If he did not mean madness in the ordinary sense, he should not have written this line; if he did, he ought not to have fallen, in the teeth of his better knowledge, into so vulgar an error. There are very few instances of insane poets, or of insane great understandings of any sort. Bacon, Milton, Newton, Snakspeare, Cervantes, &c., were all of minds as sound as they were great. So it has been with the infinite majority of literary men of all countries. If Tasso and a few others were exceptions, they were but exceptions; and the derangement in these eminent men has very doubtful characters about it, and is sometimes made a question. It may be pretty safely affirmed, at least, upon an examination of it, that had they not been the clever men they were, it would have been much worse and less equivocal. Collins, whose case was after all one of inanition rather than insanity, had been a free liver; and seems to have been hurt by having a fortune left him. Cowper was weak-bodied, and beset by Methodists. Swift's body was full of bad humors. He himself attributed his disordered system to the effects of a surfeit of fruit on his stomach; and in his last illness he used to break out in enormous boils and blisters. This was a violent effort of nature to help and purify the current of his blood,—the main object in all such cases. Dr. Johnson, who was subject to mists of melancholy, used to fancy he should go mad; but he never did.

Exercise, conversation, cheerful society, amusements of all sorts, or a kind, patient, and gradual helping of the bodily health, till the mind be capable of amusement (for it should never fool. ishly be told "not to think" of melancholy things, without having something done for it to mend the bodily health),-these are the cures, the only cures, and in our opinion the almost infallible cures of nervous disorders, however excessive. Above all the patient should be told that there has often been an end to that torment of one haunting idea, which is indeed a great and venerable suffering. Many persons have got over it in a week, a few weeks, or a month, some in a few months, soine not for years, but they have got over it at last. There is a remarkable instance of this in the life of our great king Alfred. He was

seized, says his contemporary biographer, with such a strange

illness while sitting at table, in the twenty-fifth year (we think) of his age, that he shrieked aloud; and for twenty years after. wards this illness so preyed upon him, that the relief of one hour was embittered by what he dreaded would come the next. His disorder is conjectured by some to have been an internal cancer; by others, with more probability, the black bile, or melancholy. The physicians of those times knew nothing about it; and the people showed at once their ignorance, and their admiration of the king, by saying that the devil had caused it out of jealousy. It was probably produced by anxiety for the state of his country; but the same thing which wounded him may have helped to keep him up; for he had plenty of business to attend to, and fought with his own hand in fifty-six pitched battles. Now exactly twenty years after, in the forty-fifth year of his age (if our former recollection is right) this disorder totally left him; and his great heart was where it ought to be, in a heaven of health and calmness.

CHAPTER XV.

Mists and Fogs.

FOGs and mists, being nothing but vapors which the cold air will not suffer to evaporate, must sometimes present a gorgeous aspect next the sun. To the eye of an eagle, or whatever other eyes there may be to look down upon them, they may appear like masses of cloudy gold. In fact, they are but clouds unrisen. The city of London, at the time we are writing this article, is literally a city in the clouds. Its inhabitants walk through the same airy heaps which at other times float over their heads in the sky, or minister with glorious faces to the setting

sun.

We do not say, that any one can "hold a fire in his hand" by thinking on a fine sunset; or that sheer imagination of any sort can make it a very agreeable thing to feel as if one's body were wrapped round with cold wet paper; much less to flounder through gutters, or run against posts. But the mind can often help itself with agreeable images against disagreeable ones; or pitch itself round to the best sides and aspects of them. The solid and fiery ball of the sun, stuck as it were, in the thick foggy atmosphere; the moon just winning her way through it, into beams; nay, the very candles and gas-lights in the shopwindows of a misty evening-all have, in our eyes, their agreeable varieties of contrast to the surrounding haze. We have even halted, of a dreary autumnal evening, at that open part of the Strand by St. Clement's, and seen the church, which is a poor structure of itself, take an aspect of ghastly grandeur from the dark atmosphere; looking like a tall white mass, mounting up interminably into the night overhead.

The poets, who are the common friends that keep up the intercourse between nature and humanity, have in numberless pas.

sages done justice to these our melancholy visitors, and shown us what grand personages they are. To mention only a few of the most striking. When Thetis, in the Iliad (Lib. i., v. 359), rises out of the sea to console Achilles, she issues forth in a mist; like the Genius in the Arabian Nights. The reader is to suppose that the mist, after ascending, comes gliding over the water, and condensing itself into a human shape, lands the white-footed goddess on the shore.

When Achilles, after his long and vindictive absence from the Greek armies, re-appears in consequence of the death of his friend Patroclus, and stands before the appalled Trojan armies, who are thrown into confusion at the very sight, Minerva, to render his aspect the more astonishing and awful, puts about his head a halo of golden mist, streaming upwards with fire (Lib. xviii., v. 205). He shouts aloud under this preternatural diadem; Minerva throws into his shout her own immortal voice with a strange unnatural cry; at which the horses of the Trojan warriors run round with their chariots, and twelve of their noblest captains perish in the crush.

A mist was the usual clothing of the gods, when they descended to earth; especially of Apollo, whose brightness had double need of mitigation. Homer, to heighten the dignity of Ulysses, has finely given him the same covering, when he passes through the court of Antincus, and suddenly appears before the throne. This has been turned to happy account by Virgil, and to a new and noble one by Milton. Virgil makes Æneas issue suddenly from a mist, at the moment when his friends think him lost, and the beautiful queen of Carthage is wishing his presence. Milton-but we will give one or two of his minor uses of mists, by way of making a climax of the one alluded to. If Satan, for instance, goes lurking about Paradise, it is "like a black mist low creeping." If the angels on guard glide about it, upon their gentler errand, it is like fairer vapors :

On the ground

Gliding meteorous, as evening mist

Risen from a river o'er the marish glides,

And gathers ground fast at the laborer's heel

Homeward returning.—(Par. Lost, B. xii., v 628.)

Now behold one of his greatest imaginations. The fallen demi-gods are assembled in Pandemonium, waiting the return of their "great adventurer" from his "search of worlds:"

He through the midst unmarked,

In show plebeian angel militant

Of lowest order, passed; and from the door
Of that Plutonian hall, invisible,
Ascended his high throne; which, under state
Of richest texture spread, at the upper end
Was placed in regal lustre. Down awhile
He sat, and round about him saw unseen.
At last-as from a cloud, his fulgent head

And shape star-bright appeared, or brighter; clad
With what permissive glory since his fall
Was left him, or false glitter. All amazed

At that so sudden blaze, the Stygian throng

Bent their aspect; and whom they wished, beheld,
Their mighty chief returned.

There is a piece of imagination in Apollonius Rhodius worthy of Milton or Homer. The Argonauts, in broad day-light, are suddenly benighted at sea with a black fog. They pray to Apollo; and he descends from heaven, and lighting on a rock, holds up his illustrious bow, which shoots a guiding light for them to an island.

Spenser, in a most romantic chapter of the Faery Queene (Book ii.), seems to have taken the idea of a benighting from Apollonius, as well as to have had an eye to some passages of the Odyssey; but, like all great poets, what he borrows only brings worthy companionship to some fine invention of his own. It is a scene thickly beset with horror. Sir Guyon, in the course of his voyage through the perilous sea, wishes to stop and hear the Syrens; but the palmer, his companion, dissuades him:

When suddeinly a grosse fog overspred
With his dull vapor all that desert has,
And heaven's chearefull face enveloped,

That all things one, and one as nothing was,

And this great universe seemed one confused r ass.

Thereat they greatly were dismayd, ne wist
How to direct theyr way in darkness wide,