And yet those who see farther, may not all see so well. We do not blind our eyes with looking upon the sun in the heavens. We believe it to be there, but we find its light upon earth also; and we would lead humanity, if we could, out of misery and coldness into the shine of it. Pain might still be there; must be so, as long as we are mortal; For oft we still must weep, since we are human: but it should be pain for the sake of others, which is noble; not unnecessary pain inflicted by or upon them, which it is absurd not to remove. The very pains of mankind struggle towards pleasures; and such pains as are proper for them have this inevitable accompaniment of true humanity,-that they cannot but realise a certain gentleness of enjoyment. Thus the true bearer of pain would come round to us; and he would not grudge us a share of his burden, though in taking from his trouble it might diminish his pride. Pride is but a bad pleasure at the expense of others. The great object of humanity is to enrich everybody. If it is a task destined not to succeed, it is a good one from its very nature; and fulfils at least a glad destiny of its own. To look upon it austerely is in reality the reverse of austerity. It is only such an impatience of the want of pleasure as leads us to grudge it in others; and this impatience itself, if the sufferer knew how to use it, is but another impulse, in the general yearning, towards an equal wealth of enjoyment. But we shall be getting into other discussions. -The ground-work of all happiness is health. Take care of this ground; and the doleful imaginations that come to warn us against its abuse, will avoid it. Take care of this ground, and let as many glad imaginations throng to it as possible. Read the magical works of the poets, and they will come. If you doubt their existence, ask yourself whether you feel pleasure at the idea of them; whether you are moved into delicious smiles, or tears as delicious. If you are, the result is the same to you, whether they exist or not. It is not mere words to say, that he who goes through a rich man's park, and sees things in it which never bless the mental eyesight of the possessor, is richer than he. He is richer. More results of pleasure come home to him. The ground is actually more fertile to him: the place haunted with finer shapes. He has more servants to come at his call, and administer to him with full hands. Knowledge, sympathy, imagination, are all divining-rods, with which he discovers treasure. Let a painter go through the grounds, and he will see not only the general colours of green and brown, but their combinations and contrasts, and the modes in which they might again be combined and contrasted. He will also put figures in the landscape if there are none there, flocks and herds, or a solitary spectator, or Venus lying with her white body among the violets and primroses. Let a musician go through, and he will hear "differences discreet" in the notes of the birds and the lapsing of the water-fall. He will fancy a serenade of wind instruments in the open air at a lady's window, with a voice rising through it; or the horn of the hunter; or the musical cry of the hounds, Matched in mouth like bells, or a solitary voice in a bower, singing for an expected lover; or the chapel organ, waking up like the fountain of the winds. Let a poet go through the grounds, and he will heighten and increase all these sounds and images. He will bring the colours from heaven, and put an unearthly meaning into the voice. He will have stories of the sylvan inhabitants; will shift the population through infinite varieties; will put a sentiment upon every sight and sound; will be human, romantic, supernatural; will make all nature send tribute into that spot. Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures But not to go on quoting lines which are ever in people's mouths like a popular tune, take a passage from the same poet less familiar to cne's every-day recollections. It is in his Arcadian Masque, which was performed by some of the Derby family at their seat at Harefield near Uxbridge. The Genius of the place, meeting the noble shepherds and shepherdesses, accosts them :— Stay, gentle swains, for though in this disguise, And all my plants I save from nightly ill "Milton's Genius of the Grove," says Warton, "being a spirit sent from Jove, and commissioned from heaven to exercise a preternatural guardianship over the 'saplings tall,' to avert every noxious influence, and to visit every sprout with puissant words, and murmurs made to bless,' had the privilege, not indulged to gross mortals, of hearing the celestial syrens' harmony. This enjoyment," continues the critic, in the spirit of a true reader, luxuriating over a beautiful thought, "this enjoyment, which is highly imagined, was a relaxation from the duties of his peculiar charge, in the depth of midnight, when the world is locked up in sleep and silence."* The music of the spheres is the old Platonic or Pythagorean doctrine; but it remained for Milton to render it a particular midnight recreation to "purged ears," after the earthly toils of the day. And we partake of it with the Genius. We may say of the love of nature, what Shakspeare says of another love, that it Adds a precious seeing to the eye. And we may say also, upon the like principle, that it adds a precious hearing to the ear. This and imagination, which ever follows upon it, are the two purifiers of our sense, which rescue us from the deafening babble of common cares, and enable us to hear all the affectionate voices of earth and heaven. The starry orbs, lapsing about in their smooth and sparkling dance, sing to us. The brooks talk to us of solitude. The birds are the animal spirits of nature, carolling in the air, like a careless lass. The gentle gales, Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense Native perfumes; and whisper whence they stole The poets are called creators (Пoinтal, Makers) Full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not; the isle of elves and fairies, that chased the tide to and fro on the sea-shore; of coral-bones and the knell of sea-nymphs: of spirits dancing on the sands, and singing amidst the hushes of the wind; of Caliban, whose brute nature enchantment had made poetical; of Ariel, who lay in cowslip bells, and rode upon the bat; of Miranda, who wept when she saw Ferdinand work so hard, and begged him to let her help; telling him, I am your wife, if you will marry me; Such are the discoveries which the poets make for us; worlds, to which that of Columbus was but a handful of brute matter. America began to be richer for us the other day, when Humboldt came back and told us of its luxuriant and gigantic vegetation; of the myriads of shooting lights, which revel at evening in the southern sky; and of that grand constellation, at which Dante seems to have made so remark able a guess (Purgatorio, cant. i., v. 22). The natural warmth of the Mexican and Peruvian genius, set free from despotism, will soon do all the rest for it; awaken the sleeping riches of its eye-sight, and call forth the glad music of its affections. To return to our parks or landscapes, and what the poets can make of them. It is not improbable that Milton, by his Genius of the Grove at Harefield, covertly intended himself. He had been applied to by the Derbys to write some holiday poetry for them. He puts his consent in the mouth of the Genius, whose hand, he says, curls the ringlets of the grove, and who refreshes himself at midnight with listening to the music of the spheres; that is to say, whose hand confers new beauty on it by its touch, and who has pleasures in solitude far richer and loftier than those of mere patrician mortal. See how finely Ben Jonson enlivens his description of Penshurst, the family-seat of the Sydneys; now with the creations of classical mythology, and now with the rural manners of the time. Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers, Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make Sir Philip Sydney. The better cheeses, bring 'em; or else send Imagination enriches everything. A great library contains not only books, but The assembled souls of all that men held wise. Davenant. The moon is Homer's and Shakspeare's moon, as well as the one we look at. The sun comes out of his chamber in the east, with a sparkling eye, “rejoicing like a bridegroom." The commonest thing becomes like Aaron's rod, that budded. Pope called up the spirits of the Cabala to wait upon a lock of hair, and justly gave it the honours of a constellation; for he has hung it, sparkling for ever, in the eyes of posterity. A common meadow is a sorry thing to a ditcher or a coxcomb; but by the help of its dues from imagination and the love of nature, the grass brightens for us, the air soothes us, we feel as we did in the daisied hours of childhood. Its verdures, its sheep, its hedge-row elms,--all these, and all else which sight, and sound, and associations can give it, are made to furnish a treasure of pleasant thoughts. Even brick and mortar are vivified, as of old, at the harp of Orpheus. A metropolis becomes no longer a mere collection of houses or of trades. It puts on all the grandeur of its history, and its literature; its towers, and rivers; its art, and jewellery, and foreign wealth; its multitude of human beings all intent upon excitement, wise or yet to learn; the huge and sullen dignity of its canopy of smoke by day; the wide gleam upwards of its lighted lustre at night-time; and the noise of its many chariots, heard at the same hour, when the wind sets gently towards some quiet suburb. XXXII-DEATHS OF LITTLE CHILDREN. A GRECIAN philosopher being asked why he wept for the death of his son, since the sorrow was in vain, replied, "I weep on that account." And his answer became his wisdom. It is only for sophists to contend, that we, whose eyes contain the fountains of tears, need never give way to them. It would be unwise not to do so on some occasions. Sorrow unlocks them in her balmy moods. The first bursts may be bitter and overwhelming; but the soil on which they pour, would be worse without them. They refresh the fever of the soulthe dry misery which parches the countenance into furrows, and renders us liable to our most terrible "flesh-quakes." There are sorrows, it is true, so great, that to give them some of the ordinary vents is to run a hazard of being overthrown. These we must rather strengthen ourselves to resist, or F bow quietly and drily down, in order to let them pass over us, as the traveller does the wind of the desert. But where we feel that tears would relieve us, it is false philosophy to deny ourselves at least that first refreshment; and it is always false consolation to tell people that because they cannot help a thing, they are not to mind it. The true way is, to let them grapple with the unavoidable sorrow, and try to win it into gentleness by a reasonable yielding. There are griefs so gentle in their very nature, that it would be worse than false heroism to refuse them a tear. Of this kind are the deaths of infants. Particular circumstances may render it more or less advisable to indulge in grief for the loss of a little child; but, in general, parents should be no more advised to repress their first tears on such an occasion, than to repress their smiles towards a child surviving, or to indulge in any other sympathy. It is an appeal to the same gentle tenderness; and such appeals are never made in vain. The end of them is an acquittal from the harsher bonds of affliction-from the tying down of the spirit to one melancholy idea. of a child stand us instead of virtues that have died older. Children have not exercised the voluntary offices of friendship; they have not chosen to be kind and good to us; nor stood by us, from conscious will, in the hour of adversity. But they have shared their pleasures and pains with us as well as they could; the interchange of good offices between us has, of necessity, been less mingled with the troubles of the world; the sorrow arising from their death is the only one which we can associate with their memories. These are happy thoughts that cannot die. Our loss may always render them pensive; but they will not always be painful. It is a part of the benignity of Nature that pain does not survive like pleasure, at any time, much less where the cause of it is an innocent one. The smile will remain reflected by memory, as the moon reflects the light upon us when the sun has gone into heaven. When writers like ourselves quarrel with earthly pain (we mean writers of the same intentions, without implying, of course, anything about abilities or otherwise), they are misunderstood if they are supposed to quarrel with pains of every sort. This would be idle and effeminate. They do not pretend, indeed, that humanity might not wish, if it could, to be entirely free from pain; for it endeavours, at all times, to turn pain into pleasure or at least to set off the one with the other, to make the former a zest and the latter a refreshment. The most unaffected dignity of suffering does this, and, if wise, acknowledges it. The greatest benevolence towards others, the most unselfish relish of their pleasures, even at its own expense, does but look to increasing the general stock of happiness, though content, if it could, to have its identity swallowed up in that splendid contemplation. We are far from meaning that this is to be called selfishness. We are far, indeed, from thinking so, or of so confounding words. But neither is it to be It is the nature of tears of this kind, however strongly they may gush forth, to run into quiet waters at last. We cannot easily, for the whole course of our lives, think with pain of any good and kind person whom we have lost. It is the divine nature of their qualities to conquer pain and death itself; to turn the memory of them into pleasure; to survive with a placid aspect in our imaginations. We are writing at this moment just opposite a spot which contains the grave of one inexpressibly dear to us. We see from our window the trees about it, and the church spire. The green fields lie around. The clouds are travelling over-head, alternately taking away the sunshine and restoring it. The vernal winds, piping of the flowery summer-time, are nevertheless calling to mind the far-distant and dangerous ocean, which the heart that lies in called pain when most unselfish, if disinterestthat grave had many reasons to think of. And edness be truly understood. The pain that is yet the sight of this spot does not give us pain. in it softens into pleasure, as the darker hue of So far from it, it is the existence of that grave the rainbow melts into the brighter. Yet even which doubles every charm of the spot; which if a harsher line is to be drawn between the links the pleasures of our childhood and man- pain and pleasure of the most unselfish mind hood together; which puts a hushing tender- (and ill-health, for instance, may draw it), we ness in the winds, and a patient joy upon the should not quarrel with it if it contributed to landscape; which seems to unite heaven and the general mass of comfort, and were of a earth, mortality and immortality, the grass of nature which general kindliness could not avoid. the tomb and the grass of the green field; and Made as we are, there are certain pains withgives a more maternal aspect to the whole out which it would be difficult to conceive kindness of nature. It does not hinder gaiety certain great and overbalancing pleasures. itself. Happiness was what its tenant, through We may conceive it possible for beings to be all her troubles, would have diffused. To made entirely happy; but in our composition diffuse happiness and to enjoy it, is not only something of pain seems to be a necessary incarrying on her wishes, but realising her hopes; gredient, in order that the materials may turn and gaiety, freed from its only pollutions, malig- to as fine account as possible, though our clay, nity and want of sympathy, is but a child play- in the course of ages and experience, may be ing about the knees of its mother. refined more and more. We may get rid of the worst earth, though not of earth itself. The remembered innocence and endearments Now the liability to the loss of childrenor rather what renders us sensible of it, the occasional loss itself-seems to be one of these necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. We do not mean that every one must lose one of his children in order to enjoy the rest; or that every individual loss afflicts us in the same proportion. We allude to the deaths of infants in general. These might be as few as we could render them. But if none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or woman secured; and it will easily be conceived what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose its continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant, are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always, and they furnish their neighbours with the same idea. The other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence. Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and our hopes. They are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination. Lastly, "Of these are the kingdom of heaven." Whereever there is a province of that benevolent and all-accessible empire, whether on earth or elsewhere, such are the gentle spirits that must inhabit it. To such simplicity, or the resemblance of it, must they come. Such must be the ready confidence of their hearts, and creativeness of their fancy. And so ignorant must they be of the "knowledge of good and evil," losing their discernment of that selfcreated trouble, by enjoying the garden before them, and not being ashamed of what is kindly and innocent. XXXIII. POETICAL ANOMALIES OF SHAPE. Ir is not one of the least instances of the force of habit to see how poetry and mythology can reconcile us to shapes, or rather combinations of shape, unlike anything in nature. The dog-headed deities of the Egyptians were doubtless not so monstrous in their eyes as in "I sighed," says old Captain Dalton, "when I envied you the two bonnie children; but I sigh not now to call either the monk or the soldier mine own!"-Monastery, vol, iit., p. 341. ours. The Centaurs of the Greeks, as Ovid has shown us, could be imagined possessing beauty enough for a human love story; and our imaginations find nothing at all monstrous in the idea of an angel, though it partakes of the nature of the bird. The angel, it is true, is the least departure from humanity. Its wings are not an alteration of the human shape, but an addition to it. Yet, leaving a more awful wonder out of the question, we should be startled to find pinions growing out of the shoulder-blades of a child; and we should wait with anxiety to see of what nature the pinions were, till we became reconciled to them. If they turned out to be ribbed and webbed, like those of the imaginary dragon, conceive the horror! If, on the other hand, they became feathers, and tapered off, like those of a gigantic bird, comprising also grace and splendour, as well as the power of flight, we can easily fancy ourselves reconciled to them. And yet again, on the other hand, the flying women, described in the Adventures of Peter Wilkins, do not shock us, though their wings partake of the ribbed and webbed nature, and not at all of the feathered. We admire Peter's gentle and beautiful bride, notwithstanding the phenomenon of the graundee, its light whalebone-like intersections, and its power of dropping about her like drapery. It even becomes a matter of pleasant curiosity. We find it not at all in the way. We can readily apprehend the delight he felt at possessing a creature so kind and sensitive; and can sympathise with him in the happiness of that bridal evening, equally removed from prudery and grossness, which he describes with a mixture of sentiment and voluptuousness beyond all the bridals we ever read. To imagine anything like a sympathy of this kind, it is of course necessary that the difference of form should consist in addition, and not in alteration. But the un-angel-like texture of the flying apparatus of fair Youwarkee (such, if we remember, is her name) helps to show us the main reason why we are able to receive pleasure from the histories of creatures only half-human. The habit of reading prevents the first shock; but we are reconciled in proportion to their possession of what we are pleased to call human qualities. Kindness is the great elevator. The Centaurs may have killed all the Lapithæ, and shown considerable generalship to boot, without reconciling us to the brute part of them; but the brutality melts away before the story of their two lovers in Ovid. Drunkenness and rapine made beasts of them;-sentiment makes human beings. Polyphemus in Homer is a shocking monster, not because he has only one eye, but because he murders and eats our fellow-creatures. But in Theocritus, where he is Galatea's lover, and sits hopelessly lamenting his passion, we only pity him. His deformity even increases our |