what we are; to be different, and yet the same. Hypochondria may do this; a melancholy imagination, or a strong imagination of any sort, may do it for a time; but it will never be done generally, and nature never intended it should. A decaying dead body is no more the real human being, than a watch, stopped and mutilated, is a time-piece, or cold water warm, or a numb finger in the same state of sensation as the one next it, or any one modification of being the same as another. We may pitch ourselves by imagination into this state of being; but it is ourselves, modified by our present totalities and sensation, that we do pitch there. What we may be otherwise, is another thing. The melancholy imagination may give it melancholy fancies; the livelier one, if it pleases, may suppose it a state of exquisite dissolution. The philosopher sees in it nothing but a contradiction to the life by which we judge of it, and a dissolution of the compounds which held us together. There is one thing alone in such gloomy beggings of a question, which throws them back upon the prescriptions of wisdom, and prevents them from becoming general. They are always accompanied by ill-health. We do not mean a breaking up of the frame, or that very road to death, which may be a kindly and cheerful one, illumined by the sunset, as youth was by the dawn but a polluted and artificial state of blood, or an insufficient vigour of existence,that state, in short, which is an exception to the general condition of humanity, and acts like the proof of a rule to the intentions of Nature. For these are so kind, that no mistake in the world, not even vice itself, is so sure to confuse a man's sensations and render them melancholy, as ill-health. Nature seems to say to us, "Be, above all things, as natural as you can be, as much as possible in the best fashion of the mould in which I cast you, and you shall be happy." Nor is this unlucky for virtue, but most lucky: for it takes away its pride, and leaves it its cheerfulness. Real vice will soon be found to be real unhealthiness: nor could society have a better guide to the reformation of its moral systems, than by making them as compatible as possible with every healthy impulse. But why, it may be asked, are we not all healthy? It is impossible to say: but this is certain, that the oftener a man asks himself that question, the more intimations he has that he is to try and get out of the tendency to ask them. We may live elsewhere: we may be compounded over again, and receive a new consciousness here ;--a guess which, if it seems dreary at first, might lead us to make a heaven of the earth we live in, even for our own sakes hereafter. But at all events, put, as Jupiter says in the fable, your shoulder to the wheel; and put it as cheerfully as you can. The way that Andrea de Basso should have set about reforming the Ferrarese beauties, would have been to show them, that their enjoyments

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were hurtful in proportion as they were extravagant, and less than they might be, in proportion as they were in bad taste. But to ask the healthy to be hypochondriacal: the beautiful to think gratuitously of ugliness; and the giddy, much less the wise, to desire to be angels in heaven, by representing God as a cruel and eternal punisher, is what never could, and never ought to have, a lasting effect on humanity.

It has been well observed, that life is a series of present sensations. It might be added,that the consciousness of the present moment is one of the strongest of those sensations. Still this consciousness is a series, not a line; a variety with intervals, not a continuity and a haunting. If it were, it would be unhealthy: if it were unhealthy, it would be melancholy; if it were melancholy, the evident system upon which nature acts would be different. Thus it is impossible that men should be finally led by gloomy, and not by pleasant doctrines.

When the Ferrarese ladies read the poem of Andrea de Basso, it occupied the series of their sensations for a little while, more or less according to their thoughtfulness, and more or less, even then, according to their unhealthiness. The power of voluntary thought is proportioned to the state of the health. In a little time, the Ferrarese, being like other multitudes, and even gayer, would turn to their usual reflections and enjoyments, as they accordingly did. About that period Ariosto was born. He rose to vindicate the charity and good-will of nature; and put forth more real wisdom, truth, and even piety, in his willing enjoyment of the creation, than all the monks in Ferrara could have mustered together for centuries.

To conclude, Andrea de Basso mistook his own self, as well as the means of instructing his callous beauty. We can imagine her disagreeable enough. There are few things more oppressive to the heart, than the want of feeling in those whose appearance leads others to feel intensely-the sight of beauty sacrificing its own real comfort as well as ours, by a heartless and indiscriminate love of admiration from young and old, from the gross and the refined, the wise and the foolish, the goodnatured and the ill-natured, the happy-making and the vicious. If Andrea de Basso's heroine was one of this stamp, we can imagine her to have irritated his best feelings, as well as his more equivocal. We hope she was not merely a giddy creature, who had not quite patience enough with her confessor. Alfred the Great, when a youth, was accustomed to turn a deaf ear to the didactics of his holy kinsman St. Neot; for which, says the worthy Bishop Asser, who was nevertheless a great admirer of the king, and wrote his life, all those troubles were afterwards brought upon him and his kingdom. Be this as it may, and supposing

the Ferrarese beauty to have been an unfeeling one, the poet was not aware, while triumphing over her folly, and endeavouring to enjoy the thought of her torments, that he was confounding the sentiment of the thing with its reverse, and doing his best to make himself a worse and more hard-hearted person than she. His efforts to induce us to think lightly of the most beautiful things in the external world, by showing us that they will not always be what they are that a smooth and graceful limb will not for ever be the saine smooth and graceful limb, nor an eye an eye, nor an apple an apple, are not as wise as they are poetical. To have said that the limb, unless admired with sentiment as well as with ordinary admiration, is a common-place thing to what it might be, and that there is more beauty in it than the lady supposed, would have been good. To make nothing of it, because she did not make as much as she could, is unwise. But above all, to consign her to eternal punishment in the next world, because she gave rise to a series of fugitive evils in this-granting even that she, and not her wrong education, was the cause of them-is one of those idle worryings of himself and others, which only perplex further what they cannot explain, and have at last fairly sickened the world into a sense of their unhealthiness.

What then remains of the poetical denouncements of Andrea de Basso? Why the only thing which ought to remain, and which when left to itself retains nothing but its pleasuretheir poetry. When Dante and Milton shall cease to have any effect as religious dogmatisers, they will still be the mythological poets of one system of belief, as Homer is of another. So immortal is pleasure, and so surely does it escape out of the throng of its contradictions.

sweet. "What then is the use of attempting to make them agree?" Why, we may try to make them agree upon certain general modes of thinking and means of pleasure :—we may colour their existence in the gross, though we must leave the particular shades to come out by themselves. We may enrich their stock of ideas, though we cannot control the items of the expenditure.

CANNOT.

"But what if we cannot do even this?" The question is answered by experience. Whole nations and ages have already been altered in their modes of thinking. Even if it were otherwise, the endeavour is itself one of the varieties; one of the modes of opinion and means of pleasure. Besides CANNOT is the motto neither of knowledge nor humility. There is more of pride, and ignorance, and despair, in it, than of the modesty of wisdom. It would settle not only the past but the future; and it would settle the future, merely because the past has not been influenced by those that use it.

Who are these men that measure futurity by the shadow of their own littleness? It is as if the loose stones lying about a foundation were to say, "You can build no higher than our heads."

SUPERSTITION AND DOCTRINE.

Superstition attempts to settle everything by assertion; which never did do, and never will. And like all assertors, even well-inclined ones, it shows its feebleness in anger and threatening. It commands us to take its problems for granted, on pain of being tied up to a triangle. Then come its advocates, and assert that this mode of treatment is proper and logical which is making bad worse. The worst of all is, that this is the way in which the finest doctrines in the world are obstructed. They are like an excellent child, making the Grand Tour with a foolish overbearing tutor. The tutor runs a chance of spoiling the child, and makes their presence disagreeable whereever they go, except to their tradesmen. Let us hope the child has done with his tutor.

SECOND THOUGHT ON THE VARIETY OF THE COLOURS OF PERCEPTION.

We may gather from what we read of diseased imaginations, how much our perceptions depend upon the modification of our being. We see how personal and inexperienced we are when we determine that such and such ideas must take place under other circumstances, and such and such truths be always indisputable. Pleasure must always be pleasure, and pain be pain, because these are only names

for certain results. But the results themselves will be pleasureable or painful, according to what they act upon. A man in health becomes

sickly; he has a fever, is light-headed, is hypochondriacal. His ideas are deranged, or re-arrange themselves; and a set of new perceptions, and colourings of his existence, take place, as in a kaleidoscope when we shake it. The conclusion is, that every alteration of our physical particles, or of whatever else we are compounded with, produces a different set of perceptions and sensations. What we call health of body and mind is the fittest state of our composition upon earth: but the state of perception which is sickly to our state of existence may be healthy to another.

DEATH.

Of all impositions on the public, the greatest seems to be death. It resembles the threatening faces on each side the Treasury. Or rather, it is a necessary bar to our tendency to move forward. Nature sends us out of her hand with such an impetus towards increase of enjoyment, that something is obliged to be set at the end of the avenue we are in, to moderate our bias, and make us enjoy the present being. Death serves to make us think, not of itself, but of what is about us.

CHILDHOOD AND KNOWLEDGE.

When children are in good health and temper, they have a sense of existence which seems too exquisite to last. It is made up of clearness of blood, freshness of perception, and trustingness of heart. We remember the time, when the green rails along a set of suburb gardens used to fill us with a series of holiday and rural sensations perfectly intoxicating. According to the state of our health, we have sunny glimpses of this feeling still; to say nothing of many other pleasures, which have paid us for many pains. The best time to catch them is early in the morning, at sunrise, out in the country. And we will here add, that life never perhaps feels such a return of fresh and young feeling upon it, as in early rising on a fine morning, whether in country or town. The healthiness of it, the quiet, the consciousness of having done a sort of young action (not to add a wise one), and the sense of power it gives you over the coming day, produce a mixture of buoyancy and self-possession, in which a sick man must not despair of, because he does not feel it the first morning. But oven this reform should be adopted by degrees. The best way to recommend it is to begin with allowing fair play to the other side of the question. (See the article upon Getting up on Cold Mornings.) To return to our main point. After childhood comes a knowledge of evil, or a sophisticate and unhealthy mode of life; or one produces the other, and both are embittered. Everything tells us to get back to a state of childhood-pain, pleasure, imagination, reason, passion, natural affection or piety, the better part of religion. If know

ledge is supposed to be incompatible with it, knowledge would sacrifice herself, if necessary, to the same cause, for she also tells us to do so. But as a little knowledge first leads us away from happiness, so a greater knowledge may be destined to bring us back into a finer region of it.

KNOWLEDGE AND UNHAPPINESS.

It is not knowledge that makes us unhappy as we grow up, but the knowledge of unhappiness. Yet as unhappiness existed when we knew it not, it becomes us all to be acquainted with it, that we may all have the chance of bettering the condition of our species. Who would say to himself, "I would be happy, though all my fellow-creatures were miserable!" Knowledge. must heal what it wounds, and extend the happiness which it has suspended. It must do by our comfort as a friend may do by one's books; enrich it with its comments. One man grows up and gets unhealthy without knowledge; another, with it. The former suffers and does not know why. He is unhappy, and he sees unhappiness, but he can do nothing for himself or others. The latter suffers and discovers why. He suffers even more because he knows more; but he learns also how to diminish suffering in others. He learns too to apply his knowledge to his own case; and he sees, that as he himself suffers from the world's want of knowledge, so the progress of knowledge would take away the world's sufferings and his own. The efforts to this end worry him perhaps, and make him sickly; upon which, thinking is pronounced to be injurious to health. And it may be so under these circumstances. What then, if it betters the health of the many? But thinking may also teach him how to be healthier. A game of cricket on a green may do for him what no want of thought would have done: while on the other hand, if he shows a want of thought upon these points, the inference is easy: he is not so thinking a man as you took him for. Addison should have got on horseback, instead of walking up and down a room in his house, with a bottle of wine at each end of it.

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speare divided his time between town and country, and in the latter part of his life, built, and planted, and petted his daughter Susanna. Solomon in his old age played the Anacreon; and with Milton's leave," his wisest heart" was not so much out in this matter, as when his royal impatience induced him to say that everything was vanity.

CHILDHOOD-OLD AGE-OUR DESTINY.

There appears to be something in the com position of humanity like what we have observed in that of music. The musician's first thought is apt to be his finest : he must carry it on, and make a second part to his air; and he becomes inferior. Nature in like manner

(if we may speak it without profaneness) appears to succeed best in making childhood and youth. The symphony is a little perturbed; but in what a sprightly manner the air sets off! What purity! What grace! What touching simplicity! Then comes sin, or the notion of it, and "breaks the fair music." Well did a wiser than the "wisest heart" bid us try and continue children. But there are foolish as well as wise children, and it is a special mark of the former, whether little or grown, to affect manhood, and to confound it with cunning and violence. Do men die, in order that life and its freshness may be as often and as multitudinously renewed as possible? Or do children grow old, that our consciousness may attain to some better mode of being through a rough path? Superstition answers only to perplex us, and make us partial. Nature answers nothing. But nature's calm and resolute silence tells us at once to hope for the future, and to do our best to enjoy the present. What if it is the aim of her workmanship to produce self-moving instruments, that may carry forward their own good? "A modest thought," you will say. Yet it is more allied to some doctrines celebrated for their humility, than you may suppose. Vanity, in speculations earnest and affectionate, is a charge to be made only by vanity. What has it to do with them?

ENDEAVOUR.

Either this world (to use the style of Marcus Antoninus) is meant to be what it is, or it is not. If it is not, then our endeavours to render it otherwise are right :-if it is, then we must be as we are, and seek excitement through the same means, and our endeavours are still right. In either case, endeavour is good and useful; but in one of them, the want of it must be a mistake.

GOOD AND EVIL.

Nature is justified (to speak humanly) in the ordinary state of the world, granting it is never to be made better, because the sum of good, upon the whole, is greater than that of evil. For in the list of goods we are not only to rank all the more obvious pleasures which we agree to call such, but much that is ranked under the head of mere excitement, taking hope for the ground of it, and action for the means. But we have no right on that account, to abstain from endeavouring to better the condition of our species, were it only for the sake of individual suffering. Nature, who is infinite, has a right to act in the gross. Nothing but an infinite suffering should make her stop; and that should make her stop, were the individual who infinitely suffered the only inhabitant of his hell. Heaven and earth should petition to be abolished, rather than that one such monstrosity should exist: it is the absurdest as well as most impious of all the dreams of fear. To suppose

that a Divine Being can sympathise with our happiness, is to suppose that he can sympathise with our misery; but to suppose that he can sympathise with misery, and yet suffer infinite misery to exist, rather than put an end to misery and happiness together, is to contradict his sympathy with happiness, and to make him prefer a positive evil to a negative one, the existence of torment to the cessation of feeling. As nature therefore, if considered at all, must be considered as regulated in her operations, though infinite, we must look to fugitive suffering, as nature must guard against permanent; she carves out our work for us in the gross : we must attend to it in the detail. To leave every thing to her, would be to settle into another mode of existence, or stagnate into death. If it be said that she will take care of us at all events, we answer, first, that she does not do so in the ordinary details of life, neither earns our food for us, nor washes our bodies, nor writes our books; secondly, that of things useful-looking and uncertain, she incites us to know the profit and probability; and thirdly (as we have hinted in a previous observation), that not knowing how far we may carry on the impulse of improvement, towards which she has given us a bias, it becomes us on every ground, both of ignorance and wisdom, to try.

DEGRADING IDEAS OF DEITY.

The superstitious, in their contradictory representations of God, call him virtuous and benevolent out of the same passion of fear as induces them to make him such a tyrant. They think they shall be damned if they do not believe him the tyrant he is described :—they think they shall be damned also, if they do not gratuitously ascribe to him the virtues incompatible with damnation. Being so unworthy of praise, they think he will be particularly angry at not being praised. They shudder to think themselves better; and hasten to make amends for it, by declaring themselves as worthless as he is worthy.

GREAT DISTINCTION TO BE MADE IN BIGOTS.

There are two sorts of religious bigots, the unhealthy and the unfeeling. The fear of the former is mixed with humanity, and they never succeed in thinking themselves favourites of God, but their sense of security is embittered, by aversions which they dare not own to themselves, and terror for the fate of those who are not so lucky. The unfeeling bigot is a mere unimaginative animal, whose thoughts are confined to the snugness of his kennel, and who would have a good one in the next world as well as in this. He secures a place in heaven as he does in the Manchester coach. mind who suffers outside, woman or child. We once found ourselves by accident on board a Margate hoy, which professed to "sail by Divine Providence." Walking about the deck

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at night to get rid of the chillness which would occasionally visit our devotions to the starry heavens and the sparkling sea, our foot came in contact with something white, which was lying gathered up in a heap. Upon stooping down, we found it to be a woman. The methodists had secured all the beds below, and were not to be disturbed.

SUPERSTITION THE FLATTERER OF REASON.

We are far from thinking that reason can settle everything. We no more think so, than that our eyesight can see into all existence. But it does not follow, that we are to take for granted the extremest contradictions of reason. Why should we? We do not even think well enough of reason to do so. For here is one of the secrets of superstition. It is so angry at reason for not being able to settle everything, that it runs in despair into the arms of irrationality.

GOOD IN THINGS EVIL.

"God Almighty!

There is a soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out!"

So, with equal wisdom and good-nature, does Shakspeare make one of his characters exclaim. Suffering gives strength to sympathy. Hate of the particular may have a foundation in love for the general. The lowest and most wilful vice may plunge deeper, out of a regret of virtue. Even in envy may be discerned something of an instinct of justice, something of a wish to see fair play, and things on a level." But there is still a residuum of evil, of which we should all wish to get rid."-Well then, let us try.

ARTIFICE OF EXAGGERATED COMPLAINT.

Disappointment likes to make out bad to be worse, in order to relieve the gnawing of its actual wound. It would confuse the limits of its pain; and by extending it too far, try to make itself uncertain how far it reached.

Custom is seen more in what we bear than what we enjoy. And yet a pain long borne so fits itself to our shoulders, that we do not miss even that without disquietude. The novelty of the sensation startles us. Montaigne, like our modern beaux, was uneasy when he did not feel himself braced up in his clothing. Prisoners have been known to wish to go back to their prisons: invalids have missed the accompaniment of a gun-shot wound; and the world is angry with reformers and innovators, not because it is in the right, but because it is accustomed to be in the wrong. This is a good thing, and shows the indestructible tendency of nature to forego its troubles. But then reformers and innovators must arise upon that very ground. To quarrel with them upon a principle of avowed spleen, is candid, and has

a self-knowledge in it. But to resent them as impertinent or effeminates is at bottom to quarrel with the principle of one's own patience, and to set the fear of moving above the courage of it.

ADVICE.

It has been well observed, that advice is not disliked because it is advice; but because so few people know how to give it. Yet there are people vain enough to hate it in proportion to its very agreeableness.

HAPPINESS, HOW WE FOREGO IT.

By the same reason for which we call this earth a vale of tears, we might call heaven, when we got there, a hill of sighs; for upon the principle of an endless progression of beatitude, we might find a still better heaven promised us, and this would be enough to make us dissatisfied with the one in possession. Suppose that we have previously existed in the planet Mars; that there are no fields or trees there, and that we nevertheless could imagine them, and were in the habit of anticipating their delight in the next world. Suppose that there was no such thing as a stream of air,—as a wind fanning one's face for a summer's day. What a romantic thing to fancy! What a beatitude to anticipate! Suppose, above all, that there was no such thing as love. Words would be lost in anticipating that. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," &c. Yet when we got to this heaven of green fields and fresh airs, we might take little notice of either for want of something more; and even love we might contrive to spoil pretty odiously.

LII. THE HAMADRYAD*.

AN Assyrian, of the name of Rhæcus, observing a fine old oak-tree ready to fall with age, ordered it to be propped up. He was continuing his way through the solitary skirts of the place, when a female of more than human beauty appeared before him, with gladness in her eyes. "Rhæcus," said she, "I am the Nymph of the tree which you have saved from perishing. My life is, of course, implicated in its own. But for you, my existence must have terminated; but for you, the sap would have ceased to flow through its boughs, and the godlike essence I received from it to animate these veins. No more should I have felt the wind in my hair, the sun upon my cheeks, or the balmy rain upon my body. Now I shall feel them many years to come. Many years also will your fellow-creatures sit under my shade, and hear the benignity of my whispers, and repay me with their honey and their thanks. Ask what I can give you, Rhæcus, and you shall have it."

* See the Scholiast upon Apollonius Rhodius, or the Mythology of Natalis Comes.