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period shall arrive, her critics must not be accusing us of "mere arrogant pedantry," because we make the language of our scholars and men of genius our standard of English diction, and are determined to exclude from our lips and books every obsolete or new-fangled dialect that may have local sway in Philadelphia or at the sources of the Missouri.

Should these and the preceding observations chance to fall under the eye of an American, he may, perhaps, imagine that we too have been indulging in offensive animadversions upon his na tion; but we sincerely assure him, that we have no intention to offend. We think that America is doing wonders, and we most heartily congratulate her. We can not for an instant doubt, that the formation of a great empire, resembling in its best points the best times of Great Britain, must prove an auspicious era in the history of the human race. A community, provided with ample resources against an endless increase of members, and enjoying a free bar, a free senate, and a free press, if true to itself, must do great things. But America is yet in her infancy, and must not, like a froward child, born to a great estate and the dupe of domestic adulators, immaturely assume the tone and pretensions of a riper period; she must be docile and industrious, and patient of rebuke that conveys instruction. She must not talk too much of her glory, till it comes. She must not make fine speeches about freedom, while a slave contaminates her soil. She must not rail at English travellers for visiting her cities and plantations, and publishing what they see. She must not be angry with Lord Grey for calling Mr. Fearon "a gentleman;"* and she positively must not be fretting herself into the preposterous notion, that there exists in this country an organized conspiracy against her literary fame. There is no such thing. For ourselves, we can say, that on a late occasion, we felt unfeigned zeal in offering a voluntary tribute to the memory of an American man of geniust; and that we shall be at all times ready to resume so pleasing an office; while, on the part of others, we can refer to the universal praises now bestowing upon the elegant productions of Mr. Washington Irving, as a proof that American talent has nothing to apprehend from the imputed jealousy and injustice of English criticism.

Gentleman, as Lord Grey calls Fearon."-North American Review. C. B. Brown.

WINTER.

THE mill-wheel's frozen in the stream,
The church is deck'd with holly,
Misletoe hangs from the kitchen beam,
To fright away melancholy:
Icicles clink in the milkmaid's pail,
Younkers skate on the pool below,
Blackbirds perch on the garden rail,
And hark how the cold winds blow!

There goes the squire to shoot at snipe,
Here runs Dick to fetch a log,

You'd swear his breath was the smoke of a pipe,
In the frosty morning fog.

Hodge is breaking the ice for the kine,

Old and young cough as they go,

The round red sun forgets to shine,

And hark, how the cold winds blow!

In short, Mr. Editor, winter is come at last-a mighty evil to the shivering hypocondriacs, who are glad to catch at any excuse to be miserable; but a visitation which, by those who are in no actual danger of dining with Duke Humphrey, or of being driven, from lack of raiment, to join in the exclamation of poor Tom, may very appropriately be hailed in the language of Satan, "Evil, be thou my good." The Spaniards have a proverb, that God sends the cold according to the clothes; and though the callousness and hardihood acquired by the ragged be the effect of exposure, and not an exemption from the general susceptibility, the adage is not the less true, and illustrates that beneficent provision of Nature, which, operating in various ways, compensates the poor for their apparent privations; converts the abused luxuries of the rich into severe correctives, and thus pretty nearly equalizes, through the various classes of mortals, the individual portions of suffering and enjoyment. In the distribution of the seasons, care seems to have been taken that mankind should have the full benefit of this system of equivalents. To an admirer of Nature, it is certainly melancholy to be no longer able to see the lusty green boughs wrestling with the wind, or dancing in the air to the sound of their own music; to lose the song of the lark, the nightingale, the blackbird, and the thrush; the sight of the waving corn, the green and flowery fields, the rich landscape, the blue and sunny skies. It appears a woful contrast, when the glorious sun and the azure face of heaven are perpetually hidden from us by a thick veil of fog; when the poached and swampy fields are silent and desolate, and seem, with a scowl, to warn us off their premises;

when the leafless trees stand like gaunt skeletons, while their offspring leaves are lying at their feet, buried in a winding-sheet of snow. There is a painful sense of imposition, too, in feeling that you are paying taxes for windows which afford you no light; that, for the bright and balmy breathings of Heaven, you are presented with a thick yellow atmosphere, which irritates your eyes, without assisting them to see. Well, I admit that we must betake ourselves, in-doors, to our shaded lamps and our snug firesides. There is no great hardship in that; but, Mr. Editor, our minds are driven in-doors also, they are compelled to look inwards, to draw from their internal resources; and I do contend that this is the unlocking of a more glorious mental world, abundantly atoning for all our external annoyances, were they even ten times more offensive. That man must have a poor and frozen fancy who does not possess a sun and moon obedient to his own will, which he can order to arise with much less difficulty than he can ring up his servants on these dark mornings; and as to woods, lakes, and mountains, he who can not conjure them up to his mind's eye with all their garniture and glory, as glibly as he can pronounce the words, may depend upon it that he is-no conjurer. It is well known, that in our dreams, objects are presented to us with more vivid brilliancy and effect than they ever assume to our ordinary perceptions, and the imaginary landscapes that glitter before us in our waking dreams are unquestionably more enchanting than even the most picturesque reality. They are poetical exaggerations of beauty, the beau ideal of nature. Then is it that a vivacious and creative faculty springs up within us, whose omnipotent and magic wand, like the sword of harlequin, can convert a Lapland hut into the Athenian Parthenon, and transform the desolate snow-clad hills of Siberia, with their boors and bears, into the warm and sunny vale of the Thessalian Tempe, where, through the glimpses of the pines, we see a procession of shepherds and shepherdesses marching to offer sacrifice in the temple of Pan, while the air brings to us, at intervals, the faint sound of the hymn they are chanting. There was nothing ridiculous in the saying of the clown, who complained that he could not see London for the houses. Mine is a similar predicament in the month of June; I can not see such landscapes as I have been describing, on account of the trees and fields that surround me. The real shuts out the ideal. The Vale of Health upon Hampstead Heath deprives me, for months together, of the Vale of Tempe; and the sand-boys and girls, with their donkies, drive away Pegasus upon a full gallop, and eject the nymphs and fauns from the sanctuary of my mind. The corporeal eye puts out the mental one: I am obliged to take pastoral objects as they present themselves, and to believe the hand-writing on the finger-posts which invariably and

solemnly assert that I am within four miles of London, and not in "Arcady's delicious dales," on the "vine-covered hills and gay valleys of France," or in Italy's "love-breathing woods, and luteresounding waves.' But when the fields around me are covered with snow, and fogs and darkness are upon the land, I exclaim with Milton," so much the rather thou, shine inward, light divine;" and, betaking myself to my fire-side, lo! the curtain is drawn up, and all the magnificent scenery of classic realms and favoured skies bursts upon my vision, with an overpowering splendour. Talk not to me of the inspiration and rapture diffused around Parnassus and Helicon; of the poetic intoxication derived from quaffing the "dews of Castaly," the true, the blushful Hippocrene,"or" Aganippe's rill." Sir, I boldly aver, that Apollo himself, walking amid the groves of the muse-haunted mountain, never shook such radiant inspiration from his locks as often gushes from the bars of a register-stove, when the Pierian "Wall's End" or "Russel's Main," has had its effulgence stimulated by a judiciously applied poker; and as to potable excitements of genius, I will set the single port of Canton against the whole of European and Asiatic Greece, and am prepared to prove, that more genuine Parnassian stimulus has emanated from a single chest of eight-shilling black tea, than from all the rills and founts of Arcady, Thessaly, and Boeotia. I am very seriously inclined to doubt whether the singing of the nightingale has ever awakened so much enthusiasm, or dictated so many sonnets, as the singing of the tea-kettle.

December is the true pastoral month. For my part, I consider my Christmas summer as having just set in. It was but last night that I enjoyed my first Italian sunrise. I was sitting, or rather standing, with my shoulders supported against a chesnut-tree, about half way down the slope of the celebrated Vallombrosa, watching the ascent of the great luminary of day, whose coming was announced by that greenish hue in the borizon, which so often attends his uprising in cloudless climates. In the opposite quarter of the heavens, the pale moon was still visible; while the morning star, twinkling and twinkling, appeared struggling for a few moments' longer existence, that it might just get one peep at the sun. Behind me the tufted tops of the chesnut woods began to be faintly illuminated with the ray; while the spot where I stood, and the rest of the vale, were still enveloped in a gray shade. Immediately opposite to me, two young shepherds had plucked up a wattle from the fold, and as their sheep came bleating forth, they stood on each side of the opening, singing in a sort of measured chant, alternate stanzas from the Orlando Furioso. They had chosen that part of the Sth book, where Angelica is carried, by magic art, into a deso

Jate island; and in the pride of my Italian lore, and my anxiety to"warble immortal verse and Tuscan air," I was on the very point of taking up the story, and quoting the uncourteous treatment she encountered from the licentious old Hermit, when a gust of cold wind blowing-in under the door of my room puffed out my sun, and a drop of half-frozen water falling from the ceiling upon my head, owing to the derangement of a pipe in the chamber above, simultaneously extinguished my moon! Ever while you live, Mr. Editor, let your parlour be an oblong square, with the door in one corner, and the fire-place in the centre of the farther end, by which means you will have two snug fireside places, secure from these reverie-breaking draughts of air; and if before turning up your wind-pipe, you were just to take a look at your water-pipe, you need not, like me, be subject to the demolition of the loveliest sun-rise that was ever invisible. Such are the casualties to which the most prudent visionaries are exposed: but are the plodding fellows of fact and reality a whit more se cure of their enjoyments? I appael to every man who has really visited the classic spot from which I was thus ejected without any legal notice, whether a cloud, a storm, the heat of the sun, or some other interruption, has not frequently driven him from the contemplation of a beautiful landscape which he has in vain endeavoured to resume under equally favourable circumstances. His position, somehow or other, presents the same objects in a less picturesque combination; the day is not so propitious; either there is less amenity and richness in the light, or the tints have decidedly altered for the worse; in short his first view, as compared with the second, is Hyperion to a Satyr. Now mark the advantages of the fire-side landscape over that of the open fields. No sooner had I retrimmed my lamp, rendered doubly necessary by the extinction of my sun and moon; composed myself afresh in my arm-chair, and fixed my eyes steadfastly upon the fire-shovel, which happened to stand opposite, than the whole scene of Vallombrosa, the god of day climbing over the mountains, the chesnut-woods, and the spouting shepherds, gradually developed themselves anew with all the effulgence and exact individuality of the first impression. The sun had stood still for me without a miracle, and continued immovable until I had time to transfer the whole gorgeous prospect upon the canvass of my brain. There it remains; it is mine in perpetual possession, and no new Napoleon can take it down and carry it off to the Louvre. It is deeply and ineffaceably engraved upon my sensorium; lithographed upon the tablet of my memory, there to remain while reason holds her seat. To me it is a portion of eternity enclosed within a frame; a landscape withdrawn from the grand gallery of heaven, and hung up for ever in one of the chambers of my brain. Nei

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