XII. As the abbey of Tintern is the most beautiful and picturesque of all our gothic monuments, so is the situation one of the most sequestered and delightful. One more abounding in that peculiar kind of scenery, which excites the mingled sensations of content, religion, and enthusiasm, it is impossible to behold. There every arch infuses a solemn energy, as it were, into inanimate Nature :-a sublime antiquity breathes mildly into the heart: and the soul, pure and passionless, appears susceptible of that state of tranquillity, which is the perfection of every earthly wish. Never has Colonna wandered among the woods, surrounding this venerable ruin, standing on the banks of a river, almost as sacred to the imagination as the spot, where the Cephisus and the Hyssus mingle their waters, but he has wished himself a landscape painter. He has never sat upon its broken columns, and beheld its mutilated fragments; and its waving arches and pillars, decorated with festoons of ivy; but he has formed the wish to forsake the world, and resign himself entirely to the tranquil studies of philosophy. Is there a man, my Lelius, too rich, too great, too powerful, for these emotions? Is there one too ignorant, too vain, and too presumptuous to indulge them?-Envy him not.-From him the pillars of Palmyra would not draw one sigh; the massacre of Glencoe, the matins of Moscow, or the Sicilian vespers would elicit no tear! The description of Tamerlane's walls and pyramids of human heads; the taking of Ismael, of Prague, and of Warsaw ; the massacre of the Chinese in Batavia; or that of the Javans by the Dutch; even the poisoning of the sick at Jaffa, would be read with scarcely a single feeling of sympathetic horror. Know you such a man, my friend ?-Shun him; despise him; have no intercourse with him. Having an heart that never feels, an eye that never weeps, he would squander the blood of the villager, or erect altars of sacrifice to the avaricious god of his idolatry! The valley in which Tintern Abbey is situated, like that of Cwm Dyr, answers to the idea of what Milton calls "a bosky bourn;" meaning, as Wharton justly describes, a narrow, deep, and woody valley, with a river or rivulet winding in the midst. How often has Colonna's heart glowed within him, as he has watched the waters, falling from ledge to ledge among the woods, and listened to their murmur: and how much has that feeling been increased, when, listening to the notes of the nightingale, even at noon, he has remembered those passages in Milton, where the poet describes this bird, when giving a history of the creation; and that passage in a prolusion of Strada, where he celebrates the contest between a lutanist and a nightingale. Alternat mira arte fides, dum torquet acutas Iamque manu per fila volat simul hos, simul illos, 1. 32 45 Mox silet. Illa modis totidem respondit, et artem 1. 23 27 Strada, Prolus. Acad., lib. ii., prol. 6. Then has he repeated the passage, where Dryden celebrates the power of this accomplished bird, in his Flower and Leaf, or the Lady in the Arbour :-then his fancy has wafted him to those gardens of Persia and Arabia Felix, where the nightingale is said to fly from one rosebush to another; till, intoxicated with their odours, it falls, as if inebriated, to the ground. -Then he has meditated on the passage in Horace, where he stigmatizes the extravagance of two brothers, who were accustomed to dine upon nightingales, which were always of great price:-and, after remembering that nightingale's brains were fabled to be food for fairies, he has closed the mental excursion with the wish, that he could transport that aviary of nightingales, which stands in a garden of hyacinths, at Constantinople, to the very spot, on which the wish was formed. |