By-and-by we assume the similitude of an immense boiled lobster that has leapt out of the pan--and then, seeming for a while to be an emblematical or symbolical representation of the setting Sun, we sober down into a faint pink, like that of the Morn, and finally subside into our own permanent flesh-light, which, as we turn our back upon ourselves, after the fashion of some of his majesty's ministers, reminds us of that line in Cowper descriptive of the November Moon--

"Resplendent less, but of an ampler round!"

Like that of the eagle, our youth is renewed--we feel strong as the horse in Homer--a divine glow permeates our being, as if it were the subdued spiritual essence of caloric. An intense feeling of self--not self-love, mind ye, and the farthest state imaginable in this wide world from selfishness--elevates us far up above the clouds, into the loftiest regions of the sunny blue, and we seem to breathe an atmosphere, of which every glorious gulp is inspiration. Despondency is thrown to the dogs. Despair appears in his true colours, a more grotesque idiot than Grimaldi, and we treat him with a guffaw. All ante-bath difficulties seem now--what they really are--facilities of which we are by far too much elated to avail ourselves; dangers that used to appear appalling are felt now to be lulling securities--obstacles, like mountains, lying in our way of life as we walked towards the temple of Apollo or Plutus, we smile at the idea of surmounting, so molehillish do they look, and we kick them aside like an old footstool. Let the country ask us for a scheme to pay off the national debt--_there she has it_; do you request us to have the kindness to leap over the moon--here we go; excellent Mr Blackwood has but to say the word, and a ready-made Leading Article is in his hand, promotive of the sale of countless numbers of "my Magazine," and of the happiness of countless numbers of mankind. We feel--and the feeling proves the fact--as bold as Joshua the son of Nun--as brave as David the son of Jesse--as wise as Solomon the son of David--and as proud as Nebuchadnezzar the son of Nebopolazzar. We survey our image in the mirror--and think of Adam. We put ourselves into the posture of the Belvidere Apollo.

"Then view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and light, The Sun in human arms array'd, and brow All radiant from his triumph in the fight.

The shaft hath just been shot--the arrow bright With an immortal vengeance; in his eye And nostril beautiful disdain, and might And majesty flash their full lightnings by, Developing in that one glance the Deity."

Up four flight of stairs we fly--for the bath is in the double-sunk story--ten steps at a bound--and in five minutes have devoured one quartern loaf, six eggs, and a rizzar, washing all over with a punch-bowl of congou and a tea-bowl of coffee.

"Enormous breakfast, Wild without rule or art! Where nature plays Her virgin fancies."

And then, leaning back on our Easy-chair, we perform an exploit beyond the reach of Euclid--why, WE SQUARE THE CIRCLE, and to the utter demolition of our admirable friend Sir David Brewster's diatribe, in a late number of the _Quarterly Review_, on the indifference of Government to men of science, chuckle over our nobly-won order K.C.C.B., Knight Companion of the Cold Bath.

Many analogies between the seasons of the year and the seasons of life, being natural, have been a frequent theme of poetry in all countries.

Had the gods made us poetical, we should now have poured forth, a few exquisite illustrations of some that are very affecting and impressive.

It has, however, often been felt by us, that not a few of those one meets with in the lamentations of whey-faced sentimentalists, are false or fantastic, and do equal violence to all the seasons, both of the year and of life. These gentry have been especially silly upon the similitude of Old Age to Winter. Winter, in external nature, is not the season of decay. An old tree, for example, in the very _dead_ of winter, as it is figuratively called, though bare of leaves, is full of life. The sap, indeed, has sunk down from his bole and branches--down into his toes or roots. But there it is, ready, in due time, to reascend. Not so with an old man--the present company always excepted;--his sap is not sunk down to his toes, but much of it is gone clean out of the system--therefore, individual natural objects in Winter are not analogically emblematical of people stricken in years. Far less does the Winter itself of the year, considered as a season, resemble the old age of life considered as a season. To what peculiarities, pray, in the character and conduct of aged gentlemen in general, do rain, sleet, hail, frost, ice, snow, winds, blasts, storms, hurricanes, and occasional thunder and lightning, bear analogy? We pause for a reply. Old men's heads, it is true, are frequently white, though more frequently bald, and their blood is not so hot as when they were springalds. But though there be no great harm in likening a sprinkling of white hair on mine ancient's temples to the appearance of the surface of the earth, flat or mountainous, after a slight fall of snow--and indeed, in an impassioned state of mind, we feel a moral beauty in such poetical expression as "sorrow shedding on the head of youth its untimely snows"--yet the natural propriety of such an image, so far from justifying the assertion of a general analogy between Winter and Old Age, proves that the analogies between them are in fact very few, and felt to be analogies at all, only when touched upon very seldom, and very slightly, and, for the most part, very vaguely--the truth being, that they scarcely exist at all in reality, but have an existence given to them by the power of creative passion, which often works like genius. Shakespeare knew this well--as he knew everything else; and, accordingly, he gives us Seven Ages of Life--not Four Seasons. But how finely does he sometimes, by the mere use of the names of the Seasons of the Year, intensify to our imagination the mental state to which they are for the moment felt to be analogous?--

"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by the sun of York!"

That will do. The feeling he wished to inspire, is inspired; and the further analogical images which follow add nothing to _our_ feeling, though they show the strength and depth of _his_ into whose lips they are put. A bungler would have bored us with ever so many ramifications of the same idea, on one of which, in our weariness, we might have wished him hanged by the neck till he was dead.

We are an Old Man, and though single not singular; yet, without vanity, we think ourselves entitled to say, that we are no more like Winter, in particular, than we are like Spring, Summer, or Autumn. The truth is, that we are much less like any one of the Seasons, than we are like the whole Set. Is not Spring sharp? So are we. Is not Spring snappish? So are we. Is not Spring boisterous? So are we. Is not Spring "beautiful exceedingly?" So are we. Is not Spring capricious? So are we. Is not Spring, at times, the gladdest, gayest, gentlest, mildest, meekest, modestest, softest, sweetest, and sunniest of all God's creatures that steal along the face of the earth? So are we. So much for our similitude--a staring and striking one--to Spring. But were you to stop there, what an inadequate idea would you have of our character! For only ask your senses, and they will tell you that we are much liker Summer.

Is not Summer often infernally hot? So are we. Is not Summer sometimes cool as its own cucumbers? So are we. Does not Summer love the shade? So do we. Is not Summer, nevertheless, somewhat "too much i' the sun?" So are we. Is not Summer famous for its thunder and lightning? So are we.

Is not Summer, when he chooses, still, silent, and serene as a sleeping seraph? And so too--when Christopher chooses--are not we? Though, with keen remorse we confess it, that, when suddenly wakened, we are too often more like a fury or a fiend--and that completes the likeness; for all who know a Scottish Summer, with one voice exclaim--"So is he!" But our portrait is but half-drawn; you know but a moiety of our character.

Is Autumn jovial?--ask Thomson--so are we. Is Autumn melancholy?--ask Alison and Gillespie--so are we. Is Autumn bright?--ask the woods and groves--so are we. Is Autumn rich?--ask the whole world--so are we. Does Autumn rejoice in the yellow grain and the golden vintage, that, stored up in his great Magazine of Nature, are lavishly thence dispensed to all that hunger, and quench the thirst of the nations? So do we. After that, no one can be so pur-and-bat-blind as not see that North is, in very truth, Autumn's gracious self, rather than his Likeness or Eidolon.

But--

"Lo, Winter comes to rule th' inverted year!"

So do we,

"Sullen and sad, with all his rising train-- Vapours, and clouds, and storms!"

So are we. The great author of the "Seasons" says, that Winter and his train

"Exalt the soul to solemn thought, And heavenly musing!"

So do we. And, "lest aught less great should stamp us mortal," here we conclude the comparison, dashed off in few lines by the hand of a great master, and ask, Is not North, Winter? Thus, listener after our own heart! thou feelest that we are imaged aright in all our attributes neither by Spring, nor Summer, nor Autumn, nor Winter; but that the character of Christopher is shadowed forth and reflected by the Entire Year.

A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON.

Poetry, one might imagine, must be full of Snow-scenes. If so, they have almost all dissolved--melted away from our memory--as the transiencies in nature do which they coldly pictured. Thomson's "Winter," of course, we do not include in our obliviousness--and from Cowper's "Task" we might quote many a most picturesque Snow-piece. But have frost and snow been done full justice to by them or any other of our poets? They have been well spoken of by two--Southey and Coleridge--of whose most poetical compositions respectively, "Thalaba" and the "Ancient Mariner,"

in some future volume we may dissert. Thomson's genius does not so often delight us by exquisite minute touches in the description of nature as that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great scale, and to dash objects off sweepingly by bold strokes--such, indeed, as have almost always distinguished the mighty masters of the lyre and the rainbow. Cowper sets nature before your eyes--Thomson before your imagination. Which do you prefer? Both. Be assured that both poets had pored night and day upon her--in all her aspects--and that she had revealed herself fully to both. But they, in their religion, elected different modes of worship--and both were worthy of the mighty mother. In one mood of mind we love Cowper best, in another Thomson. Sometimes the Seasons are almost a Task--and sometimes the Task is out of Season. There is delightful distinctness in all the pictures of the Bard of Olney--glorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of the Bard of Ednam.

Cowper paints trees--Thomson woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous lines, rivers from source to sea, like the mighty Burrampooter--Cowper, in many no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend of a stream, or awakens our fancy to the murmur of some single waterfall. But a truce to antithesis--a deceptive style of criticism--and see how Thomson sings of Snow. Why, in the following lines, as well as Christopher North in his Soliloquy on the Seasons--

"The cherish'd fields Put on their winter-robe of purest white.

'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts Along the mazy current."

Nothing can be more vivid. 'Tis of the nature of an ocular spectrum.

Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet "brown," where all that is motionless is white--

"The foodless wilds Pour forth their _brown_ inhabitants."

That one word proves the poet. Does it not?

The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by memory--a critic you may always trust to--is admirable; except in one or two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic, and where he seems to us to have overshot his mark, and to have ceased to be perfectly natural. Thus--

"Drooping, the ox Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil."

The image of the ox is as good as possible. We see him, and could paint him in oils. But, to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the fruit of all his toils"--to which we freely acknowledge the worthy animal was well entitled--sounds, as it is here expressed, rather fantastical. Call it doubtful--for Jemmy was never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment.

Again--

"The bleating kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, _With looks of dumb despair._"

The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepherd agreed with us--one night at Ambrose's--that the third was not quite right. Sheep, he agreed with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what immediately succeeds--

"Then, sad dispersed, Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

For, as they disperse, they do look very sad--and no doubt are so; but had they been in despair, they would not so readily, and constantly, and uniformly, and successfully, have taken to the digging, but whole flocks had perished.

You will not, we are confident, be angry with us for quoting a few lines that occur soon after, and which are a noble example of the sweeping style of description which, we said above, characterises the genius of this sublime poet:--

"From the bellowing east, In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wing Sweeps up the burden of whole wintry plains At one wide waft, and o'er the hapless flocks, Hid in the hollow of two neighbouring hills, The billowy tempest whelms; till, upward urged, The valley to a shining mountain swells, Tipp'd with a wreath high-curling in the sky."

Well might the Bard, with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast.

"Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind was up--

"Far off its coming _groan'd_,"

and the poet was inspired. Had he not been so, he had not cried, "Baffle the raging year;" and if you be not so, you will think it a most absurd expression.

Did you ever see water beginning to change itself into ice? Yes. Then try to describe the sight. Success in that trial will prove you a poet.

People do not prove themselves poets only by writing long poems. A line--two words--may show that they are the Muse's sons. How exquisitely does Burns picture to our eyes moonlight water undergoing an ice-change!

"The chilly frost beneath the silver beam, Crept, gently crusting o'er the glittering stream!"

Thomson does it with an almost finer spirit of perception--or conception--or memory--or whatever else you choose to call it; for our part, we call it genius--

"An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool _Breathes a blue film_, and in its mid career Arrests the bickering stream."

And afterwards, having frozen the entire stream into a "crystal pavement," how strongly doth he conclude thus--

"_The whole imprison'd river growls below._"