In an English village--highland or lowland--seldom is there any spot so beautiful as the churchyard. That of Grassmere is especially so, with the pensive shadows of the old church-tower settling over its cheerful graves. Ay, its cheerful graves! Startle not at the word as too strong--for the pigeons are cooing in the belfry, the stream is murmuring round the mossy churchyard wall, a few lambs are lying on the mounds, and flowers laughing in the sunshine over the cells of the dead.

But hark! the bell tolls--one--one--one--a funeral knell, speaking not of time, but of eternity! To-day there is to be a burial--and close to the wall of the Tower you see the new-dug grave.

Hush! The sound of singing voices in yonder wood, deadened by the weight of umbrage! Now it issues forth into the clear air, and now all is silence--but the pause speaks of death. Again the melancholy swell ascends the sky--and then comes slowly along the funeral procession, the coffin borne aloft, and the mourners all in white; for it is a virgin who is carried to her last home. Let every head be reverently uncovered while the psalm enters the gate, and the bier is borne for holy rites along the chancel of the church, and laid down close to the altar. A smothered sobbing disturbeth not the service--'tis a human spirit breathing in accordance with the divine. Mortals weeping for the immortal--Earth's passions cleaving to one who is now in heaven.

Was she one flower of many, and singled out by death's unsparing finger from a wreath of beauty, whose remaining blossoms seem now to have lost all their fragrance and all their brightness? Or was she the sole delight of her greyhaired parents' eyes, and is the voice of joy extinguished in their low-roofed home for ever? Had her loveliness been beloved, and had her innocent hopes anticipated the bridal-day, nor her heart, whose beatings were numbered, ever feared that narrow bed? All that we know is her name and age--you see them glittering on her coffin--"Anabella Irvine, aged xix years"!

The day seems something dim, now that we are all on our way back to Ambleside; and although the clouds are neither heavier nor more numerous than before, somehow or other the sun is a little obscured. We must not indulge too long in a mournful mood--yet let us all sit down under the shadow of this grove of sycamores, overshadowing this reedy bay of Rydal-mere, and listen to a Tale of Tears.

Many a tame tradition, embalmed in a few pathetic verses, lives for ages, while the memory of the most affecting incidents, to which genius has allied no general emotion, fades like the mist, and leaves heart-rending griefs undeplored. Elegies and dirges might indeed have well been sung amidst the green ruins of yonder Cottage, that looks now almost like a fallen wall--at best, the remnants of a cattle-shed shaken down by the storm.

Thirty years ago--how short a time in national history--how long in that of private sorrows!--all tongues were speaking of the death that there befell; and to have seen the weeping, you would have thought that the funeral could never have been forgotten. But stop now the shepherd on the hill, and ask him who lived in that nook, and chance is he knows not even their name, much less the story of their afflictions. It was inhabited by Allan Fleming, his wife, and an only child, known familiarly in her own small world by the name of LUCY OF THE FOLD. In almost every district among the mountains, there is its peculiar pride--some one creature to whom nature has been especially kind, and whose personal beauty, sweetness of disposition, and felt superiority of mind and manner, single her out, unconsciously, as an object of attraction and praise, making her the May-day Queen of the unending year. Such a darling was Lucy Fleming ere she had finished her thirteenth year; and strangers, who had heard tell of her loveliness, often dropt in, as if by accident, to see the Beauty of Rydal-mere. Her parents rejoiced in their child; nor was there any reason why they should dislike the expression of delight and wonder with which so many regarded her. Shy was she as a woodland bird, but as fond too of her nest; and when there was nothing near to disturb her, her life was almost a perpetual hymn. From joy to sadness, and from sadness to joy; from silence to song, and from song to silence; from stillness like that of the butterfly on the flower, to motion like that of the same creature wavering in the sunshine over the wood-top--was to Lucy as welcome a change as the change of lights and shadows, breezes and calms, in the mountain-country of her birth.

One summer day, a youthful stranger appeared at the door of the house, and after an hour's stay, during which Lucy was from home, asked if they would let him have lodging with them for a few months--a single room for bed and books, and that he would take his meals with the family.

Enthusiastic boy! to him poetry had been the light of life, nor did ever creature of poetry belong more entirely than he to the world of imagination. He had come into the free mountain region from the confinement of college walls, and his spirit expanded within him like a rainbow. No eyes had he for realities--all nature was seen in the light of genius--not a single object at sunrise and sunset the same. All was beautiful within the circle of the green hill-tops, whether shrouded in the soft mists or clearly outlined in a cloudless sky. Home, friends, colleges, cities--all sunk away into oblivion, and HARRY HOWARD felt as if wafted off on the wings of a spirit, and set down in a land beyond the sea, foreign to all he had before experienced, yet in its perfect and endless beauty appealing every hour more tenderly and strongly to a spirit awakened to new power, and revelling in new emotion. In that cottage he took up his abode. In a few weeks came a library of books in all languages; and there was much wondering talk over all the countryside about the mysterious young stranger who now lived at the Fold.

Every day--and, when he chose to absent himself from his haunts among the hills, every hour was Lucy before the young poet's eyes--and every hour did her beauty wax more beautiful in his imagination. Who Mr Howard was, or even if that were indeed his real name, no one knew; but none doubted that he was of gentle birth, and all with whom he had ever conversed in his elegant amenity, could have sworn that a youth so bland and free, and with such a voice, and such eyes, would not have injured the humblest of God's creatures, much less such a creature as Lucy of the Fold. It was indeed even so--for, before the long summer days were gone, he who had never had a sister, loved her even as if she had slept on the same maternal bosom. Father or mother he now had none--indeed, scarcely one near relation--although he was rich in this world's riches, but in them poor in comparison with the noble endowments that nature had lavished upon his mind. His guardians took little heed of the splendid but wayward youth--and knew not now whither his fancies had carried him, were it even to some savage land. Thus the Fold became to him the one dearest roof under the roof of heaven. All the simple ongoings of that humble home, love and imagination beautified into poetry; and all the rough or coarser edges of lowly life were softened away in the light of genius that transmuted everything on which it fell; while all the silent intimations which nature gave there of her primal sympathies, in the hut as fine and forceful as in the hall, showed to his excited spirit pre-eminently lovely, and chained it to the hearth, around which was read the morning and the evening prayer.

What wild schemes does not love imagine, and in the face of very impossibility achieve! "I will take Lucy to myself, if it should be in place of all the world. I will myself shed light over her being, till in a new spring it shall be adorned with living flowers that fade not away, perennial and self-renewed. In a few years the bright docile creature will have the soul of a very angel--and then, before God and at His holy altar, mine shall she become for ever--here and hereafter--in this paradise of earth, and, if more celestial be, in the paradise of heaven."

Thus two summers and two winters wheeled away into the past; and in the change, imperceptible from day to day, but glorious at last, wrought on Lucy's nature by communication with one so prodigally endowed, scarcely could her parents believe it was their same child, except that she was dutiful as before, as affectionate, and as fond of all the familiar objects, dead or living, round and about her birthplace. She had now grown to woman's stature--tall, though she scarcely seemed so except when among her playmates; and in her maturing loveliness, fulfilling, and far more than fulfilling, the fair promise of her childhood. Never once had the young stranger--stranger no more--spoken to daughter, father, or mother, of his love. Indeed, for all that he felt towards Lucy there must have been some other word than love. Tenderness, which was almost pity--an affection that was often sad--wonder at her surpassing beauty, nor less at her unconsciousness of its power--admiration of her spiritual qualities, that ever rose up to meet instruction as if already formed--and that heart-throbbing that stirs the blood of youth when the innocent eyes it loves are beaming in the twilight through smiles or through tears,--these, and a thousand other feelings, and above all, the creative faculty of a poet's soul, now constituted his very being when Lucy was in presence, nor forsook him when he was alone among the mountains.

At last it was known through the country that Mr Howard--the stranger, the scholar, the poet, the elegant gentleman, of whom nobody knew much, but whom everybody loved, and whose father must at the least have been a lord, was going--in a year or less--to marry the daughter of Allan Fleming--Lucy of the Fold. O, grief and shame to the parents--if still living--of the noble Boy! O, sorrow for himself when his passion dies--when the dream is dissolved--and when, in place of the angel of light who now moves before him, he sees only a child of earth, lowly born, and long rudely bred--a being only fair as many others are fair, sister in her simplicity to maidens no less pleasing than she, and partaking of many weaknesses, frailties, and faults now unknown to herself in her happiness, and to him in his love! Was there no one to rescue them from such a fate--from a few months of imaginary bliss, and from many years of real bale? How could such a man as Allan Fleming be so infatuated as sell his child to fickle youth, who would soon desert her broken-hearted? Yet kind thoughts, wishes, hopes, and beliefs prevailed; nor were there wanting stories of the olden time, of low-born maidens married to youths of high estate, and raised from hut to hall, becoming mothers of a lordly line of sons, that were counsellors to Kings and Princes.

In Spring, Mr Howard went away for a few months--it was said to the great city--and on his return at midsummer, Lucy was to be his bride.

They parted with a few peaceful tears, and though absent were still together. And now a letter came, saying that before another Sabbath he would be at the Fold. A few fields in Easdale, long mortgaged beyond their fee-simple by the hard-working statesman from whom they reluctantly were passing away, had meanwhile been purchased by Mr Howard, and in that cottage they were to abide, till they had built for themselves a house a little further up the side of the sylvan hill, below the shadow of Helm-crag. Lucy saw the Sabbath of his return and its golden sun, but it was in her mind's eye only; for ere it was to descend behind the hills, she was not to be among the number of living things.

Up Forest-Ullswater the youth had come by the light of the setting sun; and as he crossed the mountains to Grassmere by the majestic pass of the Hawse, still as every new star arose in heaven, with it arose as lustrous a new emotion from the bosom of his betrothed. The midnight hour had been fixed for his return to the Fold; and as he reached the cliffs above White-moss, according to agreement a light was burning in the low window, the very planet of love. It seemed to shed a bright serenity over all the vale, and the moon-glittering waters of Rydal-mere were as an image of life, pure, lonely, undisturbed, and at the pensive hour how profound! "Blessing and praise be to the gracious God! who framed my spirit so to delight in His beautiful and glorious creation--blessing and praise to the Holy One, for the boon of my Lucy's innocent and religious love!" Prayers crowded fast into his soul, and tears of joy fell from his eyes, as he stood at the threshold, almost afraid, in the trembling of life-deep affection, to meet her first embrace.

In the silence, sobs and sighs, and one or two long deep groans! Then in another moment, he saw, through the open door of the room where Lucy used to sleep, several figures moving to and fro in the light, and one figure upon its knees--who else could it be but her father! Unnoticed he became one of the pale-faced company--and there he beheld her on her bed, mute and motionless, her face covered with a deplorable beauty--eyes closed, and her hands clasped upon her breast! "Dead, dead, dead!" muttered in his ringing ears a voice from the tombs, and he fell down in the midst of them with great violence upon the floor.

Encircled with arms that lay round him softer and silkier far than flower-wreaths on the neck of a child who has laid him down from play, was he when he awoke from that fit--lying even on his own maiden's bed, and within her very bosom, that beat yet, although soon about to beat no more. At that blest awakening moment, he might have thought he saw the first glimpse of light of the morning after his marriage-day; for her face was turned towards his breast, and with her faint breathings he felt the touch of tears. Not tears alone now bedimmed those eyes, for tears he could have kissed away; but the blue lids were heavy with something that was not slumber--the orbs themselves were scarcely visible--and her voice--it was gone, to be heard never again, till in the choir of white-robed spirits that sing at the right hand of God.

Yet no one doubted that she knew him--him who had dropt down, like a superior being, from another sphere, on the innocence of her simple childhood--had taught her to know so much of her own soul--to love her parents with a profounder and more holy love--to see, in characters more divine, Heaven's promises of forgiveness to every contrite heart--and a life of perfect blessedness beyond death and the grave. A smile that shone over her face the moment that she had been brought to know that he had come at last, and was nigh at hand--and that never left it while her bosom moved--no--not for all the three days and nights that he continued to sit beside the corpse, when father and mother were forgetting their cares in sleep--that smile told all who stood around, watching her departure, neighbour, friend, priest, parent, and him the suddenly distracted and desolate, that in the very moment of expiration she knew him well, and was recommending him and his afflictions to the pity of One who died to save sinners.

Three days and three nights, we have said, did he sit beside her who so soon was to have been his bride; and come or go who would into the room, he saw them not--his sight was fixed on the winding-sheet, eyeing it, without a single tear, from feet to forehead, and sometimes looking up to heaven. As men forgotten in dungeons have lived miserably long without food, so did he--and so he would have done, on and on to the most far-off funeral day. From that one chair, close to the bedside, he never rose. Night after night, when all the vale was hushed, he never slept. Through one of the midnights there had been a great thunderstorm, the lightning smiting a cliff close to the cottage; but it seemed that he heard it not--and during the floods of next day, to him the roaring vale was silent. On the morning of the funeral, the old people--for now they seemed to be old--wept to see him sitting still beside their dead child; for each of the few remaining hours had now its own sad office, and a man had come to nail down the coffin. Three black specks suddenly alighted on the face of the corpse--and then off--and on--and away--and returning--was heard the buzzing of large flies, attracted by beauty in its corruption. "Ha--ha!" starting up, he cried in horror--"What birds of prey are these, whom Satan has sent to devour the corpse?" He became stricken with a sort of palsy--and, being led out to the open air, was laid down, seemingly as dead as her within, on the green daisied turf, where, beneath the shadow of the sycamore, they had so often sat, building up beautiful visions of a long blissful life.

The company assembled--but not before his eyes--the bier was lifted up and moved away down the sylvan slope, and away round the head of the Lake, and over the wooden bridge, accompanied, here and there, as it passed the wayside houses on the road to Grassmere, by the sound of psalms--but he saw--he heard not;--when the last sound of the spade rebounded from the smooth arch of the grave, he was not by--but all the while he was lying where they left him, with one or two pitying dalesmen at his head and feet. When he awoke again and rose up, the cottage of the Fold was as if she had never been born--for she had vanished for ever and aye, and her sixteen years' smiling life was all extinguished in the dust.

Weeks and months passed on, and still there was a vacant wildness in his eyes, and a mortal ghastliness all over his face, inexpressive of a reasonable soul. It scarcely seemed that he knew where he was, or in what part of the earth, yet, when left by himself, he never sought to move beyond the boundaries of the Fold. During the first faint glimmerings of returning reason, he would utter her name, over and over many times, with a mournful voice, but still he knew not that she was dead--then he began to caution them all to tread softly, for that sleep had fallen upon her, and her fever in its blessed balm might abate--then with groans too affecting to be borne by those who heard them, he would ask why, since she was dead, God had the cruelty to keep him, her husband, in life; and finally, and last of all, he imagined himself in Grassmere Churchyard, and clasping a little mound on the green, which it was evident he thought was her grave, he wept over it for hours and hours, and kissed it, and placed a stone at its head, and sometimes all at once broke out into fits of laughter, till the hideous fainting-fits returned, and after long convulsions left him lying as if stone-dead. As for his bodily frame, when Lucy's father lifted it up in his arms, little heavier was it than a bundle of withered fern. Nobody supposed that one so miserably attenuated and ghost-like could for many days be alive--yet not till the earth had thrice revolved round the sun did that body die, and then it was buried far away from the Fold, the banks of Rydal-water, and the sweet mountains of Westmoreland; for after passing like a shadow through many foreign lands, he ceased his pilgrimage in Palestine, even beneath the shadow of Mount Sion, and was laid, with a lock of hair--which, from the place it held, strangers knew to have belonged to one dearly beloved--close to his heart, on which it had lain so long, and was to moulder away in darkness together, by Christian hands and in a Christian sepulchre.

L'ENVOY.

Periodical literature is a type of many of the most beautiful things and interesting events in nature; or say, rather, that _they_ are types of _it_--the Flowers and the Stars. As to Flowers, they are the prettiest periodicals ever published in folio--the leaves are wire-wove and hot-pressed by Nature's self; their circulation is wide over all the land; from castle to cottage they are regularly taken in; as old age bends over them, his youth is renewed; and you see childhood poring upon them pressed close to its very bosom. Some of them are ephemeral--their contents are exhaled between the rising and setting sun. Once a-week others break through their green, pink, or crimson cover; and how delightful, on the seventh day, smiles in the sunshine the Sabbath Flower--a Sunday publication perused without blame by the most religious--even before morning prayer! Each month, indeed, throughout the whole year, has its own Flower periodical. Some are annual, some biennial, some triennial, and there are perennials that seem to live for ever--and yet are still periodical--though our love will not allow us to know when they die, and phoenix-like reappear from their own ashes. So much for Flowers--typifying or typified;--leaves emblematical of pages--buds of binding--dew-veils of covers--and the wafting away of bloom and fragrance like the dissemination of fine feelings, bright fancies, and winged thoughts.

The Flowers are the periodicals of the earth--the Stars are the periodicals of heaven. With what unfailing regularity do the numbers issue forth! Hesperus and Lucifer! ye are one concern. The Pole-star is studied by all nations. How popular the poetry of the Moon! On what subject does not the Sun throw light? No fear of hurting your eyes by reading that fine clear large type on that softened page. As you turn them over, one blue, another yellow, and another green, all are alike delightful to the pupil, dear as the very apple of his eye. Yes, the great Periodical Press of heaven is unceasingly at work--night and day; the only free power all over the world--'tis indeed like the air we breathe--if we have it not, we die.

Look, then, at all paper periodicals with pleasure, for sake of the Flowers and the Stars. Suppose them all extinct, and life would be like a flowerless earth, a starless heaven. We should soon forget the Seasons. The periodicals of the External would soon all lose their meaning, were there no longer any periodicals of the Internal. These are the lights and shadows of life, merrily dancing or gravely stealing over the dial; remembrancers of the past--teachers of the present--prophets of the future hours. Were they all dead, Spring would in vain renew her promise--wearisome would be the interminable summer days--the fruits of autumn tasteless--the winter ingle blink mournfully round the hearth.

What are the blessed Seasons themselves, in nature and in Thomson, but periodicals of a larger growth? We should doubt the goodness of that man's heart, who loved not the periodical literature of earth and sky--who would not weep to see one of its flowers wither--one of its stars fall--one beauty die on its humble bed--one glory drop from its lofty sphere. Let them bloom and burn on--flowers in which there is no poison, stars in which there is no disease--whose blossoms are all sweet, and whose rays are all sanative--both alike steeped in dew, and both, to the fine ear of nature's worshipper, bathed in music.

Pomposo never reads Magazine poetry--nor, we presume, ever looks at a field or wayside flower. He studies only the standard authors. He walks only in gardens with high brick walls--and then admires only at a hint from the head-gardener. Pomposo does not know that many of the finest poems of our day first appeared in magazines--or, worse still, in newspapers; and that in our periodicals, daily and weekly, equally with the monthlies and quarterlies, is to be found the best criticism of poetry anywhere extant, superior far, in that unpretending form, to nine-tenths of the learned lucubrations of Germany--though some of it, too, is good--almost as one's heart could desire. What is the circulation even of a popular volume of verses--if any such there be--to that of a number of Maga? Hundreds of thousands at home peruse it before it is a week old--as many abroad ere the moon has thrice renewed her horns; and the Series ceases not--regular as the Seasons that make up the perfect year. Our periodical literature--say of it what you will--gives light to the heads and heat to the hearts of millions of our race. The greatest and best men of the age have not disdained to belong to the brotherhood; and thus the hovel holds what must not be missing in the hall--the furniture of the cot is the same as that of the palace--and duke and ditcher read their lessons from the same page.

Good people have said, and it would be misanthropical to disbelieve or discredit their judgment, that our Prose is original--nay, has created a new era in the history of Periodical Literature. Only think of that, Christopher, and up with your Tail like a Peacock! Why, there is some comfort in that reflection, while we sit rubbing our withered hands up and down on these shrivelled shanks. Our feet are on the fender, and that fire is felt on our face; but we verily believe our ice-cold shanks would not shrink from the application of the red-hot poker. Peter has a notion that but for that red-hot poker the fire would go out; so to humour him we let it remain in the ribs, and occasionally brandish it round our head in moments of enthusiasm when the Crutch looks tame, and the Knout a silken leash for Italian Greyhound.

Old Simonides--old Mimnermus--old Theognis--old Solon-old Anacreon--old Sophocles--old Pindar--old Hesiod--old Homer--and old Methuselah! What mean we by the word _old_? All these men are old in three lights--they lived to a raven age--long long ago--and we heard tell of them in our youth. Their glory dawned on us in a dream of life's golden prime--and far away seems now that dawn, as if in another world beyond a million seas! In that use of the word "old," far from us is all thought of dotage or decay. Old are those great personages as the stars are old; a heaven there is in which are seen shining, for ever young, all the most ancient spiritual "orbs of Song."

In our delight, too, we love to speak of old Venus and of old Cupid--of old Eve and of old Cleopatra--of old Helen and of old Dalilah; yea, of old Psyche, though her aerial wings are as rainbow bright as the first hour she waved them in the eye of the youthful Sun.

How full of endearment "old boy!"--"old girl!" "Old Christopher North!"--"old Maga!" To our simplest sayings age seems to give a consecration which youth reveres. And why may not our hand, withered somewhat though it be, but yet unpalsied, point out aloft to heedless eyes single light or constellation, or lily by herself or in groups unsuspected along the waysides of our mortal pilgrimage?

Age like ours is even more lovable than venerable; and, thinking on ourselves, were we a young woman, we should assuredly marry an old man.

Indeed, no man ought to marry before thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty; and, were it not that life is so short, soon enough at threescore and ten. At seventy you are sager than ever, though scarcely so strong. You and life love each other as well as ever; yet 'tis unpleasant, when sailing on Windermere or Lochlomond with your bride, to observe the Man in the Honeymoon looking at you with a congratulatory grin of condolence, to fear that the old villain will smile over your grave in the Season of Kirns and Harvest Homes, when the fiddle is heard in every farmhouse, and the bagpipes are lowing like cattle on a thousand hills.

Fain would he insure his life on the Tipperary Tables. But the enamoured annuitant is haunted with visions of his own Funeral deploying in a long line of chariots--one at the head of all armed with scythes--through the city, into the wide gates of the Greyfriars. Lovely is his bride in white, nor less so his widow in black--more so in grey, portentous of a great change. Sad, too, to the Sage the thought of leaving his first-born as yet unborn--or if born, haply an elfish Creature with a precocious countenance, looking as if he had begun life with borrowing ten years at least from his own father--auld-farrant as a Fairy, and gash as the Last of the Lairds.

Dearly do we love the young--yea, the young of all animals--the young swallows twittering from their straw-built shed--the young lambs bleating on the lea--the young bees, God bless them! on their first flight away off to the heather--the young butterflies, who, born in the morning, will die of old age ere night--the young salmon-fry glorying in the gravel at the first feeling of their fins--the young adders basking, ere they can bite, in the sun, as yet unconscious, like sucking satirists, of their stings--young pigs, pretty dears! all a-squeak with their curled tails after prolific grumphie--young lions and tigers, charming cubs! like very Christian children nuzzling in their nurse's breast--young devils, ere Satan has sent them to Sin, who keeps a fashionable boarding-school in Hades, and sends up into the world above-ground only her finished scholars.

Oh! lad of the lightsome forehead! Thou art smiling at Us; and for the sake of our own Past we enjoy thy Present, and pardon the contumely with which thou silently insultest our thin grey hairs. Just such another "were we at Ravensburg." "_Carpe Diem_" was then our motto, as now it is yours; "no fear that dinner cool," for we fed then, as you feed now, on flowers and fruits of Eden. We lived then under the reign of the Seven Senses; Imagination was Prime Minister, and Reason, as Lord-Chancellor, had the keeping of the Royal Conscience; and they were kings, not tyrants--we subjects, not slaves. Supercilious as thou art, Puer, art thou as well read in Greek as we were at thy flowering age? Come close that we may whisper in thine ear--while we lean our left shoulder on thine--our right on the Crutch. The time will come when thou wilt be, O Son of the Morning! even like unto the shadow by thy side! Was he not once a mountaineer? If he be a vainglorious boaster, give him the lie, Ben-y-glo and thy brotherhood--ye who so often heard our shouts mixed with the red-deer's belling--tossed back in exultation by Echo, Omnipresent Auditress on youth's golden hills.

Know, all ye Neophytes, that three lovely Sisters often visit the old man's solitude--Memory, Imagination, Hope. It would be hard to say which is the most beautiful. Memory has deep, dark, quiet eyes, and when she closes their light, the long eyelashes lie like shadows on her pensive cheeks, that smile faintly as if the dreamer were half asleep--a visionary slumber, which sometimes the dewdrop melting on the leaf will break, sometimes not the thunder-peal with all its echoes. Imagination is a brighter and bolder Beauty, with large lamping eyes of uncertain colour, as if fluctuating with rainbow light, and with features fine as those which Grecian genius gave to the Muses in the Parian Marble, yet in their daring delicacy defined like the face of Apollo. As for Hope--divinest of the divine--Collins, in one long line of light, has painted the picture of the angel,--

"And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair."

All our great prose-writers owe the glory of their power to our great poets. Even Hobbes translated Homer as well--that is as ill--as Thucidydes; the Epic in his prime after eighty; the History in his youth at forty; and it is fearful to dream what the brainful and heartless metaphysician would have been, had he never heard of the Iliad and the Odyssey. What is the greatest of prose-writers in comparison with a great poet? Nay--we shall not be deterred by the fear of self-contradiction (see our "Stroll to Grassmere") from asking who is a great prose-writer? We cannot name one; they all sink in Shakespeare.

Campbell finely asks and answers--

"Without the smile from partial beauty won, Oh! what were man? a world without a sun."

Suppose the world without poetry--how absurd would seem the Sun! Strip the word "phenomena" of its poetical meaning, and forthwith the whole human race, "moving about in worlds _realised_," would lose their powers of speech. But, thank Heaven! we are Makers all. Inhabiting, we verily believe, a real, and substantial, and palpable outer world, which nevertheless shall one day perish like a scroll, we build our bowers of joy in the Apparent, and lie down to rest in a drapery of Dreams.

Thus we often love to dream our silent way even through the noisy world.

And dreamers are with dreamers spiritually, though in the body apart; nor wandering at will think they whence they come, or whither they are going, assured by delight that they will reach their journey's end--like a bee, that in many a musical gyration goes humming round men's heads and tree-tops, aimlessly curious in his joy, yet knowing instinctively the straight line that intersects all those airy circles, leading to and fro between his hive in the garden and the honey-dew on the heather hills.

What can it be that now recalls to our remembrance a few lines of Esop, the delightful old Fabulist, the Merry and Wise, who set our souls a-thinking and our hearts a-feeling in boyhood, by moral lessons read to them in almost every incident befalling in life's common walks--solemn as Simonides in this his sole surviving elegiac strain?

"What weary woe, what endless strife Bring'st thou to mortal men, O Life!

Each hour they draw their breath.

Alas! the wretches all despair To flee the ills they cannot bear, But through the gates of Death.

And yet how beautiful art Thou On Earth and Sea--and on the brow Of starry Heaven! The Night Sends forth the moon Thee to adorn; And thee to glorify the Morn Restores the Orb of Light.

Yet all is full of Pain and Dread; Bedrench'd in tears for ever shed; The darkness render'd worse By gleams of joy--and if by Heaven A Blessing seemeth to be given, It changes to a curse."

Even in our paraphrase are not these lines very impressive? In the original they are much more solemn. They are not querulous, yet full of lamentation. We see in them not a weak spirit quarrelling with fate, but a strong spirit subdued by a sense of the conditions on which life has been given; conditions against which it is vain to contend, to which it is hard to submit, but which may yet be borne by a will deriving strength from necessity, and in itself noble by nature. Nor, dark as the doctrine is, can we say it is false. Intellect and Imagination may from doleful experiences have too much generalised their inductions, so as to seem to themselves to have established the Law of Misery as the Law of Life. But perhaps it is only thus that the Truth can be made available to man, as it regards the necessity of Endurance. All is not wretchedness; but the soul seeks to support itself by the belief that it is really so. Holding that creed, it has no excuse for itself, if at any time it is stung to madness by misery, or grovels in the dust in a passion of grief; none, if at any time it delivers itself wholly up, abandoning itself to joy, and acts as if it trusted to the permanence of any blessing under the law of Mutability. The Poet, in the hour of profound emotion, declares that every blessing sent from heaven is a Nemesis. That oracular response inspires awe. A salutary fear is kept alive in the foolish by such sayings of the wise. Even to us--now--they sound like a knell. Religion has instructed Philosophy; and for Fate we substitute God. But all men feel that the foundations of Faith are laid in the dark depths of their being, and that all human happiness is mysteriously allied with pain and sorrow. The most perfect bliss is ever awful, as if we enjoyed it under the shadow of some great and gracious wing that would not long be detained from heaven.

It is not for ordinary minds to attempt giving utterance to such simplicities. On their tongues truths become truisms. Sentiments, that seem always fresh, falling from the lips of moral wisdom, are stale in the mouths of men uninitiated in the greater mysteries. Genius colours common words with an impressive light, that makes them moral to all eyes--breathes into them an affecting music, that steals into all hearts like a revelation and a religion. They become memorable. They pass, as maxims, from generation to generation; and all because the divinity that is in every man's bosom responds to the truthful strain it had of yore itself inspired. Just so with the men we meet on our life-journey. One man is impressive in all his looks and words, on all serious or solemn occasions; and we carry away with us moral impressions from his eyes or lips. Another man says the same things, or nearly so, and perhaps with more fervour, and his locks are silver. But we forget his person in an hour; nor does his voice ever haunt our solitude.