"the cloudy wind which blew

From the Levant hath crept into its cave,

And the broad moon has brighten'd,"

and look out with him on the magic city, meet... ing, in its beautiful distinctness, the very organ as it were of sight itself*. of sight itself *. I wander with the Renegade, and enter into his feelings, and am struck by his fears when the hour of midnight sets before him, in all its solemn stillness, the form that is not earthly, and the love that has already shrouded itself in the gravet. I recognize no mean casuist in the developement, full of truth and tenderness, of the power of the mind to create its own happiness out of the simplest materials that Providence, ever merciful, casts in its way.

"Of objects all inanimate I made

Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers,

And rocks whereby they grew, a paradise."

I mourn over the soft, and patient, and silent younger sufferer, and am present with the horrors of a situation where light is denied, and destruction does her work in darkness, as he gradually sinks into the arms of death with

"not a word of murmur, not

A groan o'er his untimely lot."§

I disdain not, monster as he is, to mix some

*Doge of Venice.
Lament of Tasso.

+ The Siege of Corinth.

§ Prisoner of Chillon.

pity for the lost and fallen Lara with my admiration of his faithful Page, following him through life, clinging to him in death, and evincing, ah, so fatally! the love of her heart in the distraction of her mind*. I, finally, hesitate not to confess, that I bow me down and worship the Genius, which, alluding to a portrait recalling some face we think we have seen before, exclaims, in " syllables that breathe of the sweet South,"

"One of those forms which flit by us, when we

Are young, and fix our eyes on every face;

And, oh! the loveliness at times we see

In momentary gliding, the soft grace,

The youth, the bloom, the beauty which agree,

In many a nameless being we retrace,

Whose course and home we know not, nor shall know,
Like the lost Pleiad + seen no more below."t

Yes, my Lord, with these, and with many other portions of your works, I seek acquaintance with the earnestness of one who desires to go to the fairest models of Genius for the highest sources of his enjoyments, nor can any detestation of your deformities take away from this reverence your beauties. Here, if you are original, you are immortal.

for

But great as you are in these exquisite delineations of nature and of mind, you are yet not

+ Quæ septem dici, sex tamen esse solent.-OVID.

And

more so than we have a right to expect, placed as you were under circumstances of peculiar favourableness. When you described the ruins of Rome, you were on the spot. You were on the spot when you electrify us with the remembrances of Greece, of the Plains of Ilium, of the seat of ancient learning, and of the remains of her antiquity. When, with a pencil glowing with strength and softness, you painted the "wizard streams" and romantic regions of the South, you were traversing their climes, and in the very midst and heart of their beauties. you need not, I am sure, be told what advantage this locality, associated with the history of past heroic ages, gives to a poet; how it makes him. sublimer in his views and thoughts; how his soul admits of a deeper enchantment, and his muse of a loftier imagination, when on the plain of Marathon he sings of the departed glories of Greece, or on the banks of the Scamander of the field sanctified by the battles of Gods and men. The beauties of Arcadia will be found to be beauties nowhere so fresh and faithful as in Arcadia. On the spot which years and genius have consecrated, all poetical inspiration must be at its height. It must be wrapped in a holy and divine awfulness. It must possess the quick passing feeling of an ethereal mind, bright and beautiful, and with the very energy about it of its native Heaven. What is lovely, is never so lovely

as at such a moment.

What is great, never rises

to such sublimity. "I stood upon the Symplegades. I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them. I felt all the poetry of the situation as I repeated the first lines of the Medea," &c. My Lord, you felt but as you ought to have felt; as it would have been a slur upon your heart, and an eternal stain upon your genius, not to have felt. So entranced, even the merest clod of the valley would have perceived "some rousing motions" in him, and, impressed by a growing intellect, have sent forth imagination upon a stronger pinion and a wider range. Fancy must have died to the soul indeed, if, thus situated, your muse had experienced any incapacity to " gaze her visions wild and feel unmixt her flame."

What philosophers call the association of ideas, repugnant as it may occasionally be to the progress of science, is yet of prime importance to the genius of poetry. It is a strange process of the brain. It hangs by small threads and filaments, and works its way through dead and subterranean channels until it emerges, at length, into perfect day. Discarding present objects, it deals with the dark backward and abysm of time," and calls up from thence images of fondness, of faithfulness, and of beauty. How we

*Letter on the Rev. W. L. Bowles's "Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope."

come by this mysterious power, we cannot tell. Some chord is struck that, like lightning, spreads its vibrations through the whole soul; and from these "dim discovered tracts of mind," presently rich with thought, imagination bodies forth the illustrious forms, which, but for such connexion, might never have awoke from their slumber, or been drawn out in their greatness.

This association of our ideas is, perhaps, more predominant in its enchantment, where solemnity reigns over the colouring which it assumes; and I have often thought, my Lord, that, reverting to this source of melancholy pleasure, our family pictures are not the meanest part of our family possessions. If we can steal a moment from present seducements to dwell with "the years beyond the flood," we shall find their contemplation no undelightful employment. They give us back, with the images, the honours and the virtues of our ancestry. We trace the line of our descent from generation to generation, and, with it, the illustrious deeds by which it hath been ennobled. We learn what has been done by them. We feel what is required of us. We are made sensible how poor and worthless nobility sits upon a mind that is not noble; and how lost a character is his who can be tranquil under the consciousness, that, of all the honours he enjoys, he can boast of none which he has not disgraced.

These family portraits virtue will make her