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nary pile erected in its stead, still we saw down into the old consecrated foundation! Had the very street been swept away-its name and its dust-still the air was holy-and more beautiful overhead the blue gleam of the sky!

And in the midst of all that noisy world of the present, that noisy and miserable world-in the midst of it and pervading it-might not even our youthful eye see the spirit of Religion? And feel, even when most astounded with sights and sounds of wickedness, that in life there was still a mens divinior

only deepened Peace! Here-though yet the voice of the great city will not be hushed-and there is heard ever a suppressed murmur-a sounda noise-a growl-dissatisfied with the Sabbath-here, the power that descends from the sky upon men's hearts stilling them against their wills into a sanctity so alien to their usual life, is felt to have even a more sublime consecration! "The still small voice" speaks, in the midst of all that unrepressed stir, the more distinctly, because so unlike to the other sounds, with which it mingles not; that there is another life, "not of this noisy

"Mens agitat_molem et magno se corpore world, but silent and divine," is felt

miscet."

Christianity spoke in Sabbath-bells, not "swinging slow with sullen roar," like the curfew of old, extinguishing the household fires on all hearths; but, high up in the clearer air, the belfry of tower and spire sent a sweet summons, each over its own region, to families to repair again to the house of God, where the fires of faith, hope, and charity, might be rekindled on the altar of the religion of peace. The sweet solemn faces of old men-of husbands and fathers, and sons and brothers-the fair faces of matrons and virgins-the gladsome faces of

children

"For piety is sweet to infant minds"

were seen passing along the sobered streets, whose stones, but a few hours ago, clanked to the mad rushing to and fro of unhallowed feet, while the air, now so still, or murmuring but with happy voices, attuned to the spirit of the day, was lately all astir with rage, riot, and blasphemy!

from the very disturbances that will
not lie at rest; and though hundreds
of thousands heed it not, the tolling
of that great bell from the Cathedral
strikes of death and judgment.
In the high Cathedral,

"Where through the long-drawn aisle and
fretted vault,

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise,”

we called to mind the low kirk and its Psalms. The kirk near the modest manse, in which our boyhood flew away-with its decent pews, little loft, and unambitious pulpit-the friendly faces of the rural congregation-the grave elders sitting in their place of honor-the pious preacher, who to us had been as a father!-Oh! manytoned are the voices on the Sabbath,

all praising and worshipping God!— List-list, in the hush of thy spirit, and all Christian lands are sounding with one various hymn!

And then London, ere long, became to us-in all its vastness-even as our very home! For all undisturbed amidst the din, and murmuring internally, each with its own peculiar character of domestic joys, with laughter and with song-how many dwellings for us did open their hospitable doors, and welcome us in, with blessings, beneath their social roofs! Our presence brought a bright

"Such ebb and flow must ever be, Then wherefore should we mourn !" Sweet is the triumph of religion on the Sabbath-day, in some solitary glen, to which come trooping from a hundred braes, all the rural dwellers, disappearing, one small family party after another, into the hushed kirker expression into their partial eyes; now, as the congregation has collected, exhaling to heaven, as a flower bank exhales its fragrance, the voice of Psalms! But there Piety has

our mirth never seemed otherwise than well-timed to them, not yet did our melancholy-nor failed either to awaken congenial feelings in the

Oh! the great pleasure of friendships formed in youth! where chance awakens sympathy, accident kindles affection and Fortune, blind and restless on her revolving wheel, favors, as if she were some serene-eyed and steadfast divinity, the purest passions of the soul! As Friendship was added to Friendship, as Family after Family, Household after Household, became each a new part of our enlarged being, how delightful, almost every successive day, to feel our knowledge growing wider and warmer of the virtues of the character of England! Perhaps some unconscious nationality had been brought with us from our native braes-narrowing our range of feeling, and inclining sometimes to unjust judgments and unkindly thoughts. But all that was poor or bad in that prejudice, soon melted away before the light of bold English eyes, before the music of bold English speech.

breasts of those to whom we were with its own-nor let us fear to detoo undeservedly dear. clare it beneath those sunny skies— with its blameless, at least not sinful, charm. Now carried on a stream of endless, various, fluctuating converse, with a friend, more earnest, more enthusiastic, more impassioned than ourselves—and nature filled not our veins with frozen blood-along streets and squares, all dimly seen or unseen, and the faces and figures of the crowds that went thronging by, like the faces and figures in some regardless dream! Now a-foot along pleasant pathways, for a time leading through retired and sylvan places, and then suddenly past a cluster of cottages, or into a pretty village, almost a town, and purposely withholding our eyes from the prospect, till we had reached one well remembered eminence-and then the glorious vision seen from Richmond Hill! Where, where, on the face of all the earth, can the roaming eye rest in more delighted repose than on the "pleasant villages and farms" that far and wide compose that suburban world, so rich in trees alone, that were there no other beauty, the poet could even find a paradise both for week-day and Sabbath hours, in the bright neighborhood of London! Endless profusion and prodigality of art, coping almost successfully with nature ! Wealth is a glorious thing in such creations. Riches are the wands of Magicians. Poverty bleakens the earth-in her region grandeur is bare-and we sigh for something that is not among the naked rocks. But here from the buried gold, groves rise with such loads of verdure, that but for their giant boughs and branches, their heads would be bowed down to the lawns and gardens, gorgeous all with their flushing flowers, naturalized in the all-bearing soil of England, from all climes, from the occident to the orient!

The Friends, too, whom in those sacred hours we had taken to our hearts, linked, along with other more human ties, by the love of literature and poetry-and with whom we had striven to enter

"The cave obscure of old Philosophy," and when starry midnight shone serenely over Oxford's towers and temples, sighed-vainly sighed-with unsatisfied longings and aspirations, that would not let us rest, to " unsphere the spirit of Plato"-they too were often with us in the wide metropolis, where, wide as it is, dear friends cannot almost be for a single day, but by some happy fortune they meet! How grasped-clasped were then our hands and our hearts ! How all college recollections-cheerful and full of glee -or high and of a solemn shadecame over us from the silence of those still retreats, in the noise of the restless London! Magdalen, Mertoun, Oriel, Christ-Church, Trinity-how pleasant were your names!

But where cease the suburban charms of the Queen of Cities? Mansion after mansion-each more beautifully embowered than another-or more beautifully seated on some genHundreds of morning, meridian, tly undulating height, above the farevening, midnight meetings! Each sweeping windings of the silver

Thames, is still seen by the roamer's eye, not without some touch of vain envy at his heart of those fortunate ones, for whom life thus lavishes all its elegance and all its ease-Oh, vain envy indeed, for who knows not that all happiness is seated alone in the heart!— till, ere he remembers that far-off London has vanished quite away, he looks up, and lo! the Towers of Windsorthe Palace of Old England's Kings!

Nor are those " sylvan scenes" unworthily inhabited. Travel citycrowded continents, sail in some circumnavigating ship to far and fair isles, that seem dropt from heaven into the sea, yet shall your eyes behold no lovelier living visions than the daughters of England. Lovelier never visited poet's slumbers nightly -not even when before him in youth "Hope, enchanted, smiled, and waved her golden hair!"

Wafted away, we knew not, cared not whither, on the wings of wonder and admiration,-when, during the long Summer silence, the towers of Oxford kept chiming to deserted courts and cloisters,-all England, its downs, its wolds, its meadows, its plains, its vales, its hills, its mountains, minsters, abbeys, cathedrals, castles, palaces, villages, towns, and cities, all became tributary to our imagination, gazing upon her glories with a thousand eyes. Now we breathed the fragrance of Devonia's myrtle bowers -now from St. Michael's Mount "looked to Bayona and the Giant's Hold," now wept and worshipped at the grave of Shakspeare, or down the yellow Avon thought we saw sailing her own sweet stately swan! Now gazed in dread astonishment on Portsmouth's naval arsenal, and all that machinery-sublime, because of the power that sets it a-going, and far more, because of the power that it sends abroad, winged and surcharged with thunder, all over the main-ships without masts, sheer-hulks, majestic and magnificent even in that bare black magnitude, looming through the morning or evening gloaming-and lo! a First-rater, deck above deck, tier above tier of guns, sending up, as she

sails in sunshine, her clouds into the sky; and as the Ocean-Queen bears up in the blast, how grand her stern-and what a height above the waves tumbling a-foam in her wake! Now seated on the highest knoll of all the bright Malvern Hills in breathless delight, slowly turning round our head in obedience to the beauty and grandeur of that panorama-matchless on earth- -we surveyed at one moment county upon county, of rich, merry, sylvan England, mansioned, abbeyed, towered, spired, castled; and at another, different, and yet not discordant, say, rather, most harmonious with that other level scene, the innumerous mountains of Wales, cloud-crested, or clearly cutting with outlines free, flowing or fantastic, here the deep blue, there the dark purple, and yonder the bright crimson sky! Now borne as on an angel's wing, and in the

very waist and middle of the night," we sat down a Solitary on Derwent Water's shore,

"While the cataract of Lodore
Peal'd to our orisons !"

Now while Luna and her nymphs delighted to behold their own beauty on its breathless bosom, we hung in a little skiff, like a water-lily moored in moonshine, in the fairest of all fair scenes in nature, and the brightest of all the bright-how sweet the music of her name, as it falls from our lips with a blessing-Windermere—Windermere!

And thus we robbed all England of her beauty and her sublimity, her grandeur and her magnificence, and bore it all off and away treasured in our heart of hearts. Thus, the towers and temples of Oxford were haunted with new visions—thus in London we were assailed by sounds and sights from the far-off solitude of rocks, and cliffs, and woods, and mountains, on whose summits hung setting suns, or rose up in spiritual beauty the young crescent moon, or crowded unnumbered planets, or shone alone in its lustre,

"The star of Jove, so beautiful and large," as if the other eyes of heaven were

afraid to sustain the serenity of that are the thoughts born that bring clouds one orb divine!

But still as the few soul-brightening, soul-strengthening suns of youth rolled on, those untamed years, of which every day, it might seem indeed every hour, brought the consciousness of some new knowledge, some new feeling, that made the present greater than the past, and was giving perpetual promise of a still greater future,-promise that was the divine manna of hope-while the world of nature continued to our eyes, our hearts, and our imaginations, dearer and more dear, saddened or sublimed by associations clothing with green gladness the growth of the young, with hoary sadness, the decay of the old trees,

"Moulding to beauty many a mouldering tower;"

and in storm or sunshine, investing with a more awful or a more peaceful character the aspect of the manyshipped sea,-even then, when the world of the senses was in its prime, and light and music did most prodigally abound in the air and the waters, in the heavens and on the earth, we rejoiced with yet a far exceeding joy, we longed with yet a far exceeding desire, we burned with yet a far exceeding passion, for all that was growing momently brighter and more bright, darker and more dark, vaster and more vast, within the self-discovered region of mind and spirit! There swept along each passion, like a great wind-there the sudden thought

"Shot from the zenith like a falling star!" We wished not to "have lightened the burden of the mystery of all that unintelligible world! It was the mystery which, trembling, we loved-awaking suddenly to the quaking of our own hearts, at solitary midnight, from the divine communion of dreams, that like spirits for ever haunted our sleep.

""Tis mind alone-bear witness, heaven and earth!

"Tis mind alone that in itself contains The beauteous or sublime!"

Where are the blasts born that bring the clouds across the stars? Where 2 ATHENEUM, VOL. 1, 3d series.

across our souls ? The study of physics is sublime, for the student feels as if mounting the lower steps of the ladder leading up to God in the skies. But the metaphysics of our own moral, our own intellectual being, sublimer far! when reason is her own object, and conscience, by her own light, sees into her own essence!

And where shall such studies be best pursued? Not alone in the sacred silence of the Academic Grovealthough there should be their glimmering beginnings, and there their glorified but still obscurest end. But through the dim, doubting, and often sorely disturbed intermediate time, when man is commanded by the being within him to mingle with man, when smiles, and sighs, and tears, are most irresistible, and when the look of an eye can startle the soul into a passion of love or hate, then it is that human nature must be studied-or it will remain unknown and hidden for evermust be studied by every human being for himself, in the poetry and philosophy of Life! as that life lies spread before us like a sea! At first, like delighted, wondering, and fearful children, who keep gazing on the waves that are racing like living creatures from some far-off region to these their own lovely and beloved shores, or still with unabated admiration, at morning, see the level sands yellowing far away, with bands of beautiful birds walking in the sun, or, having trimmed their snowy plumage, wheeling in their pastime, with many wild-mingled cries, in the glittering air, with here-there-yonder some vessel seemingly stranded, and fallen helpless on her side, but waiting only for the tide to waken her from her

rest, and again to waft her, on her reexpanded wings, away into the main! Then, as the growing boy becomes more familiar with the ebb and the flow-with all the smiles and frowns on the aspect-all the low and sweet, all the loud and sullen, tones of the voice of the sea-in his doubled delight he loses half his dread, launches his own skiff, paddles with his own

oar, hoists his own little sail-and, ere long, impatient of the passion that devours him, the passion for the wonders and dangers that dwell on the great deep, on some day disappears from his birth-place and his parents' eyes, and, years afterwards, returns a thoughtful man from his voyaging round the globe!

Therefore, to know ourselves, we sought to penetrate into the souls of other men to be with them in the very interior of their conscience, when they thought no eye was upon them but the eye of God. 'Twas no seclusion of the spirit within itself to take cognizance of its own acts and movements; but we were led over the fortunes and works of human beings wherever their minds have acted or their steps have trod.

Is it wonderful then that we, like other youths with a soul within them, mingled ourselves and our very being with the dark, bright, roaring, hushed, vast, beautiful, magnificent, guilty and glorious London!

What forbids us even now exultingly to say, that nature had not withheld from us the power of genial delight in all the creations of genius; and that she shrouded, as with a gorgeous canopy, our youth, with the beauty and magnificence of a million dreams? Lovely to our eyes was all the loveliness that emanated from more gifted spirits, and in the love with which we embraced it, it became our very own! We caught the shadows of high thoughts as they passed along the wall, reflected from the great minds meditating in the hallowed shade! And thenceforth they peopled our being! Nor haply did our own minds not originate some intellectual forms and combinations, in their newness fair, or august-recognized as the product of our own more elevated moods, although unarrayed, it might be, in words, or passing away with their symbols into oblivion, nor leaving a trace behind-only a sense of their transitory presence, consolatory and sublime!

Often do we vainly dream that Time works changes only by ages-by centuries! But who can tell what even

an hour may bring forth? Decay and destruction have "ample room and verge enough," in such a City; and in one year they can do the work of many generations. This century is but young-scarcely hath it reached its prime. But since its first year rolled round the sun, how many towers and temples have in ever-changeful London "gone to the earth!" How many risen up whose "statures reach the sky!" Dead is the old King in his darkness, whom all England loved and reverenced.

Princes have died,

and some of them left not a namemighty men of war have sunk, with all their victories and all their trophies, vainly deemed immortal, into oblivion!—Mute is the eloquence of Pitt's and of Canning's voice!--And thousands, unknown and unhonored, as wise, or brave, in themselves as good and as great as those whose temples fame hath crowned with everlasting halo, have dropt the body, and gone to God. How many thousand fairest faces, brightest eyes, have been extinguished and faded quite away! Fairer and brighter far to him whose youth they charmed and illumined, than any eyes that shall ever more gaze on the flowers of earth, or the stars of heaven!

Methinks the westering sun shines cooler in the garden-that the shades are somewhat deepened-that the birds are not hopping round our head, as they did some hour ago—that in their afternoon siesta they are mute. Another set of insects are in the air. The flowers, that erewhile were broad and bright awake, with slumbering eyne are now hanging down their heads; and those that erewhile seemed to slumber, have awoke from their day-dreams, and look almost as if they were going to speak. Have you a language of your own-dear creatures-for we know that ye have loves? But hark, the Gong-the Gong! in the hand of John, smiting it like the slave of some Malaychief. In our Paradise there is "fear that dinner cool," mortal man must eat-and thus endeth "OUR MIDSUMMER-DAY'S DREAM."

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