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cies, is so deficient in euphony, and so large a part of its vocabulary is debased by association, that it always requires strong or deep pathos, beautiful images, profound thought, rapid and striking interest, or much artifice in composition; something, in short, to withdraw the attention from the coarseness of the vehicle. We cannot emulate the simplicity of the Greeks or the Italians. The poet, indeed, who can and dare, may be austere; but austerity and simplicity are different things. Simplicity is never, austerity is always, conscious of itself. The Sunday habit of a modest country girl is simple-the regulation dress of a nunnery is meant to be austere. Simplicity does not seek what it feels no need of—Austerity rejects what it judges unfit.

But neither simplicity nor austerity are necessarily poetical. The simple must be beautiful, the austere must be great, or they have no place in genuine poetry. A daisy is simple, a turnip still simpler, yet the former belongs to the poetry of Nature, the latter to her most utilitarian prose.

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Among the controversies of the day, not the least important is that respecting the song of the Nightingale. It is debated whether the notes

of this bird are of a joyous or a melancholy expression. He who has spoken so decisively of "the merry Nightingale," must forgive my somewhat unfilial inclination toward the elder and more common opinion. No doubt the sensations of the bird while singing are pleasurable, but the question is, What is the feeling which its song, considered as a succession of sounds produced by an instrument, is calculated to carry to a human listener? When we speak of a pathetic strain of music, we do not mean that either the fiddler or his fiddle are unhappy, but that the tones or intervals of the air are such as the mind associates with tearful sympathies. At the same time, I utterly deny that the voice of philomel expresses present pain. I could never have imagined that the pretty creature "sets her breast against a thorn," and could not have perpetrated the diabolical story of Terens. In fact, nature is very little obliged to the heathen mythology. The constant anthropomorphism of the Greek religion sorely perplexed the ancient conceptions of natural beauty. A river is turned into a god, who is still too much of a river to be quite a god. It is a statue of ice in a continual state of liquefaction.

XVII.

Page 56.

Agony of prayer.

I know not who first used this expression, nor at what time it entered into my mind. It occurs where one should hardly expect to find itin Darwin's Botanic Garden; but I had never read the "Botanic Garden" at the time that I wrote this epitaph. Doubtless I have read the phrase elsewhere. It could not be of Darwin's invention.

XVIII.

Page 56, last line.

The marriage of pure minds.

Let me not to the marriage of pure minds

Admit impediments.

Shakspeare's Sonnets,

XIX.

Page 57. To the Nautilus.

"There is a kind of Nautilus, called by Linnæus Argonauta, whose shell has but one cell; of this animal Pliny affirms, that having exonerated its shell by throwing out the water, it swims upon the surface, extending a web of wonderful tenuity, and bending back two of its arms, and, rowing with the rest, makes a sail, and at length receiving the water, dives again." Pliny, IX., 29.

Linnæus adds to his description of this animal, that, like the crab Diogenes or Bernhard, it occupies a house not its own, as it is not connected to its shell, and is therefore foreign to it. Who could have given credit to this if it had not been attested by so many, who have with their own eyes seen this Argonauta in the act of sailing.” Syst. Nat. p. 1161.

"The Nautilus, properly so named by Linnæus, has a shell consisting of many chambers, of which cups are made in the East with beautiful painting and carving on the mother-pearl. The animal is said to inhabit only the uppermost or open chamber which is larger than the rest, and that the rest remain empty, except that the siphunculus, which communicates from one to the other of them, is filled with an appendage of the animal like a gut or string. Mr. Hook in his Philos. Exper. p. 306, imagines this to be a dilatable or compressible tube, like the air-bladders of fish, and that by contracting or permitting it to expand, it renders its shell buoyant or the contrary.”—Darwin.

It is not to be supposed that the Nautilus defies the storm. It only sails in fair weather and light breezes, and if the sea become turbulent, or any interruption threaten to cut short its voyage of pleasure, it dives directly. I recollect to have seen, in manuscript, a most beautiful copy of verses, founded on this habit of the Nautilus. Had they been in print, mine should never have appeared. The same may be said of the lines" to certain gold fishes." A real poet, among many strains of "higher mood,” of which he deems the world unworthy, has an exquisite little piece on those beautiful creatures, in which he has exhibited a more than pictorial power of language. It is saying far too little to say, that he makes you see the gold-fish-that they flash, in all their effulgence of hue, and complicity of motion, “on that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." He makes you feel as if you were a gold fish yourself.

X

It is said, that the gold fish (Cyprinus Auratus of Linnæus) was originally confined to a little lake of China.

XX.

Page 61. Leonard and Susan.

This tale, which was first published in Blackwood's Magazine, was intended to form part of a series of narrative and reflective pieces, which should have been intitled "Lucubrations of an Old Bachelor." Leonard was to have been an old man in my, i. e. the Old Bachelor's childhood. This, of course, throws the supposed date of the incidents at least a century back, and may obviate the charge of exaggeration which has been alleged against my description of prison sufferings. A debtor's gaol, however, is still, I suspect, pretty much what it always has been a place of low dissipation or unprincipled luxury for the dishonest; of ruin, and misery, and debasement to the unfortunate.

Blessed be the memory of that benevolent jurist who struggled so manfully against the barbarism of antichristian ordinances ! May the softest air of Paradise calm and heal the phrenzy which crossed him in an evil hour; and if separated spirits have any perception of what passes in the world they have left, may his spirit be comforted in seeing the good work which he well begun, perfected to a good end. Our Judges are very fond of asserting that "Christianity is parcel of the law" it will be more to the purpose when we can truly say that the law is parcel of christianity.

I wish that future ages-on the very improbable supposition that this trifle should exist in a future age-may think the representation of an election a caricature.

No reflection is meant upon Nabobs in general. "Wherever the carcase is, there will the vultures be gathered together." Wherever there is a new way opened to riches, there will be a concourse of those who own no God but Mammon; a Fiend compared to whom Juggernaut is merciful, and Cotytto is pure. But there will also be many who seek wealth as the means of doing good, and many such have returned from the shores of Hindostan. Such characters as my Nabob were probably more common when the East first became the scene of British enterprize than at present. India is now visited by men of better educa

tion, more refined habits, more philosophic minds; and moreover, the press---Heaven's blessing upon it !---forbids any man to be very overtly wicked in any quarter of the globe, who wishes to come back and enjoy his gettings in England.

It is hardly worth while to mention that most of the lugubrious love ditties in this volume were conceived in the character of the lovelorn "old bachelor." For what many will deem their silly "mock-platonism," and "querulous egotism," I am only dramatically answerable. I, does not always mean myself.

XXI.
Page 74.

The chaste and consecrated snow

On Dian's bosom.

Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,

Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow

That lies on Dian's lap.

Shakspeare's Timon of Athens.

XXII.

Page 85.

And where the mighty Banian's echoing shade.

The fig tree, not that kind for fruit renown'd,
But such as at this time to Indians known,

In Malabar or Deccan spreads her arms,
Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade

High overarched, with echoing walls between.

Paradise Lost, b. 9.

The palace is Aladdin's. It is needless to mention how much my description is indebted to Thalaba. The imagination of Southey is as thoroughly Arabesque as that of Moore's is Persian. Thalaba, Kehama, and Lalla Roohk, have completely orientalized our imaginations

I love Albums. They sometimes procure a sunny look, or a kind

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