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come from hearing Mr Irving! What is that to sonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to you? Let him go home and digest what the good determine. But for a mere human gentlemanman said to him. You are at your chapel in your that has no orchestra business to call him from oratory. The growing infirmities of age manifest his warm bed to such preposterous exercisesthemselves in nothing more strongly, than in an we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, inveterate dislike of interruption. The thing during this Christmas solstice), to be the very which we are doing, we wish to be permitted to earliest hour at which he can begin to think of do. We have neither much knowledge nor de- abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; vices; but there are fewer in the place to which for to do it in earnest requires another half-hour's we hasten. We are not willingly put out of our good consideration. Not but there are pretty way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gawds, was, we had vast reversions in time future; we abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged some hours before what we have assigned: which to economise in that article. We bleed away a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getour moments now as hardly as our ducats. We ting up. But having been tempted once or cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, and fretted into by moths. We are willing to we confess our curiosity abated. We are no barter our good time with a friend, who gives longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to us in exchange his own. Herein is the distinc- attend at his morning levees. We hold the good tion between the genuine guest and the visitant. hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon This latter takes your good time, and gives you such observances; which have in them, besides, his bad in exchange. The guest is domestic to something pagan and Persic. To say truth, we you as your good cat, or household bird; the never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window, the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered disturbance, and victuals spoiled. The inferior for it all the long hours after in listlessness and functions of life begin to move heavily. We headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring cannot concoct our food with interruptions. Our her sense of our presumption in aspiring to reguchief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. late our frail waking courses by the measures of With difficulty we can eat before a guest; and that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny never understood what the relish of public feast- not that there is something sprightly and vigoring meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion ous, at the outset especially, in these break-offair play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming day excursions. It is flattering to get the start in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in punctual generation who time their calls to the his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality precise commencement of vour dining hour-not are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms to eat but to see you eat. Our knife and fork before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural drop instinctively and we feel that we have inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, or their genius, as we have said, in knocking the are already up and about their occupations, moment you have just sat down to a book. They content to have swallowed their sleep by wholehave a peculiar compassionate sneer, with which sale; we choose to linger abed, and digest our they "hope that they do not interrupt your dreams. It is the very time to recombine the studies." Though they flutter off the next wandering images, which night in a confused moment, to carry their impertinences to the mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulnearest student that they can call their friend, ness; to shape and mould them. Some people the tone of the book is spoiled; we shut the have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, leaves, and with Dante's lovers, read no more they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curi. that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion ously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone were simply co-extensive with its presence, but vision: to collect the scattered rays of a brighter it mars all the good hours afterwards. These phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, scratches in appearance leave an orifice that the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daycloses not hastily. "It is a prostitution of the light a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop Tay- to handle and examine the terrors or the airy lor, "to spend it upon impertinent people, who solaces. We have too much respect for these are, it may be, loads to their families, but can spiritual communications to let them go so never ease my loads." This is the secret of their lightly. We are not so stupid, or so careless as gaddings, their visits, and morning calls: they that imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we too have homes, which are--no homes. should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns: or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world whither we are

That we should rise with the Lark.—At what | precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear, and prepares to tune up his unsea

hastening. We have shaken hands with the
world's business; we have done with it; we
have discharged ourself of it. Why should we
get up? we have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs
to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at
the fourth act. We have nothing here to ex-
pect but in a short time a sick-bed, and a dis-
missal. We delight to anticipate death by such
shadows as night affords. We are already half
acquainted with ghosts. We were never much
in the world. Disappointment early struck a
dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions.
Our spirits showed grey before our hairs. The
mighty changes of the world already appear as
but the vain stuff out of which dramas are com-
posed. We have asked no more of life than
what the mimic images in playhouses present us
with. Even those types have waxed fainter.
Our clock appears to have struck.
We are
SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of mundane
satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with
shadows. It is good to have friends at court.
The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill in-
troduction to that spiritual presence, upon
which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown.
We are trying to know a little of the usages of
that colony; to learn the language, and the faces
we shall meet with there, that we may be the
less awkward at our first coming among them.
We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as
knowing we shall soon be of their dark com-
panionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams.
We try to spell in them the alphabet of the
invisible world; and think we know already,
how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes,
which, while we clung to flesh and blood,
affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel
attenuated into their meagre essences, and have
given the hand of half-way approach to incorpo-
real being. We once thought life to be some-
thing, but it has unaccountably fallen from us
before its time. Therefore we choose to dally
with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours
to light us to. Why should we get up?

passed, when you must have felt about for a smile and handled a neighbour's cheek to be sure that he understood it? This accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlanterned nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a melange of chance carving they must have made of it!-here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse's shoulder-there another had dipped his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilised times, has never experienced this, when at some economic table he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came? The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark? or distinguish Sherries from pure Malaga? Take away the candle from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an inference; till the restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how he burnishes! There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are abstracted works— "Things that were born, when none but the still night And his dumb candle saw his pinching throes." Marry, daylight-daylight might furnish the That we should lie down with the Lamb.-We images, the crude material; but for the fine could never quite understand the philosophy of author hath it), they must be content to hold shapings, the true turning and filing (as mine this arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors their inspiration of the candle. The mild interin sending us for instruction to these woolly bed-nal light, that reveals them, like fires on the fellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. and silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's Man found out long sixes,-Hail, candlelight! without disparagement to sun or moon, the kind-Morning Hymn in Paradise, we would hold a liest luminary of the three-if we may not rather style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon! We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candlelight. They are every body's sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! They must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have

good wager was penned at midnight; and Taylor's rich description of a sunrise✶ smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured cadences (Prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted courts our endeavours. We would in

"Holy Dying."

dite something about the solar system. Betty, tions are not active-for to be active is to call bring the candles.

That Great Wit is allied to Madness.-So far from this being true, the greatest wits will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,

"Did Nature to him frame,

As all things but his judgment overcame;
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below."

something into act and form-but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the supernatural, or something superadded to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonised: but even in the describing of real and everyday life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature-show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy,-than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels, -as they existed some twenty or thirty years back,—those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and

The ground of the fallacy is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious re-expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms,semblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a whether he has not found his brain more "bestate of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But tossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of the true poet dreams being awake. He is not when and where more confounded, among the possessed by his subject, but has dominion over improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean third-rate love-intrigue-where the persons shall heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and burning marl without dismay; he wings his flight the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond without self-loss through realms of chaos "and Street, -a more bewildering dreaminess induced old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the severer chaos of a "human mind untuned," he is fairy grounds of Spenser. In the productions content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate we refer to, nothing but names and places is mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither familiar; the persons are neither of this world is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so un- nor of any other conceivable one; an endless checked, but that-never letting the reins of string of activities without purpose, of purposes reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, destitute of motive:-we meet phantoms in our -he has his better genius still whispering at his known walks; fantasques only christened. In ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner the poet we have names which announce fiction; counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius re- and we have absolutely no place at all, for the commending kindlier resolutions. Where he things and persons of the "Fairy Queen" prate seems most to recede from humanity, he will be not of their "whereabout." But in their inner found the truest to it. From beyond the scope nature, and the law of their speech and actions, of Nature if he summon possible existences, he we are at home and upon acquainted ground. subjugates them to the law of her consistency. The one turns life into a dream; the other to the He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign direct- wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of everyday ress, even when he appears most to betray and occurrences. By what subtle art of tracing the desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; mental processes it is effected, we are not philohis very monsters are tamed to his hand, even sophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the He tames, and he clothes them with attributes money god appears first in the lowest form of a of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes like Indian Islanders forced to submit to Euro- the god of all the treasures of the world; and pean vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the to the laws of their own nature (ours with a differ- world kneels for favours-with the Hesperian ence), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Here- fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing in the great and the little wits are differenced; his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the that if the latter wander ever so little from nature same stream-that we should be at one moment or actual existence, they lose themselves, and in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace visions nightmares. They do not create, which and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting implies shaping and consistency. Their imagina-mutations of the most rambling dream, and ow

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are; recollections of toils and fatigues, ill repaid in past expeditions, rise and pass into anticipation; and he lingers, uncertain, till an advanced hour determines the question for him, by the certainty that it is now too late to go.

Perhaps a man has conclusive reasons for wishing to remove to another place of residence. But when he is going to take the first actual step towards executing his purpose, he is met by a new train of ideas, presenting the possible, and magni

MY DEAR FRIEND,-We have several times talked of this bold quality, and acknowledged its great importance. Without it, a human being, with powers at best but feeble and surrounded by innumerable things tending to perplex, to divert, and to frustrate their operations, is indeed a pitiable atom, the sport of divers and casual im-fying the unquestionable, disadvantages and unpulses. It is a poor and disgraceful thing not to be able to reply, with some degree of certainty, to the simple questions, What will you be? What will you dɔ?

A little acquaintance with mankind will supply numberless illustrations of the importance of this qualification. You will often see a person anxiously hesitating a long time between different, or opposite determinations, though impatient of the pain of such a state, and ashamed of the debility. A faint impulse of preference alternates toward the one, and toward the other; and the mind, while thus held in a trembling balance, is vexed that it cannot get some new thought, or feeling, or motive; that it has not more sense, more resolution, more of anything that would save it from envying even the decisive instinct of brutes. It wishes that any circumstance might happen, or any person might appear, that could deliver it from the miserable suspense.

In many instances, when a determination is adopted, it is frustrated by this temperament. A man, for example, resolves on a journey tomorrow, which he is not under an absolute necessity to undertake, but the inducements appear, this evening, so strong, that he does not think it possible he can hesitate in the morning. In the morning, however, these inducements have unaccountably lost much of their force. Like the sun that is rising at the same time, they appear dim through a mist; and the sky lowers, or he fancies that it does, and almost wishes to see darker clouds than there actually

certainties of a new situation; awakening the natural reluctance to quit a place to which habit has accommodated his feelings, and which has grown warm to him (if I may so express it), by his having been in it so long; giving a new impulse to his affection for the friends whom he must leave; and so detaining him still lingering, long after his judgment may have dictated to him to be gone.

A man may think of some desirable alteration in his plan of life; perhaps in the arrangements of his family, or in the mode of his intercourse with society. Would it be a good thing? He thinks it would be a good thing. It certainly would be a very good thing. He wishes it were done. He will attempt it almost immediately. The following day he doubts whether it would be quite prudent. Many things are to be considered. May there not be in the change some evil of which he is not aware? Is this a proper time? What will people say? And thus, though he does not formally renounce his purpose, he shrinks out of it, with an irksome wish that he could be fully satisfied of the propriety of renouncing it. Perhaps he wishes that the thought had never occurred to him, since it has diminished his self-complacency, without promoting his virtue. But next week his conviction of the wisdom and advantage of such a reform comes again with great force. Then, Is it so practicable as I was at first willing to imagine? Why not? Other men have done much greater things; a resolute mind may brave and accom

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plish everything; difficulty is a stimulus and
a triumph to a strong spirit; "the joys of con-
quest are the joys of man.' What need I care
for people's opinion? It shall be done.
makes the first attempt. But some unexpected
obstacle presents itself; he feels the awkward-
ness of attempting an unaccustomed manner of
acting; the questions or the ridicule of his friends
disconcert him; his ardour abates and expires.
He again begins to question whether it be wise,
whether it be necessary, whether it be possible;
and at last surrenders his purpose to be perhaps
resumed when the same feelings return, and to
be in the same manner again relinquished.

While animated by some magnanimous sentiments which he has heard or read, or while musing on some great example, a man may conceive the design, and partly sketch the plan of a generous enterprise; and his imagination revels in the felicity, to others and to himself, that would follow from its accomplishment. The splendid representation always centres in himself as the hero who is to realise it.

In a moment of remitted excitement, a faint whisper from within may doubtfully ask, Is this more than a dream; or am I really destined to achieve such an enterprise? Destined! and why are not this conviction of its excellence, this conscious duty of performing the noblest things that are possible, and this passionate ardour, enough to constitute a destiny? He feels indignant that there should be a failing part of his nature to defraud the nobler, and cast him below the ideal model and the actual examples which he is admiring; and this feeling assists him to resolve that he will undertake this enterprise, that he certainly will, though the Alps or the ocean lie between him and the object. Again his ardour slackens; distrustful of himself, he wishes to know how the design would appear to other minds; and when he speaks of it to his associates, one of them wonders, another laughs, and another frowns. His pride, while with them, attempts a manful defence; but his resolution gradually crumbles down toward their level; he becomes in a little while ashamed to entertain a visionary project, which therefore, like a rejected friend, desists from intruding on him or following him, except at lingering distance; and he subsides, at last, into what he labours to believe a man too rational for the schemes of ill-calculating enthusiasm. And it were strange if the effort to make out this favourable estimate of himself did not succeed, while it is so much more pleasant to attribute one's defect of enterprise to wisdom, which on maturer thought disapproves it, than to imbecility, which shrinks from it.

A person of undecisive character wonders how all the embarrassments in the world happened to meet exactly in his way, to place him just in that one situation for which he is peculiarly unadapted, but in which he is also willing to think no other man could have acted with

facility or confidence. Incapable of setting up a firm purpose on the basis of things as they are, he is often employed in vain speculations on some different supposable state of things, which would have saved him from all this perplexity and irresolution. He thinks what a determined course he could have pursued, if his talents, his health, his age, had been different; if he had been acquainted with some one person sooner; if his friends were, in this or the other point, different from what they are; or if fortune had showered her favours on him. And he gives himself as much licence to complain, as if all these advantages had been among the rights of his nativity, but refused, by a malignant or capricious fate, to his life. Thus he is occupied instead of marking with a vigilant eye, and seizing with a strong hand, all the possibilities of his actual situation.

A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself; since, if he dared to assert that he did, the puny force of some cause, about as powerful, you would have supposed, as a spider, may make a seizure of the hapless boaster the very next moment, and contemptuously exhibit the futility of the determinations by which he was to have proved the independence of his understanding and his will. He belongs to whatever can make capture of him; and one thing after another vindicates its right to him, by arresting him while he is trying to go on; as twigs and chips, floating near the edge of a river, are intercepted by every weed, and whirled in every little eddy. Having concluded on a design, he may pledge himself to accomplish it if the hundred diversities of feeling which may come within the week will let him. His character precluding all foresight of his conduct, he may sit and wonder what form and direction his views and actions are destined to take tomorrow; as a farmer has often to acknowledge that next day's proceedings are at the disposal of its winds and clouds.

This man's notions and determinations always depend very much on other human beings; and what chance for consistency and stability, while the persons with whom he may converse or transact are so various? This very evening, he may talk with a man whose sentiments will melt away the present form and outline of his purposes, however firm and defined be may have fancied them to be. A succession of persons whose faculties were stronger than his own, might, in spite of his irresolute reaction, take him and dispose of him as they pleased. infirmity of spirit practically confesses him made for subjection, and he passes, like a slave, from owner to owner. Sometimes, indeed, it happens that a person so constituted falls into the train, and under the permanent ascendency, of some one stronger mind, which thus becomes through life the oracle and guide, and gives the inferior a steady will and plan. This, when the govern.

Such

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