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SIR,

METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS EXTRAORDINARY.

CLOUDLAND, gorgeous land!

Coleridge's Fancy in Nubibus.

TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH, ESQ.

I AM a little crazy. My friends speak of the circumstance with concern; but I cannot say that it causes me any annoyance, except it be from the suspicion with which they receive my evidence. They are very apt to look incredulous, and say to one another, 66 Ay, ay, very well, 'tis his wild way of talking, but no such thing ever happened." Now, surely the having a supernumerary cranny in the skull, (for it must be confessed I am decidedly crack-brained), ought not to interfere with a man's being believed, when he plainly tells you about things which he saw with eyes that have no flaw, and ears of which the apertures are all as they should be. It was only last Wednesday se'ennight that the incident befel me, which will form the subject of this letter. I told it to Doctor Scammony, who is kind enough to feel my pulse at times, and he said it was " hallucinatio mentis," -my intimate friend, Sam Pottinger, interrupted me with, "my dear fellow, this is all fudge,”—and my cousin, Lucy Manning, advised me, that I "had better not talk about it again, as it was mere rhodomontade"-and, when I had found a more rational listener in old Alice Tugwell, who has nursed me when ill, even she at the end squalled out, "Lard love thy swivity head, thee'st been dreaming broad awake." Judge you, Mr Christopher, and hold the scales of equity even, between me and my detractors, Dr Scammony, Sam Pottinger, Miss Lucy Manning, and Dame Alice Tugwell, aforesaid. My pursuits consist in reading new poetry, and noticing the weather. For instruction about the latter, I have read what is said of Mr Howard's Nomenclature of Clouds, as expounded by Dr T. L. Forster, in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Since which, I never lift up my eyes without taking especial care to refer the passing clouds to one of the seven genera they have established. Now, it happened that about a fortnight ago I went to my bookseller's, Mr TitleVOL. X.

page, whose counter I found groaning with the incumbrance of modern publications, and he told me, that so many new poems were perpetually forthcoming, that he thought the old ones of living authors must soon be used as waste paper. I certainly chewed the cud upon this speech a good deal, in a little room which I have at the end of my garden, and which overlooks a wildish sort of common. They tell me I fell asleep there, or indulged my imagination awake, whenever I have spoken of what I am going to relate. But to both of these solutions I say no. With these eyes, then, did I see the shopman of my bookseller trundle a wheelbarrow full of books upon the common, where there was a pot boiling, slung between three sticks, and which I thought had belonged to a party of gypsies. His master followed, with more drab-coated volumes under his arm, and I could see that, one by one, he popt the works of living versifiers into the cauldron, out of which, after a little simmering, they issued in the shape of vapour, and successively overspread the heaven with clouds, which, knowing Mr Howard's theory, I was luckily able to systematize. Perhaps you will be able to draw some wiser inferences from what I saw than I can,-only believe in the pot and the wheelbarrow; surely a leaky scull is able to recognize the famous utensil of Mr Accum, and the coach of Mr Punch. I thought, however, that whenever thunder grumbled, or rain fell from these clouds so distilled from paper, that there was something bad in taste or morals in the poems which made the broth, whence the steam issued.

Tom Moore's progeny were first immersed. His songs whirled (a coin of his friend King Leigh the First's mintage) into cirri or curl-clouds, and pretty little fantastic chignons and lovelocks they became. Lalla Rookh was metamorphosed into a cirrocubulus, or sonder-cloud, rather heavy in the main, patchy, spotty, and disjointed, made up of separate parts, some of which 2 L

were exquisitely good in themselves, but not coalescing into a pleasing and proper unity.

The abundant offspring of the laureat, as well as that of Sir Walter, mounted up and took the shape of cumuli, or stacken-clouds, those marble-like masses which shine like temples or cities in the intense blue of a summer noon. -Southey's were somewhat heavily grouped in places, but they sailed along nobly. The solidity of Sir Walter's was relieved by the outline running into freakish shapes, like those Gothic ornaments, which, separately viewed, disfigure, but, in connection with the whole, contribute to the delightful effect of our venerable cathedrals.

Crabbe's works tumbled up into the same sort, and a good homely batch of stacken-cloud they made. It flirted down indeed a few drops in my eyes, as it were by way of a sly joke; but this was so trifling that it neither injured the nap of my coat, nor detracted much from the merit of the author, though it was an indication that his taste is not unquestionable. His cloud looked as if much useful household rain-water might upon occasion be collected from it, both for cookery and for washing.

Lord Byron's were next shot into the boiler, and they emerged in the form of cumulo-stratus, or twain-cloud. A fine wild picturesque appearance of troubled atmosphere was the result of the decoction of Childe Harold, and his other misanthropical personages. The bosom of the cloud, which seemed by its working to be suffering intestine commotion, was of a lurid purple, and a flash or two of lightning issued from it, deepening, by its momentary radiance, the gloom through which it struggled. The English Bards, the Poems on Domestic Circumstances, and Don Juan, took rather a more airy shape, but as the wind moved the lighter part of them, the nucleus was seen to be fraught with "sulphureous and thought-executing fires, vauntcouriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts." Leigh Hunt's Rimini, Bacchus and Ariadne, and others, most of them inosculating," (as Dr Forster hath it,) slid upwards, and the pretty Nepheliads were dispatched to their own quarters, and the whole became instantly cirrostratus or wane-cloud, which sort, as Mr Howard avers, "is characterized by shallowness.' Can any

thing be more apt? Moreover," it is in this cloud that those peculiar refractions of the sun's light called haloes, mocksuns, &c. usually appear;" and certainly this etherial quintessence of Mr L. H.'s publications in rhyme was extremely fertile of these gaudy delusions, the consequence, I suppose, of the bewildering paltry claptraps of Cockney applause, with which his distiches are tricked out. It is not to be denied that portions of his cloud were beautiful, but the whole was treacherous and threatening; and indeed the lower extremities deliquesced into regular nimbus, or rain-cloud, and a pitiless drenching I got from incautious exposure to it-his own "washerwomen" could not have saturated my garments with wet more thoroughly, than the effects of his bad taste did, while I was trying to ascertain, by nubilous analogy, the degree of his poetical merit.

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The barrow next supplied the works of Campbell and Rogers. They were soon subtilized into cirrocumulus, or sonder-cloud. The Pleasures of Hope took a station to the windward quarter, and there imbibing a golden light from "the fiery-tressed sun,' sailing nearer to us, with much promise of increasing attractiveness. The Pleasures of Memory went to leeward at first, and passing from us, though it never actually got out of sight, kept gaining in tenderness of hue, for what it lost in distinctness of contour and feature.

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Montgomery's, Milman's, Croly's, Maturin's, and Shelley's productions, rose into cumulostrati, or twain-clouds, which are described as being top-heavy, and apt to degenerate into nimbi, or positively rainy clouds. Of course, the component parts, originating from such different authors, varied much. Where Montgomery's had a share in producing some of the mass, there was great beauty-a floating delicacy in some of the wreaths of vapour which was quite exquisite-not that his division had altogether an escape from extreme and frothy tenuity. Milman's part of the cloud was rather overbeetling and stiff in figure, but a magnificent apparition notwithstanding; and I made no doubt that his and Croly's would devolve at last into something nearer to the nature of cumulus, which is the true fine-weather harbinger and exponent. There was a blue brimstone miasma

about Maturin's which foreboded thunder which did growl a little, and the distillation from some of his muddy metaphors dropped in not very transpicuous streams. The stormy rack raised from Shelley's was evidently of dangerous import, while the body of the cloud in that direction was plainly a garner of hail and thunder-it was not long before a forked flash of lightning pierced it, dazzling our eyes, and followed by a surly peal; and I was instantly well peppered with hail-stones, but thought it well that I got nothing worse from such a brewage of tempest. Barry Cornwall's Sketches had not body enough to consolidate into cumulus, but they made a very fine kind of cirrocumulus, with some locks of the cirrus fancifully wafted among the spaces between the denser parts, and all were refracting on their sunny sides colours of the least obstrusive brilliancy. Hogg's broke into clouds of the same genus, and indeed presented a sky such as the shepherd himself must by moonlight have often gazed at with tranquil pleasure, and have been struck with its resemblance to his own charge, then either quietly grazing, or lying at rest on the green heather, hardly less lovely objects than "the snowy flock of Cyn thia's fold" studding the blue arch of night over his head;-whether Hogg may have pursued the parallel between the respective overseers of the two flocks, I cannot tell; but if he did, he may possibly have thought himself able to compete in brilliance with the moon at her brightest.

Of the Lyrical Ballads, after they had been nightly stewed down, some crept along in a stratus, or fall-cloud, and some rose like an exhalation" into adelightful cirrostratus, or wane-cloud, which, however, emitted a soft shower, (a proof belike of something wrong amid graces beyond the reach of art to snatch.) Yet this ill luck was redeemed by the beauty of the rainbow which was tenderly bodied forth in the cloud as it passed away. Wordsworth's heart would have" leapt up" at beholding the sight. Iris, in the times of the Greeks, never shot down from the empyreum in a more delicately-tinted curve, and we may well envy that damsel for having such a meteor for her pathway, the raised platform at the coronation, although Miss Fellows and her nymphs strewed it with flow

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Next came some poems, comparatively few in number, and not large in bulk; and yet they played such pranks in the air, that they were as "noticeable" for their vagaries, as their author for his "large grey eyes.' They were Coleridge's. The Ancient Mariner and Cristabel were transmogrified into something between cirrostratus and cirrocumulus,—wildest and most ominous where the gas extracted from the Mariner was whirling in grotesque volumes, and reflecting as many colours as a "witch's oils," which, as Mr Coleridge informs us, "buru green, and red, and white." It would, certes, puzzle the acutest adept in terminology, or rather orismology, (as the purists speak; -see Kirby and Spence's Letters on Entomology,) to describe what shape the cloud was of which was formed by Cristabel ;-it looked in front a little like the head of a mastiff bitch, and ended, (if end it could be called,) with something like a child "singing and dancing to itself." Although these clouds vexed the eyesight, and threatened an explosion of something very fearful and mysterious, it was impossible to keep one's eyes from looking at them. One poem, however, called Genevieve, sublimed into a faultless shape and hue of loveliness, as glorious to our sight, being o'er our heads, as is a winged messenger of heaven."

66

Wilson's "Plagues and Palms," rose aloft in a semblance hard to be classi fied, the Isle of Palms had something of the changeable look of cirrostratus,-but the City of the Plague, though not altogether removed from that genus, was trenching closely upon the solid and steady appearance of the cumulus, "with fleecy folds voluminous."

There was a long horizonal stratus, or fall-cloud, condensed from the works of various writers. Among the authors who contributed to this lowlying sheet of mist, were the following. Lloyd, though he made an effort to mount; but metaphysics kept him down ;-Bowles, who not only at

tempted, but succeeded in sending up periodicals. They were soused into the some pretty light floculent cirri from pot,-anniversary-addresses, songs of some of his sonnets and local descrip- victory, congratulatory odes, and most tions: his odes, however, gravitated lacrymose monodies-and came out, most ponderously;-Sotheby, whose forming a perfect drizzle, and making originals could not manage to extricate one's neckcloth feel like a dishclout. themselves from the level of the stratus; but his admirable translation of the Georgics, and of Oberon, were buoyed into a purer atmosphere; Hodgson was in the same scrape; his Lady Jane Gray, his Friends, &c. were converted into prone hazy vapour; while his translation did better for him, as his Juvenal rose with some degree of alacrity;-Sir James Bland Burgess, whose Richard Coeur de Lion had really, at this late date, hardly any right to come and suffocate us in a muggy fog: we cannot indeed complain, upon the same footing, of his Dragon Knight, for since it is only a year or two old, it had the true undoubted privilege of trying its fate in the pot, even though it issued in vapour of so thick a consistence, that there was infinite danger of its giving catarrh and sore throat to his majesty's faithful lieges,—the stratus was deadly heavy about this region of it; -Herbert, whose Scandinavian Helga and Hedin betrayed no inclination to soar; and poor Pia Della Pietra still remained in a vapour-bath; but whether it were mal'aria or not, I did not venture into it to try. Some others followed, whose names I could not discover; but the last I distinguished was that of William Thomas Fitzgerald, whose verses indeed seemed mostly to be contained in newspapers and

Those who think I have been dreaming, will expect now to be told that some unexpected jog awoke me, or that the pot burst with a bounce, and that I found it to be all illusion. No such thing-the conclusion was on this wise. The barrow being empty, Mr Titlepage's shopman got between the handles, and soberly wheeled it off the ground. Mr Titlepage himself made me a bow, and retired. Next morning I found that the pot had been removed, but the ground remained blackened and scorched where the fire had been kindled, and it does so to this hour. I have more admiration than ever for Mr Howard's classification of the clouds into seven genera; and as the old works of most of our existing poets are now "resolved into air-thin air," I am happy in the expectation that they will set to work again, and supply us with a fresh stock. It will be satisfactory to know that you believe in what I have told you; (for what signifies it my being a trifle or so crazy, when I only relate to you plain matters of fact which actually happened to me?) but if you range yourself with the disbelievers, I shall not fret; only you must then expect no more communications from

Yours as you use me,
SIMON SHATTERBRAIN.

THE FLOATING BEACON.

ONE dark and stormy night, we were on a voyage from Bergen to Christiansand in a small sloop. Our captain suspected that he had approached too near the Norwegian coast, though he could not discern any land, and the wind blew with such violence, that we were in momentary dread of being driven upon a lee-shore. We had endeavoured, for more than an hour, to keep our vessel away; but our efforts proved unavailing, and we soon found that we could scarcely hold our own. A clouded sky, a hazy atmosphere, and irregular showers of sleety rain, combined to deepen the obscurity of night, and nothing whatever was vi

sible, except the sparkling of the distant waves, when their tops happened to break into a wreath of foam. The sea ran very high, and sometimes broke over the deck so furiously, that the men were obliged to hold by the rigging, lest they should be carried away. Our captain was a person of timid and irresolute character, and the dangers that environed us made him gradually lose confidence in himself. He often gave orders, and countermanded them in the same moment, all the while taking small quantities of ardent spirits at intervals. Fear and intoxication soon stupified him completely, and the crew ceased to consult him,

or to pay any respect to his authority, than ever.
in so far as regarded the management
of the vessel.

About midnight our main-sail was
split, and shortly after we found that
the sloop had sprung a leak. We had
before shipped a good deal of water
through the hatches, and the quantity
that now entered from below was so
great, that we thought she would go
down every moment. Our only chance
of escape lay in our boat, which was
immediately lowered. After we had
all got on board of her, except the
captain, who stood leaning against the
mast, we called to him, requesting that
he would follow us without delay.
"How dare you quit the sloop with-
out my permission?" cried he, stag-
gering forwards. "This is not fit
weather to go a-fishing. Come back
-back with you all!""
No, no,"
returned one of the crew, 66
we don't
want to be sent to the bottom for your
obstinacy. Bear a hand there, or we'll
leave you behind."-" Captain, you
are drunk," said another; you can-
not take care of yourself. You must
obey us now."-"Silence! mutinous
villain," answered the captain. "What
are you all afraid of? This is a fine
breeze-Up mainsail, and steer her
right in the wind's eye."

66

The sea knocked the boat so violently and constantly against the side of the sloop, that we feared the former would be injured or upset, if we did not immediately row away; but, anxious as we were to preserve our lives, we could not reconcile ourselves to the idea of abandoning the captain, who grew more obstinate the more we attempted to persuade him to accompany us. At length, one of the crew leapt on board the sloop, and having seized hold of him, tried to drag him along by force; but he struggled resolutely, and soon freed himself from the grasp of the seaman, who immediately resumed his place among us, and urged that we should not any longer risk our lives for the sake of a drunkard and a madman. Most of the party declared they were of the same opinion, and began to push off the boat; but I entreated them to make one effort more to induce their infatuated commander to accompany us. At that moment he came up from the cabin, to which he had descended a little time before, and we immediately perceived that he was more under the influence of ardent spirits

He abused us all in the

grossest terms, and threatened his crew with severe punishment, if they did not come on board, and return to their duty. His manner was so violent, that no one seemed willing to attempt to constrain him to come on board the boat; and after vainly representing the absurdity of his conduct, and the danger of his situation, we bid him farewell, and rowed away.

The sea ran so high, and had such a terrific appearance, that I almost wished myself in the sloop again. The crew plied the oars in silence, and we heard nothing but the hissing of the enormous billows as they gently rose up, and slowly subsided again, without breaking. At intervals, our boat was elevated far above the surface of the ocean, and remained, for a few moments, trembling upon the pinnacle of a surge, from which it would quietly descend into a gulph, so deep and awful, that we often thought the dense black mass of waters which formed its sides, were on the point of over-arching us, and bursting upon our heads. We glided with regular undulations from one billow to another; but every time we sunk into the trough of the sea, my heart died within me, for I felt as if we were going lower down than we had ever done before, and clung instinctively to the board on which I sat.

Notwithstanding my terrors, I frequently looked towards the sloop. The fragments of her mainsail, which remained attached to the yard, and fluttered in the wind, enabled us to discern exactly where she lay, and shewed, by their motion, that she pitched about in a terrible manner. We occasionally heard the voice of her unfortunate commander, calling to us in tones of frantic derision, and by turns vociferating curses and blasphemous oaths, and singing sea-songs with a wild and frightful energy. I sometimes almost wished that the crew would make another effort to save him, but, next moment, the principle of self-preservation repressed all feelings of humanity, and I endeavoured, by closing my ears, to banish the idea of his sufferings from my mind.

After a little time the shivering canvass disappeared, and we heard a tumultuous roaring and bursting of billows, and saw an unusual sparkling of the sea about a quarter of a mile

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