nition, which swam along the young heart's current, like fleecy clouds that float about the sun-pleasant then to feel in their sphere, as are the fleecy clouds to look at, when in amber-and-carmine glory they linger in the western heavens, steeped in the splendor of the day-god's exit. And if in infancy it were the lot of such reflective being to be "nursed at happy distance" from the jaundiced atmosphere of dense cities, he may remember how the waterfall seduced him from the sport, to sit and gaze at its prismatic flow; and how the echoes of mirth seemed a sound profane in the sanctity of an old wood's silence; or how, on the steep hill's summit and awearied, he laid himself down and would have slept, but that his eye was attracted heavenwards, and all incapable of comprehending the spell which kept him wakeful, he there in charmed recumbency acknowledged

"The witchery of the soft blue sky."

When, a week after E.'s arrival, I followed him to the home of his childhood, and mingled with its many charms, I felt this faith in the moulding influence of familiar scenery substantiated; for in his Waller-like affection for "harmony, and grace, and gentlest beauty," it was easy to recognise the taste

and disposition which Nature unthwarted would, as a matter of course, foster to their full growth and strength, through the medium primarily of contact-— of habitual gazing upon and heart-intercourse with the surpassing loveliness encinctured in that tranquil vale-itself to be regarded by such as look earnestly into this vast Illustrated Volume, the World we live in, as a vignette, elaborately wrought and purposed to display how sweet a smile animates all features— despite the digital-on-lip monition of Silence-when Beauty, on mountain or in valley, hath mutual occupancy with Quietude. And tracing, with the Old Man, the free hills over which his foot-of-youth had sprung lustily, the deep glades, stream-intersected fields, and verdant woods now robing in their autumnal vestment, it was without the range of possibilities to resist a certain contagion engendered by his enthusiastic pride in his birthplace.

More than six thousand souls are said to locate in the bosom and about the extremities of that fair valley, before whose charms, had he by chance confronted them, Lorraine would surely have set up his easel; -the Laureate, could he yet see them and create associations, would not leave Tintern Abbey Revisited in its pre-eminency among home-touches, for of this

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green pastoral landscape," as of that, a noble timeworn Abbey is the primal grace;-and could it come in the halcyon hues of sweet eventide under survey of Sir Christopher North, the world might rejoice in a supplementary Recreation, and his lustrous picture of Windermere at Sunset not longer live alone in its glory.

As to mine Ancient, pride in the natural beauties of this Valley-of-the-Test was tantamount to a passion; and it was not unamusing to note his prurient impatience for a candidate whom to initiate and accompany in his "noviciate of delight." So it was hastily upon the clearance of that comfortablest of all repasts, the matutinal, that we sallied forth towards his former "daily walks and ancient neighbourhood." Really that day, apart from the pleasures of our reconnoitre, and on the score of its intrinsic merits, throws over the reminiscence of a gorgeous reality a charm not inferior to the couleur-de-rose effect striven for by poet-painters of Luxury and the East. Patient living and moving long before under such frequency of misrepresentation as God's meek sky is subject to in British Babylon, and groping (so to say) in heaven's light seen under double disparagement-exterior dimness brought about by sombrous vapors, inter

changed officially with denseness from interior cobweb, in charitable semi-political superstition conserved from crushing besom of destruction through years of multiplying spider-film on film;—patient abiding under comparative eclipse might have predisposed us, beneath that bright-blue, bare-breasted sky, to somewhat fraternise in feeling with an old man, fabricator of our primeval pantalons, who, awhile blinded by removable cataract, on first scarce-reaccess of light exclaimed, "A thousand suns!" Yet in good truth might that day of exploitation have been given and accepted in its entireness as a Septembral master-piece,—a day whose respirations, one would fancy, were sufficiently redolent with rich autumnal odours to have embalmed, and so in some manner have preserved, its loveliness. Beauty of which even eloquence could make but faint praise, and fragrance, not to be syllabled, rising up from Earth, as incense from an altar co-extensive with, and impregnating, the wide firmament, afforded no unsuitable support to that theory of the day's self-embalming; but an old enactment and innumerable precedents were adverse, and the flushed Hours-predestined victims of Consumption-looked round them and yielded-up the ghost, after the manner of a long line of predecessors.

That very estimable item in the details of a sound constitution-freedom of debate, is often exercised without reference to equitable or even reasonable duration; and for our own part we have greater confidence that good would accrue from a fair debatingsociety sort of restriction upon talk, especially wild political talk, than from political suffrage sidled into ballot-boxes. Rambling regenerators, advocating short parliaments, could not consistently oppose a system for abbreviating speeches; else, with an influx from the league, a weary yarn of verbiage, wrought by half-a-dozen orators, might stretch its suffocating length over an entire session. Not to lose my own loquacious Guide by wandering into the arid wastes of political oratory, nor to class his with the vain babblings of the disaffected, it is expedient at once to observe, that throughout his garrulous guidance few pauses admitted further remark from the object guided than a consenting "yea," to eulogy passed upon ubiquitous loveliness. Taciturn never, here, upon his natal soil, E. took to himself the part of commentator-in-chief as a right, allowed by human sense of becomingness and animal.-The proclamation of Morn by another herald on this individual chanticleer's rightful stercoraceous pinnacle-could such infringe