has the power to tranquillize our feelings when scarce any thing else could afford us relief. Whatever the tumults which rend our. bosoms, the face of nature is for ever serene, and we feel that her unfading beauty is the smile of God. In it we learn that trouble and disquiet are of our little sphere, of time, and of change, tranquillity and peace are of the universe, of eternity.

Poets differ from other men in their greater susceptibility to the beauties of nature more than in any thing else. Byron in his boyhood would lie for hours motionless and apparently entranced upon a tombstone which commanded an extensive and beautiful prospect. And no one can ever have read the exquisite description of Paradise in Milton's great poem, without being impressed with the conviction, that he, who in blindness could give such gorgeous pictures of the glories of the external world, must have had a soul most tenderly alive to the beautiful in nature before that awful calamity befel him, which he has so pathetically lamented.

"Thus with the year

Seasons return, but not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn,

Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark.”

They

As the love of nature is universal, so the pictures of it, which the poet spreads before the imagination, are universally pleasing. are pleasing, because as works of art, in the same manner as painting and statuary, they present an image more or less perfect, of that which we are formed to love and admire. This pleasure is increased by the additional one of sympathy with the feeling, which the true poet always infuses into his descriptions. It is by appealing to this universal love of nature, that Thompson's Seasons, a work whose poetic merit is by no means high, has been one of the most popular books in the language.

In Milton, as we have seen, this love of nature amounted to a passion. It is strikingly exhibited in some of his lighter pieces, in his L'Allegro for instance, which, in the language of an able critic, differs from other poems as the otto of roses differs from the mere essence. In that little poem, his description of morning, for tranquil and sparkling beauty, has never been surpassed.

"To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweetbrier, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine:

While the cock with lively din
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the barn-door,
Stoutly struts his dames before;

Oft list'ning how the hounds and horn
Cheerly rouse the slumb'ring morn,
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill:
Some time walking not unseen

By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green,
Right against the eastern gate,

Where the great Sun begins his state,
Rob'd in flames and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight,
While the plowman near at hand
Whistles o'er the furrow'd land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.

Strait mine eye hath caught new pleasures,
Whilst the landskip round it measures;

Russet lawns, and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The lab'ring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide.
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighb'ring eyes."

Such was the sensibility of that great man to the gentle, every day beauties of rural life, and it fills us with astonishment at the universality of his genius, which could turn from this visible, diurnal sphere, and create in the unfathomable regions of perpetual darkness, the sublimely terrific abstractions of Sin and Death.

In the more ardent temperament of Byron, this love of nature assumed a still more intense and passionate form. His description of the thunder storm by night among the Alps and over the lake of Geneva, has perhaps, for thrilling intensity of feeling, never been equalled.

"All heaven and earth are still-though not in sleep, But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;

And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep :-
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain-coast,
All is concentred in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense

Of that which is of all Creator and defence.

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Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt

In solitude, where we are least alone;

A truth, which through our being then doth melt, And purifies from self: it is a tone,

The soul and source of music, which makes known Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm,

Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,

Binding all things with beauty;-'t would disarm The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.

"The sky is changed!—and such a change! Oh night, And storm, and darkness, ye are wonderous strong, Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light Of a dark eye in woman! Far along, From peak to peak, the rattling crags among Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud, But every mountain now hath found a tongue, And Jura answers, through her misty shroud, Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

"And this is in the night-most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be