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medical point of view, prove the better caution. That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams—if dreams they were for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other

Headless bear, black man, or ape

Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.*

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth-that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our antemundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form.-It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., extinguished taper, will come and look at me; who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition-who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story-finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity.

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimæras dire -stories of Celano and the Harpies-may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition-but they were there before. They are transcripts, types-the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all?-or

-Names, whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not?

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from
such objects, considered in their capacity of
being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?
-O, least of all! These terrors are of older
standing. They date beyond body-or, with-
out the body, they would have been the same.
All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in
Dante-tearing, mangling, choking, stifling,
scorching demons-are they one half so
fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple
idea of a spirit unembodied following him

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turn'd round, walks on
And turns no more his head;

but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings— cities abroad, which I have never seen and I have traversed, hardly have hoped to see. for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon-their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight-a map-like distinctness of trace-and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.-I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells-my highest Alps,-but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The There poverty of my dreams mortifies me. is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,

to solace his night solitudes-when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune-when my stretch of imagi. native activity can hardly, in the night

• Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light-it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea calm, and thence to a river motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarisation of dreams) was no other

than the gentle Thames, which landed me in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace.

The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humourist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be,-"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing.

VALENTINE'S DAY.

HAIL to thy returning festival, old Bishop every street and turning. The weary and Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric, all forspent twopenny postman sinks bethou venerable Arch-flamen of Hymen! neath a load of delicate embarrassments, not Immortal Go-between; who and what his own. It is scarcely credible to what an manner of person art thou? Art thou but extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on a name, typifying the restless principle which in this loving town, to the great enrichment impels poor humans to seek perfection in of porters, and detriment of knockers and union? or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, bell-wires. In these little visual interpretawith thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, tions, no emblem is so common as the heart, and decent lawn sleeves? Mysterious per--that little three-cornered exponent of all sonage! like unto thee, assuredly, there is our hopes and fears, the bestuck and no other mitred father in the calendar; not bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the into more allegories and affectations than an consigner of undipt infants to eternal tor-opera-hat. What authority we have in hisments, Austin, whom all mothers hate; nor tory or mythology for placing the headhe who hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is

Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee.

In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at

quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, "Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or putting a delicate question, "Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of

sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance.

profession, but no further; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody halfway. E. B. meditated how he could repay Not many sounds in life, and I include all this young maiden for many a favour which urban and all rural sounds, exceed in in- she had done him unknown; for when a terest a knock at the door. It "gives a very kindly face greets us, though but passing by, echo to the throne where hope is seated." and never knows us again, nor we it, we But its issues seldom answer to this oracle should feel it as an obligation: and E. B. within. It is so seldom that just the person did. This good artist set himself at work to we want to see comes. But of all the cla- please the damsel. It was just before Vamorous visitations the welcomest in expecta-lentine's day three years since. He wrought, tion is the sound that ushers in, or seems to unseen and unsuspected, a wondrous work. usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself We need not say it was on the finest gilt was hoarse that announced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days; you will say, That is not the post I am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens !delightful eternal common-places, which "having been will always be;" which no school-boy nor school-man can write away; having your irreversible throne in the fancy and affections-what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, youthful fancy, not without verses

66

Lovers all,

A madrigal,

some

paper with borders-full, not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottos and fanciful devices, such as beseemed, —a work in short of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice-(0 ignoble trust!)—of the common post; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand, the next morning he saw the cheerful messenger knock, and by and by the precious charge delivered. He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with light love, or foolish expectations, for she had no lover; or, if she had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present; a God-send, as our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit All Valentines are not foolish; and I received where the benefactor was unknown. shall not easily forget thine, my kind friend It would do her no harm. It would do her (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B.- good for ever after. It is good to love the E. B. lived opposite a young maiden whom unknown. I only give this as a specimen of he had often seen, unseen, from his parlour E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed window in C-e-street. She was all joyous- kindness. ness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of missing one with good-humour. E. B. is an artist of no common powers; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none; his name is known at the bottom of many a church. well-executed vignette in the way of his

or some such device, not over abundant in sense-young Love disclaims it, and not quite silly-something between wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in Arcadia.

Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; and no better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentine and his true

MY RELATIONS.

I AM arrived at that point of life at which | old Christian. She was a woman of strong a man may account it a blessing, as it is a sense, and a shrewd mind-extraordinary at singularity, if he have either of his parents a repartee; one of the few occasions of her surviving. I have not that felicity-and breaking silence-else she did not much sometimes think feelingly of a passage in value wit. The only secular employment I Browne's Christian Morals, where he speaks remember to have seen her engaged in, was, of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy the splitting of French beans, and dropping years in the world. "In such a compass of them into a china basin of fair water. The time," he says, "a man may have a close odour of those tender vegetables to this day apprehension what it is to be forgotten, comes back upon my sense, redolent of when he hath lived to find none who could soothing recollections. Certainly it is the remember his father, or scarcely the friends most delicate of culinary operations. of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a face in no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself."

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none-to remember. By the uncle's side I may be said to have been born an orphan. I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She Brother, or sister, I never had any-to know was one whom single blessedness had soured them. A sister, I think, that should have to the world. She often used to say, that I been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. was the only thing in it which she loved; What a comfort, or what a care, may I not and, when she thought I was quitting it, she have missed in her!-But I have cousins grieved over me with mother's tears. A sprinkled about in Hertfordshire-besides partiality quite so exclusive my reason can- two, with whom I have been all my life in not altogether approve. She was from morn- habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I ing till night poring over good books, and may term cousins par excellence. These are devotional exercises. Her favourite volumes James and Bridget Elia. They are older were, Thomas à Kempis, in Stanhope's trans- than myself by twelve, and ten, years; and lation; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, neither of them seems disposed, in matters with the matins and complines regularly set of advice and guidance, to waive any of the down,-terms which I was at that time too prerogatives which primogeniture confers. young to understand. She persisted in May they continue still in the same mind; reading them, although admonished daily and when they shall be seventy-five, and concerning their Papistical tendency; and seventy-three, years old (I cannot spare went to church every Sabbath as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied; though, I think at one period of her life, she told me, she had read James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature with great satisfaction the Adventures of an hath her unities, which not every critic can Unfortunate Young Nobleman. Finding the penetrate: or, if we feel, we cannot door of the chapel in Essex-street open one explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of day-it was in the infancy of that heresy-none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire she went in, liked the sermon, and the those fine Shandean lights and shades, manner of worship, and frequented it at in- which make up his story. I must limp after tervals for some time after. She came not in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates for doctrinal points, and never missed them. have given me grace and talent. J. E. then With some little asperities in her consti--to the eye of a common observer at least— tution, which I have above hinted at, she seemeth made up of contradictory principles. was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine The genuine child of impulse, the frigid

them

sooner), persist in treating me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother!

philosopher of prudence-the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier down of everything that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others: and, determined by his own sense in everything, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions.-With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing anything absurd or singular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so for the world would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art (whereof he hath amassed a choice collection), under the pretext of buying only to sell again-that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Domenichino hang still by his wall?-is the ball of his sight much more dear to him ?—or what picturedealer can talk like him?

in the state, whatever it be, that we are
placed in. He is triumphant on this theme,
when he has you safe in one of those short
stages that ply for the western road, in a
very obstructing manner, at the foot of John
Murray's street-where you get in when it
is empty, and are expected to wait till the
vehicle hath completed her just freight-a
trying three quarters of an hour to some
people. He wonders at your fidgetiness,—
"where could we be better than we are, thus
sitting, thus consulting?"-"prefers, for his
part, a state of rest to locomotion,”—with an
eye all the while upon the coachman,
till at length, waxing out of all patience,
at your want of it, he breaks out into
a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for
detaining us so long over the time which
he had professed, and declares peremptorily,
that "the gentleman in the coach is deter-
mined to get out, if he does not drive on that
instant."

Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. Indeed he makes wild work with logic; and seems to jump at most admirable conclusions by some process, not at all akin to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason; and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it-enforcing his negation with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural to him-when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says some of the best things in the world— and declareth that wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in their grounds-What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all be changed into frivolous Members of Parliament !

Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their speculative conclusions to the bent of their individual humours, his theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his constitution. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person upon principle, as a travelling Quaker. He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the great-the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's getting on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can discover, and has a spirit, that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience extolling it as the truest wisdom-and to His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous see him during the last seven minutes that -and in age he discovereth no symptom of his dinner is getting ready. Nature never cooling. This is that which I admire in him. ran up in her haste a more restless piece of I hate people who meet Time half-way. I workmanship than when she moulded this am for no compromise with that inevitable impetuous cousin and Art never turned out spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will take his a more elaborate orator than he can display swing.-It does me good, as I walk towards himself to be, upon this favourite topic of the street of my daily avocation, on some the advantages of quiet and contentedness fine May morning, to meet him marching in a

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