now mouldering in the dust! For as human hearts have felt, and all human lips have declared--melancholy making poets of us all, ay, even prophets--till the pensive air of Autumn has been filled with the music of elegiac and foreboding hymns--as is the Race of Leaves--now old Homer speaks--so is the Race of Men! Nor till time shall have an end, insensate will be any creature endowed "with discourse of reason" to those mysterious misgivings, alternating with triumphant aspirations more mysterious still, when the Religion of Nature leans in awe on the Religion of God, and we hear the voice of both in such strains as these--the earthly, in its sadness, momentarily deadening the divine:--

"But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn?

Oh! when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?"

SOLILOQUY ON THE SEASONS.

SECOND RHAPSODY.

Have we not been speaking of all the Seasons as belonging to the masculine gender? They are generally, we believe, in this country, painted in petticoats, apparently by bagmen, as may be daily seen in the pretty prints that bedeck the paper-walls of the parlours of inns.

Spring is always there represented as a spanker in a blue symar, very pertly exposing her budding breast, and her limbs from feet to fork, in a style that must be very offensive to the mealy-mouthed members of that shamefaced corporation, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. She holds a flower between her finger and her thumb, crocus, violet, or primrose; and though we verily believe she means no harm, she no doubt does look rather leeringly upon you, like one of the frail sisterhood of the Come-atables. Summer again is an enormous and monstrous mawsey, _in puris naturalibus_, meant to image Musidora, or the Medicean, or rather the Hottentot Venus.

"So stands the statue that enchants the world!"

She seems, at the very lightest, a good round half hundred heavier than Spring; and, when you imagine her plunging into the pool, you think you hear a porpus. May no Damon run away with her clothes, leaving behind in exchange his heart! Gadflies are rife in the dogdays, and should one "imparadise himself in form of that sweet flesh," there will be a cry in the woods that will speedily bring to her assistance Pan and all his Satyrs. Autumn is a motherly matron, evidently _enceinte_, and, like Love and Charity, who probably are smiling on the opposite wall, she has a brace of bouncing babies at her breast--in her right hand a formidable sickle, like a Turkish scymitar--in her left an extraordinary utensil, bearing, we believe, the heathenish appellation of cornucopia--on her back a sheaf of wheat--and on her head a diadem--planted there by John Barleycorn. She is a fearsome dear; as ugly a customer as a lonely man would wish to encounter beneath the light of a September moon. On her feet are bauchles--on her legs huggers--and the breadth of her soles, and the thickness of her ankles, we leave to your own conjectures. Her fine bust is conspicuous in an open laced boddice--and her huge hips are set off to the biggest advantage, by a jacket that she seems to have picked up by the wayside, after some jolly tar, on his return from a long voyage, had there been performing his toilet, and, by getting rid of certain encumbrances, enabled to pursue his inland journey with less resemblance than before to a walking scarecrow. Winter is a withered old beldam, too poor to keep a cat, hurkling on her hunkers over a feeble fire of sticks, extinguished fast as it is beeted, with a fizz in the melted snow which all around that unhoused wretchedness is indurated with frost; while a blue pool close at hand is chained in iciness, and an old stump, half buried in the drift. Poor old, miserable, cowering crone! One cannot look at her without unconsciously putting one's hand in his pocket, and fumbling for a tester. Yes, there is pathos in the picture, especially while, on turning round your head, you behold a big blockhead of a vulgar bagman, with his coat-tails over his arms, warming his loathsome hideousness at a fire that would roast an ox.

Such are the Seasons! And though we have spoken of them, as mere critics on art, somewhat superciliously, yet there is almost always no inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, paintings, poems, or prose-works, that--pardon our tautology--are popular with the people.

The emblematical figments now alluded to, have been the creations of persons of genius, who had never had access to the works of the old masters; so that, though the conception is good, the execution is, in general, far from perfect. Yet many a time, when lying at our ease in a Wayside Inn, stretched on three wooden chairs, with a little round deal-table before us, well laden with oatmeal cakes and cheese and butter, nor, you may be sure, without its "tappit hen"--have we after a long day's journey--perhaps the longest day--

"Through moors and mosses many, O,"

regarded with no imaginative spirit--when Joseph and his brethren were wanting--even such symbols of the Seasons as these--while arose to gladden us many as fair an image as ever nature sent from her woods and wildernesses to cheer the heart of her worshipper who, on his pilgrimage to her loftiest shrines, and most majestic temples, spared not to stoop his head below the lowest lintel, and held all men his equal who earned by honest industry the scanty fare which they never ate without those holy words of supplication and thanksgiving, "Give us this day our daily bread!"

Our memory is a treasure-house of written and unwritten poetry--the ingots, the gifts of the great bards, and the bars of bullion--much of the coin our own--some of it borrowed mayhap, but always on good security, and repaid with interest--a legal transaction, of which even a not unwealthy man has no need to be ashamed--none of it stolen, nor yet found where the Highlandman found the tongs. But our riches are like those that encumbered the floor of the Sanctum of the Dey of Algiers, not very tidily arranged; and we are frequently foiled in our efforts to lay our hand, for immediate use or ornament, on a ducat or a diamond, a pistole or a pearl, a sovereign, or only his crown. We feel ourselves at this moment in that predicament, when trying to recollect the genders of Thomson's "Seasons"--

"Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come, And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend!"

That picture is indistinctly and obscurely beautiful to the imagination, and there is not a syllable about sex--though "ethereal mildness," which is an Impersonation, and hardly an Impersonation, must be, it is felt, a Virgin Goddess, whom all the divinities that dwell between heaven and earth must love. Never to our taste--but our taste is inferior to our feeling and our genius--though you will seldom go far wrong even in trusting it--never had a poem a more beautiful beginning. It is not simple--nor ought it to be--it is rich, and even gorgeous--for the Bard came to his subject full of inspiration; and as it was the inspiration, here, not of profound thought, but of passionate emotion, it was right that music at the very first moment should overflow the page, and that it should be literally strewed with roses. An imperfect Impersonation is often proof positive of the highest state of poetical enthusiasm. The forms of nature undergo a half humanising process under the intensity of our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because only the soul of genius can give it a presence--though afterwards all eyes dimly recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their harps, and go drown themselves in Helicon.

"From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed, Child of the Sun, refulgent SUMMER comes, In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth: He comes attended by the sultry hours, And ever-fanning breezes, on his way; While, from his ardent look, the turning Spring Averts her blushful face, and earth, and skies, All smiling, to his hot dominion leaves."

Here the Impersonation is stronger--and perhaps the superior strength lies in the words "child of the Sun." And here in the words describing Spring, she too is more of an Impersonation than in the other passage--averting her blushful face from the Summer's ardent look. The poet having made Summer masculine, very properly makes Spring feminine; and 'tis a jewel of a picture--for ladies should always avert their blushful faces from the ardent looks of gentlemen. Thomson, indeed, elsewhere says of an enamoured youth overpowered by the loving looks of his mistress,--

"From the keen gaze her lover turns away, Full of the dear ecstatic power, and sick With sighing languishment."

This, we have heard, from experienced persons of both sexes, is as delicate as it is natural; but for our own simple and single selves, we never remember having got sick on any such occasion. Much agitated, we cannot deny--if we did, the most credulous would not credit us--much agitated we have been, when our lady-love, not contented with fixing upon us her dove-eyes, began billing and cooing in a style from which the cushat might have taken a lesson with advantage, that she might the better perform her innocent part on her first assignation with her affianced in the pine-grove on St Valentine's day; but never in all our long lives got we absolutely _sick_--nor even _squeamish_--never were we obliged to turn away with our hand to our mouth--but, on the contrary, we were commonly as brisk as a bee at a pot of honey; or, if that be too luscious a simile, as brisk as that same wonderful insect murmuring for a few moments round and round a rose-bush, and then settling himself down seriously to work, as mute as a mouse, among the half-blown petals.

However, we are not now writing our Confessions--and what we wished to say about this passage is, that in it the one sex is represented as turning away the face from that of the other, which may be all natural enough, though polite on the gentleman's part we can never call it; and, had the female virgin done so, we cannot help thinking it would have read better in poetry. But for Spring to avert _his_ blushful face from the ardent looks of Summer, has on us the effect of making both Seasons seem simpletons. Spring, in the character of "ethereal mildness," was unquestionably a female; but here she is "unsexed from the crown to the toe," and changed into an awkward hobbletehoy, who, having passed his boyhood in the country, is a booby who blushes black at the gaze of his own brother, and if brought into the company of the lasses, would not fail to faint away in a fit, nor revive till his face felt a pitcherful of cold water.

"Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf, While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain, Comes jovial on," &c.,

is, we think, bad. The Impersonation here is complete, and though the sex of Autumn is not mentioned, it is manifestly meant to be male. So far, there is nothing amiss either one way or another. But "nodding o'er the yellow plain" is a mere statement of a fact in nature--and descriptive of the growing and ripening or ripened harvest--whereas it is applied here to Autumn, as a figure who "comes jovial on." This is not obscurity--or indistinctness--which, as we have said before, is often a great beauty in Impersonation; but it is an inconsistency and a contradiction--and therefore indefensible on any ground either of conception or expression.

"There are no such essential vices as this in the "Castle of Indolence"--for by that time Thomson had subjected his inspiration to thought--and his poetry, guided and guarded by philosophy, became celestial as an angel's song.

"See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year, Sullen and sad, with all his rising train, Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme, These! that exalt the soul to solemn thought, And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms!

Congenial horrors, hail! with frequent foot, Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life, When nursed by careless Solitude I lived, And sung of Nature with unceasing joy, Pleased have I wander'd through your rough domain; Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure; Heard the winds roar, and the big torrents burst; Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd In the grim evening sky. Thus passed the time, Till through the lucid chambers of the south Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smiled!"

Divine inspiration indeed! Poetry, that if read by the bedside of a dying lover of nature, might

"Create a soul Under the ribs of death!"

What in the name of goodness makes us suppose that a mean, and miserable November day, even while we are thus Rhapsodising, is drizzling all Edinburgh with the worst of all imaginable Scottish mists--an Easterly Haur? We know that he infests all the year, but shows his poor spite in its bleakest bitterness in March and in November. Earth and heaven are not only not worth looking at in an Easterly Haur, but the Visible is absolute wretchedness, and people wonder why they were born. The visitation begins with a sort of characterless haze, waxing more and more wetly obscure, till you know not whether it be rain, snow, or sleet, that drenches your clothes in dampness, till you feel it in your skin, then in your flesh, then in your bones, then in your marrow, and then in your mind. Your blinking eyes have it too--and so, shut it as you will, has your moping mouth. Yet the streets, though looking blue, are not puddled, and the dead cat lies dry in the gutter. There is no eavesdropping--no gushing of waterspouts. To say it rained would be no breach of veracity, but a mere misstatement of a melancholy fact. The truth is, that _the weather cannot rain_, but keeps spit, spit, spitting, in a style sufficient to irritate Socrates--or even Moses himself; and yet true, veritable, sincere, genuine, and authentic Rain could not--or if he could would not--so thoroughly soak you and your whole wardrobe, were you to allow him a day to do it, as that shabby imitation of a tenth-rate shower, in about the time of a usual sized sermon. So much cold and so much wet, with so little to show for it, is a disgrace to the atmosphere, which it will take weeks of the sunniest the weather can afford to wipe off. But the stores of sunniness which it is in the power of Winter in this northern latitude to accumulate, cannot be immense; and therefore we verily believe that it would be too much to expect that it ever can make amends for the hideous horrors of this Easterly Haur. The Cut-throat!

On such days suicides rush to judgment. That sin is mysterious as insanity--their graves are unintelligible as the cells in Bedlam. Oh!

the brain and the heart of man! Therein is the only Hell. Small these regions in space, and of narrow room--but haunted may they be with all the Fiends and all the Furies. A few nerves transmit to the soul despair or bliss. At the touch of something--whence and wherefore sent, who can say--something that serenes or troubles, soothes or jars--she soars up into life and light, just as you may have seen a dove suddenly cleave the sunshine--or down she dives into death and darkness, like a shot eagle tumbling into the sea!

Materialism! Immaterialism! Why should mortals, whom conscience tells that they are immortals, bewildered and bewildering ponder upon the dust! Do your duty to God and man, and fear not that, when that dust dies, the spirit that breathed by it will live for ever. Feels not that spirit its immortality in each sacred thought? When did ever religious soul fear annihilation? Or shudder to think that, having once known, it could ever forget God? Such forgetfulness is in the idea of eternal death. Therefore is eternal death impossible to us who can hold communion with our Maker. Our knowledge of Him--dim and remote though it be--is a God-given pledge that He will redeem us from the doom of the grave.

Let us then, and all our friends, believe, with Coleridge, in his beautiful poem of the "Nightingale," that

"In Nature there is nothing melancholy,"

not even November. The disease of the body may cause disease in the soul; yet not the less trust we in the mercy of the merciful--not the less strive we to keep feeding and trimming that spiritual lamp which is within us, even when it flickers feebly in the dampy gloom, like an earthly lamp left in a vaulted sepulchre, about to die among the dead.

Heaven seems to have placed a power in our Will as mighty as it is mysterious. Call it not Liberty, lest you should wax proud; call it not Necessity, lest you should despair. But turn from the oracles of man--still dim even in their clearest responses--to the Oracles of God, which are never dark; or if so, but

"Dark with excessive bright"

to eyes not constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around you--bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to illuminate the unfathomable--open your Bible, and all the spiritual world will be as bright as day.

The disease of the body may cause disease to the soul. Ay, madness. Some rapture in the soul makes the brain numb, and thence sudden or lingering death;--some rupture in the brain makes the soul insane, and thence life worse than death, and haunted by horrors beyond what is dreamt of the grave and all its corruption. Perhaps the line fullest of meaning that ever was written, is--

"Mens sana in corpore sano."

When nature feels the flow of its vital blood pure and unimpeded, what unutterable gladness bathes the spirit in that one feeling of--health!

Then the mere consciousness of existence is like that emotion which Milton speaks of as breathed from the bowers of Paradise--

"Vernal delight and joy, able to drive All sadness but despair"

It does more--for despair itself cannot prevail against it. What a dawn of bliss rises upon us with the dawn of light, when our life is healthful as the sun! Then

"It feels that it is greater than it knows."

God created the earth and the air beautiful through the senses; and at the uplifting of a little lid, a whole flood of imagery is let in upon the spirit, all of which becomes part of its very self, as if the enjoying and the enjoyed were one. Health flies away like an angel, and her absence disenchants the earth. What shadows then pass over the ethereal surface of the spirit, from the breath of disordered matter!--from the first scarcely-felt breath of despondency, to the last scowling blackness of despair! Often men know not what power placed the fatal fetters upon them--they see even that a link may be open, and that one effort might fling off the bondage; but their souls are in slavery, and will not be free. Till something like a fresh wind, or a sudden sunbeam, comes across them, and in a moment their whole existence is changed, and they see the very vanishing of their most dismal and desperate dream.

"Somewhat too much of this"--so let us strike the chords to a merrier measure--to a "livelier lilt"--as suits the variable spirit of our Soliloquy. Be it observed, then, that the sole certain way of getting rid of the blue devils, is to drown them in a shower-bath. You would not suppose that we are subject to the blue devils? Yet we are sometimes their very slave. When driven to it by their lash, every occupation, which when free we resort to as pastime, becomes taskwork; nor will these dogged masters suffer us to purchase emancipation with the proceeds of the toil of our groaning genius. But whenever the worst comes to the worst, and we almost wish to die so that we might escape the galling pressure of our chains, we sport buff, and into the shower-bath. Yet such is the weakness of poor human nature, that like a criminal on the scaffold, shifting the signal kerchief from hand to hand, much to the irritation of his excellency the hangman, one of the most impatient of men--and more to the satisfaction of the crowd, the most patient of men and women--we often stand shut up in that sentry-looking canvass box, dexterously and sinistrously fingering the string, perhaps for five shrinking, and shuddering, and _grueing_ minutes, ere we can summon up desperation to pull down upon ourselves the rushing waterfall! Soon as the agony is over, we bounce out the colour of beetroot, and survey ourselves in a five-foot mirror, with an amazement that, on each successive exhibition, is still as fresh as when we first experienced it,

"In life's morning march, when our spirits were young."