and severe Crabbe spake sometimes of joy, and his pictures bore gleams of the coming sunshine; and in 1792 issued the enchanting music of Memory's all-absorbing power and imperial influence, and from the wilds of Cumberland came majestic symphonies and divine harmonies, liquid as the lute, yet grand as the organ's swell; and there was Coleridge, more bewitching than the spirit of a dream, and in silvery intonations he told us Christabel, and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in more magnificent soundings he rolled up to the blue summit of Mont Blanc, and its graceful flowers, and its sportive goats, and its dark ravines, and its rushing torrents, and its fearful avalanches, and its gloomy pines, and its clear sky, and its rising sun, an anthem of kindling adoration, and in cooings softer than the dove's, he told us how he won his Genevieve; then were heard low, pensive warblings from the lips of Bowles, and these immortalized him; and Atherstone, so lofty and towering in his flight, could stoop and sing of undisturbed repose, in tones richer than those which erst fell from the Eolian harp when the breeze floated by, cr from Memnon's lyre when the light first dawned on the dim and surging ocean; and over Lamb's Essays reigned a placid stillness; and Sotheby could revel for a season in his translation of the pastoral Georgics; and Moore plucked the rose, and narcissus, and orange-blossom beneath the orient clime; and in 1799, Campbell's star, so brilliant and unwaning, beamed in the horizon "like to an angel o'er the dying, who die in righteousness; and Scott, amid his fair ladies and gallant knights, could yet delight himself in home's unsullied bliss; and Byron dropt some honeyed lines; and Shelley some finer and more ethereal eulogiums; and 1818 beheld Keats dreaming deliciously in his Endymion, Lamia, and Ode to a Nightingale; and Heber sang the songs of Zion; and Herbert Knowles, in a country churchyard, looked upwards to the heavens and caught inspiration; and farther north, Pollok relented and spoke of children and domestic sweets, and burning friendship, and eternal affection; and out of Ayrshire came the gentle Montgomery, with his chaste and spiritual lyrics, and he whispered in more than Philomela's softness of the twilight hour; and Leigh Hunt, with all his quaintness, had many a line of native beauty and touching sensibility; and John Clare could tell us of flowers, and clouds, and streams, and hay-fields, and harvest-homes, and the bliss of early love; and Wilson threw into his poetry all the warmth of his open-hearted nature; and Hemans gave us songs of parental and filial fondness; and Bernard Barton, in less classical strain, penned his meditations on those charming scenes which meet the eye in every nook and corner of our land, and we felt refreshed with his Address to an Evening Primrose, and his story of Bishop Hubert; and Procter mingled his fine minstrelsy with the hymn thus swelling upwards to the throne, as he wandered on "the pebbled beach;" and Milman forgot his stateliness for awhile, and gave us "the merry heart that laughs at care;" and Croly, so oriental in thought, imagination, and language, could sometimes tune his harp_to warble the praise of quiet happiness; and Landor turned and twined a wreath of familiar flowers, the daisy, the woodbine, and the elder; and Joanna Baillie spoke of the bosom's tenderest attachments; and William Knox breathed scriptural simplicity in his Songs of Israel; and Thomas Pringle, when far off in Afric's desert region, remembered his fatherland, and the tinkling of its Sabbath bell; and Elliott depicts the bramble-flower; and Norton looks on the shades of evening, and as the shadows deepen, recals many a pensive joy and pleasure; and Caroline Southey sheds a tear over the Pauper's Deathbed; and Mary Howitt loves the Mountain Children and the English Churches; and Hood melts us with his tale of Eugene Aram; and Tennyson, in fine rolling music, strikes out, "Break, break, break on thy crags, O sea!" and enchains us with his "Dear mother, Ida, hearken ere I die!" and thrills the life-blood with "I'm to be Queen of the May, mother-I'm to be Queen of the May!" and Hartley Coleridge has not forgotten his illustrious sire; and D. M. Moir gazes back on auld lang syne, and tells us a soothing story: and in Scottish melody Burns sang, and Allan Cunningham, and Hector Macneill, and Robert Tannahill, and John Mayne. Nor can we pass over the Ettrick Shepherd with his beautiful Queen's Wake, and still more beautiful songs; and Motherwell with his "I've wandered east, I've wandered west through many a weary way," and his collection of ballads; and Robert Nicoll, with his High Thoughts of Heaven, worthy a nobler name; and James Hislop, with his majestic Cameronian's Dream. And what exquisite things have we not had from Mitford, and Gilpin, and Miller, and Howitt, and Washington Irving, and Macaulay! Gentle "music has been heard in many places, "fine sounds are floating wild about the earth.” The very air teems with honey sweetness and softest murmurings; and these have been our matin and our vesper hymns! And he whose name heads our paper has sung a "hymn to the spirit of all beauty.' It is distinguished by grace, delicacy, and simplicity: we cannot listen to its silver strain without being both refined and exalted; it takes possession of us. It was a calm Sabbath evening when we first caught its intonations; the sun was sinking in the west, and tinging the horizon with a golden hue; the warblings of birds in many a leafy tree rose upwards; the soft and gentle breeze, laden with the_hawthorn and wild rose, swept sweetly by. It was an hour of rich perfumes; the twilight stole down, giving a soothing dimness to the objects spread around; the solemn notes of an old organ mingled with creation's sounds. Such was the holy season in which we knew of Alford. Hearken: Methinks I can remember, when a shade I know not how-which is not on this earth, Something all-glorious and all beautiful, Of which our language speaketh not, and which And upon a time, I saw an army of bright, beamy shapes, A mingling of soft light; and then they sung Be the calm of thy rest, In the warm, dark womb. Spread ye, spread the dewy mist around him; Spread ye, spread, till the thick, dark night surround himTill the dark, long night has bound him, Which bindeth all before their birth Down upon the nether earth. The first cloud is beamy and bright, The next cloud is mellowed in light, The third cloud is dim to the sight, And it stretched away into gloomy night: Twine ye, twine the mystic threads around him; Twine ye, twine, till the fast, firm fate surround him- Down upon the nether earth. The first thread if beamy and bright, The next thread is mellowed in light, The third thread is dim to the sight, And it stretcheth away into gloomy night. Sing ye, sing the spirit song around him; Sing ye, sing, till the dull, warm sleep surround him- Down upon the nether earth. The first dream is beamy and bright, The next dream is mellowed in light, The third dream is dim to the sight, And it stretcheth away into gloomy night. Is the calm of thy rest, For thy chamber of sleep Is dark and deep; They have dug thee a tomb In the dark, deep womb, The warm, dark womb. Then dimness passed upon me; and that song Was sounding o'er me when I woke again To be a pilgrim on the nether earth. Twine ye, twine the mystic threads around him; Twine ye, twine, till the fast, firm fate surround himTill the firm, cold fate hath bound him, Which bindeth all before their birth Down upon the nether earth. mortal gods; so Young has it, and Pollok after him, and displays great beauty of conception and chasteness of expression. Many are its scenes of sunlit happiness-many its songs of peace; it breathes an un listurbed and unruffled sweetness-an inviolate and imperishable love of the true and holy; it is encircled with the golden glory of a first and faithful attachment. The poem opens with a fine description of Spring, followed by a liquid memory of the past, uttered in the ear of his beloved, which for sweetness of thought and grace of execution, will find but few equals. It is an April morn ; the bright and beautiful heaven is beaming on them; the leaves glitter as orient gems in the sunshine; they sit together on the grassy slope: this the tale of his remembrance : Few have lived As we have lived, unsevered; our young life In this of thine; and thou, too, dost but move Some we love well; the early presences Of our young life-these, as the world of things Keep with us and are for ever uppermost. Out from the nether darkness, and been borne Into a new and glorious universe, Who speak of things to come; but there is that For since our birth, Our thoughts have flowed together in one stream; The same hills rose about us-the same trees, In the same seat, with hands clasped side by side,- This is truly beautiful; many have been the thoughts recalled by its perusal: the green hil's of infancy, crowned by the darksome copse; the wild, straggling lane, with its hedge-rows sprinkled with woodbine and convolvulus; the babbling brook murmuring over its pebbly bottom, with its banks fringed with butter-cups, daisies, and forget-me-nots; the old halls, How like the ethereal Shelley this is! there is the same light, aerial spirit, the same highwrought imagination, the same star-lit web-standing upon their sloping lawns, with their its music is magnificent. Our poet appears to us to be one of the happiest of men; there is no repining, with its sullen discord; he enjoys those mercies which surround him; and in a calm, confiding trust he leans on the bosom of the universal Father. This feeling of blessedness pervades every line he has written; they are all tinctured with the same sweet and quiet colouring. His longest poem, The School of the Heart, is written in blank-verse-the language of im strange traditions and family histories; the white-washed cottages, trellised with jessamine and rose, seen in the sunlight of evening; the ancient church, half-covered with ivy, and partly hidden by the venerable yew, come before us in sweet perspective, all awakened by these lines; and with these scenes return the forms and faces of those we loved in childhood's hour we remember their kindness, gentleness, and tenderness; we feel that they cannot come to us--we must go to them. His feelings, on first leaving home and her he loved, are exquisitely described. It was morning; the light had just streaked the horizon; there was a freshness and coolness in the air: at a wicker-gate they part, and take their last fond look: he journeys onwards. The novelty of the scenes banishes for awhile his thoughts of that hallowed hour. A child played beneath the noon-day sun by some cottage porch: he was thrilled with delight. But listen : When first I issued forth into the world, How different his second journey! no novelty now; no new sweets to attract; the happy child, the rose-trailed porch, the quiet villages, and the busy towns, assuage not his grief. There was no beauty now, Of lands new seen-but the same dreary road With inward fretting and unrest, I reached waves in the corn-fields, and the sound of murmuring bees, and the scent of odoriferous shrubs, and the melody of birds, and the village chimes come ever and anon on the breeze. Many are the lines addressed to his beloved, all of which are tinged with a delicate beauty; they contain nothing that can offend the most retiring modesty or the most fastidious taste, while there is everything to gratify the loving soul: they exhibit great elegance of fancy and manly vigour of style. Those who write on this subject are generally so fulsome, that we have more than once determined never more to read any amatory writing; but Alford is a noble exception; he is tender and chaste; and through the whole of these verses there runs a golden vein of sincerity and truth. There are some spirits who are for ever telling us that this present life is dull, cold, and cheerless; that little or no real happiness is found below. Of such we would ask, what means the beauty of the outward creation-the magnificence of the midnight heaven—the sublimity of the crashing storm-the seasons, which roll unerringly around,-winter, with its fine frosty mornings and fire-side comforts; spring, with its buds, and blossoms, and light fresh green; summer, with its oriental softness and grace; autumn, with its ripened fruits, and fading leaves, and solemn, moaning winds? What means the day, ushered in by twilight And turning round, he gazes more tenderly and the invigorating air, and ere nightfall into her face, and says: I remember well, one summer's night, How like the feeling of every youthful lover, and what a beautiful picture! A summer's night-the sweet, soft moonlight, the arm fondly laid upon the shoulder, the eye glistening with tenderness, the calm and breathless stillness, the "'tis time we went to rest," the quiet parting with each other, with bosoms perchance too full and too happy for utterance. What a delicious scene of true and faithful affection! how unlike the unhallowed attachment of the libertine; what music in the very silence! The eye alone speaks, and what language it breathes! The hour so peaceful, so spiritual, so ethereal. The place of interview and communion, the glorious rolling planet; their light, the silver crescent and the million stars; their perfumes, the empurpled flowers. What luxurious moments! how allied their happiness to the pure and untainted bliss of Paradise. On them the dew seemed to fall more gently, the moon to shed a more radiant brightness, and the stars to glimmer more resplendently. After a separation, our poet and his fair one meet again it is "the leafy month of June," when the sky is one fine transparent blue, and the roses flower in all their beauty, and the kingcups adorn the grassy meadows, and the elders whiten the hedge-rows, and the gay poppy sinking away into dim and shadowy darkness; Oh! liness, have breathed out and rolled upwards, and spread onwards a tremendous anthem of tempest sounds and clear, silvery tones, massive, ponderous, indestructible! ing; and as with nature, so with those books, which are the melodies of nature. There is the blind old man of Scio, and there is the elegant bard of Mantua; both are pregnant with delight, but not of the same kind. Ďante and Petrarch, Spencer and Young, Ben Johnson and Thomson, Hall and Hazlitt, are each distinct and different, but each calculated to give his own peculiar pleasure. We can love them all; but surely it were vain to expect that each would afford a like gratification. Herein we generally err; we anticipate that the smooth, Life teems with happiness: he who is content is happy; here lies the secret of earthly bliss; man's happiness is in his own soul; our misfortunes may prove so many sources of divine felicity; it depends on ourselves; we have power to make, power to unmake; hardships cannot shackle the mind, that is free; it can never be imprisoned, never enchained, unless we ourselves forge the fetters. Should afflic-polished line will stir us like the clarion's blast; tion come, and woe, and desertion, there is one bosom which fondly beats to ours, and which loves us with an infinite love. Ah! they give a richer and a deeper scent to the domestic affections; they throw a halo of exquisite sunshine on the home of our regard; they breathe into it a more hallowed and a more unutterable blessedness. The family are linked together in a more confiding and tender sensibility; and there is unity of heart and unity of spirit: we may be the most happy whilst the most sorrowful. There is ever some mitigating circumstance-some light from the nether heavensome delicious accents from above. And with these opposers of the true and holy, there is ever the axiom-if, indeed, it be an axiom-that possession cloys: perhaps it is the popular, the pervading opinion; the multitude believe in it; the merchant on change, the student in the study, the noble in his hall, the minister in the pulpit, alike receive it; they seem never to have questioned it: and when we ask any for a proof of its verity, they are astonished, and often confounded. We deny its truth: we do so firmly and conscientiously. Possession does not necessarily cloy: we never have experienced it. Once a man, overcome with trials and sorrow, looked around on those things which had in the hour of sunshine gladdened and delighted him, and having found no comfort and no satisfaction, he uttered the sentiment that possession cloyed: one and another took it up, until it is now well-nigh the prevailing creed. Away with this empty echoing! but is it less to be enjoyed on this account? is the rose less beautiful because it is not so slender as the lily of the valley-the violet less graceful because it differs from the hyacinththe honeysuckle less to be admired because its blossom is not so white and starry as the clematis,-the hawthorn, because it is not streaked with the cerulean tint of the iris-the summer flowers of England, because they are not so luxuriant as those beneath the golden colouring of an Italian evening?—and is Herrick with his daffodils and daisies to be despised, because in his love of simple beauty he minds not the grander and sublimer features of the universe? And in painting, do we grow weary of Claude Lorraine's golden beauty, and Ludovico Caracci's masterly Transfiguration, and Tintoret's wild and extravagant sketches, and Correggio's graceful elegance deepening oftentimes to grandeur, and Parmegiano's simple yet severe style, and Vandycke's soul-breathing portraits, and Murillo's mellowed softness, and Vinci's sublimity in his Last Supper, and Teniers' transparency, and Nicholas Poussin's Paradise and Deluge, and Snyders' magnificent Stag-hunt, and Rembrandt's lively imagination, and Wilson's natural loveliness, and Reynolds' expression, and Gainsborough's exquisite Cottage-girl, and West's striking picture of Death on the Pale Horse, and Blake's terrible and ghastly embodiments, and Michael Angelo's superhuman vastness of thought, and Titian's unrivalled colouring? And in sculpture, is the eye dimmed by gazing on the fair form of Venus just issuing from the bath, with her beautiful countenance expressive of soft voluptuousness; and the enchanting statue of Niobe with its deep despair and agonizing sorrow; and the Apollo's magnificence; and the Juno with lips sweet as a rosebud; and the Minerva, with head uplifted in serene pensiveness to heaven; and the Laocoon, of which Pliny speaks in terms of the highest eulogium, and which amid its sufferings, breathes out such awful quietude as to still the pulsations of the heart; and the Dying Gladiator, with his broken hopes and solemn gloom depicted so truly; and Hercules resting for awhile after having plucked the golden apples in rich Hesperian gardens; and Polycletus' famous Flora, with her delicate drapery; and Actæon defend One great argument which seems to confirm this deeply-rooted idea is, that the reality ever disappoints the anticipation. This fault is generally chargeable on ourselves, and not neces sarily in the thing itself; we too frequently expect that every delight will flow from one object; this is not fair or reasonable: a flower is calculated to yield one kind of pleasure, and the roll of thunders another; the happiness derived from hearing the soft cadence of the village bell is distinct from that of the loud crashing of sweeping winds; the lute, with its liquid notes floating across some peaceful landscape, from that of the organ's swell along "the dim cathedral aisles;" the gently flowing rivulet from the impetuous stream; whereas we too often imagine that one of these will yield using himself against his dogs; and Myro's cethe enjoyments of the rest; and when we find our expectations disappointed, we deepen the discordant sound that possession cloys. Possession does not necessarily cloy. A fine winter scene will produce different feelings in the heart from that of a sweet summer's even lebrated Discobulus?—and of modern times is it wearying to behold Bacon's classical Narcissus gazing at the semblance of his own fair form in the deep flowing waters, and wishing to gaze for ever; and Bailey's dreamy slumber in his Sleeping Nymph, and his ideal of exquisite grace and holy chastity in his Eve at the Fountain, so full of delicate touches; and Behn's eloquent persuasiveness and anxious desire in his Cupid and the Doves; and Canova's hallowed devotedness of woman and careless indifference of man in his Venus and Adonis; and the repentance seen in the sunken eye of his Magdalene, as if she had forsaken the world for ever, and knew nothing but the name of her God; and the muscular sinew and heroic firmness of his Ajax, and the bland sweetness of his Graces, and the mild complacency of his Paris, and the innocent charms of the Infant John, and the manliness and fond beguilment displayed in Mars and Venus, and the soft tenderness and playful affection of Psyche and Cupid; and Chantrey's Resignation, with eye up-turned to the clear bright sky, giving as it were the human will to the divine, and reposing on the bosom of the Supreme; and Flaxman's Mercury and Pandora; the one so light and airy, and the other so perfect in feminine beauty; and Sievier's blushing Musidora about to bathe in the limpid stream; and Westmacott's enchanting Psyche? The oftener we gaze, the deeper our admiration; beauties come out which were unseen before, and associations cling around them: associations weave their unfading chaplet. Perhaps, beheld amid the luxuriant loveliness of the southern landscape, and beneath the purple and golden light of the southern sky, they become the divinity of the scene; they breathe over the spot a deep, hushed stillness, and the charming shapes and forms of creation become in after times woven with the sculptured marble, and we cannot look on the one without recalling the other. Thus we never tire; thus possession does not necessarily cloy; and thus will these noble works of art ever put on a sweeter grace, and exert a more impassioned influence. And in music, do the romantic beauty of Mozart's Zauberflöte, and the spirit-stirring outpouring of his Don Giovanni, and the solemnity of his Requiem, lose any of their power by too frequently rolling their divine sounds on the ear and do we ever tire with hearing Arne's sweet melodies and his fine Artaxerxes, and Beethoven's gigantic conceptions uttering their storm-like harmonies, and his ravishing strains of beauty, and his bursts of tremendous passion, and his chastened accents of sorrow; and Weber's richness in Oberon, with its strange, unearthly harmony, and the mournful simplicity of his last waltz; and Rossini's Italian airs, and Mendelssohn's sweeping majesty, and Bach's immortal strains, and Crotch's exquisite Palestine, and Glück's Alceste, and Anselm Faidit's thrilling love-songs, and Christopher Tye's fine anthem, I will exalt thee O Lord, and Bird's Non nobis Domine, and Gibbon's solemn combinations, and Cavalli's bold expression, and Cesti's graceful Cara e dolce Libertâ, and Salvator Rosa's wild utterances of minstrelsy, resembling the deep gloom of his paintings; and Purcell's Te Deum, second only to Handel's, and his elegant Tell me why, my charming fair; and Corelli's pastoral sweetness, and Tartini's impassioned Sonatas, and Perez's pure southern intonations, and Boyce's pathetic By the waters of Babylon, and his chaste duet, Together let us range the fields; and Danby's Fairest flowers, and Cooke's As now the shade of eve, and Webbe's Swiftly o'er the mountain's brow, and Callcott's unrivalled O snatch me from these tempestuous scenes; and Haydn's immortal canzonets, and his Creation, so picturesque of beauty and loveliness, with music lively as the lark's, yet majestic as the surging of the billowy ocean; and Handel's stupendous choruses, and magnificent Dead March. And in literature, will the melodious line of Izaak Walton and Goldsmith become less soft and less beautiful? And are we ever satiated with Cadmon's Fall of Man, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Herbert's holy hymns, and Herrick's simple ditties, and Shakspeare's magnificent music, and Sir Philip Sidney's gentle tones, as of Arcadian rills, and Donne's vigorous and penetrating glance, and Giles Fletcher's hallowed theme, and Wither's spiritual emblems, and Browne's sweet pastorals, and Camden's antiquarian research, and Overbury's flowery scenes, and Jeremy Taylor's richness of thought and profuseness of imagery, and Drummond's chaste love sonnets, chanted far away in the north, and Cowley's lively essays and quiet contentment on the banks of Thames, and Milton's sublimity and oppressive grandeur, and Dryden's stately verse, and Nathaniel Lee's deep gush of tempest-sounds, and Evelyn's thoughts on Forest Trees, and Barrow's fulness, and Baxter's holiness, and Henry More's quaint but expressive conceptions, and Clarendon's renowned History, and Hale's pleasant tracts, and Locke's metaphysical inquiries, and Addison's graceful writings, and Pope's brilliant satire, and Swift's biting language, and Parnell's charming Hermit, and Somerville's Chase, and Steele's humorous and masterly delineations, and Defoe's wondrous tale, and Mandeville's graphic sketches, and Berkeley's high-spun idealisms, and Blair's masculine energy, and Johnson's majestic periods, and Collins' inimitable Ode to the Passions, and Lyttleton's tender monody on the death of his wife, and Gray's exquisite Elegy and storm-like Pindaric sweep, and Mason's classical idioms, and Langhorne's amiable lines and translation of Plutarch's Lives, and Blackstone's immortal Commentaries on his country's laws, and M'Pherson's wild mountainstrains, and Chatterton's songs of days gone by, and Falconer's sea descriptions, and Bruce's delightful pæan to the early spring, and Logan's long-remembered welcome to the cuckoo, and Walton's monument of English poetry, and Beattie's embodiment of his youthful aspirations and feelings in the charming Minstrel, and Smart's Hymn of David, and Barnard's affecting ballad of Auld Robin Gray, and Gibbon's splendid diction and extensive learning, and Sterne's pathos and moving pity, and Adam Smith's great work on the Wealth of Nations, and Warburton's paradoxes and dogmas, and Lowth's beautiful Hebrew melodies, and Watts' Songs for Childhood, and Burke's exuberant fancy and dazzling paintings, and Chatham's magnificent oratory, and Canning's elegant speeches, and Beckford's fine orientalism, and Hannah More's moral sentiments, and Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de Medici, and Mackintosh's clear, silvery argument, and Hallam's Constitu |