call it a fit Appendix to the Paradise Lost.' It is the Consolation to that Complaint. Imagine the ages to have rolled by since our first parents gave earth to their offspring, who sealed the gift with blood, and bequeathed it to us with toil :-imagine, after all that experience can teach--after the hoarded wisdom and the increasing pomp of countless generations-an old man, one of that exiled and fallen race, standing among the tombs of his ancestors, telling us their whole history, in his appeals to the living heart, and holding out to us, with trembling hands, the only comfort which earth has yet discovered for its cares and sores the anticipation of Heaven! To me, that picture completes all that Milton began. It sums up the human history, whose first chapter he had chronicled; it preacheth the great issues of the Fall; it shows that the burning light then breathed into the soul, lives there still; it consummates the mysterious record of our mortal sadness and our everlasting hope. But if the conception of the Night Thoughts' be great, it is also uniform and sustained. The vast wings of the inspiration never slacken or grow fatigued. Even the humours and conceits are of a piece with the solemnity of the poem-like the grotesque masks carved on the walls of a cathedral, which defy the strict laws of taste, and almost inexplicably harmonise with the whole. The sorrow, too, of the poet is not egotistical, or weak in its repining. It is the great one sorrow common to all human nature-the deep and wise regret that springs from an intimate knowledge of our being and the scene in which it has been cast. That same knowledge, operating on various minds, produces various results. In Voltaire it sparkled into wit; in Goethe, it deepened into a humour that belongs to the sublime; in Young it generated the same high and profound melancholy as that which excited the inspirations of the Son of Sirach, and the soundest portion of the philosophy of Plato." Here is a passage that itself justifies even such an eulogy-for where is its superior-we had almost said its equal-either in poetry or philosophy throughout the whole range of the creation of English genius ? "How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, Triumphantly distress'd! what joy, what dread! "Tis past conjecture; all things rise in proof, : Of subtler essence than the trodden clod; For human weal, Heaven husbands all events: The last paragraph is admirablebut the first is wondrous-and would have entranced Hamlet. "I have of late (but, wherefore, I know not) lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave, o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in ɛction, how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust ?" The ghost of one," in form and moving, how express and admirable," was gliding through his imagination -and he knew that what was once "its smooth body," "A most instant tetter barked about Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust; his mother, whom that ghost, when in the body - "Would not beteem the wind of heaven Visit her face too roughly now forgetful of " the buried Majesty of Denmark," and soaking" in the rank sweat of an incestuous bed; "the serpent that did sting his father's life now wearing his crown; "confusion worse confounded among all the holiest thoughts and things that had made to him the religion of his being-beneath all that horrible and hideous oppression-and in the revealed knowledge of possibilities of wickedness in nature, otherbeyond the reaches of his soul," he thought of heaven and earth, and man-and spoke of them still as glorious and godlike-while there was quaking in his soul an ineffable trouble never more to be appeased, wise " But not Shakspeare-not Young, ever drew such a picture of MAN as the one now emerging from the still deep waters of our memory-by whom painted? One of the Masters in Israel. "And first, that he hath withdrawn himself, and left this his temple desolate, we have many sad and plain proofs before us. The stately ruines are visible to every eye, that bear in their front (yet extant) this doleful inscription: 66 Here God once dwelt." Enough appears of the admirable frame and structure of the soul of man, to show the divine presence did sometime reside in it, more than enough of vicious deformity, to proclaim he is now retired and gone. The lamps are extinct, the altar overturn'd. The light and love are now vanisht, which did the one shine with so heavenly brightness, the other burn with so pious fervour. The gol den candlestick is displac't, and thrown away as an useless thing, to make room for the throne of the Prince of Darkness. The sacred incense, which sent rowling up in clouds its rich perfumes, are exchang'd for a poisonous hellish vapour, and here is, instead of a sweet savour, a stench. The comely order of this house is turn'd all into confusion. The beauties of holiness into noisom impurities. The house of prayer, to a den of thieves, and that of the worst and most horrid kind, for every lust is a thief, and every theft, sacrilege; continual rapine and rob. bery is committed upon holy things. The noble powers which were design'd and dedicated to divine contemplation and delight, are alienated to the service of the most despicable idols, and employ'd unto vilest intuitions and embraces; to behold and admire lying vanities; to indulge and cherish lust and wickedness. What, have not the enemies done wickedly in the sanctuary! How have they broken down the carved work thereof, and that too with axes and hammers; the noise whereof was not to be heard in building, much less in the demolishing this sacred frame. Look upon the fragments of that curious sculpture which once adorn'd the palace of that great king: The reliques of common notions; the lively prints of some undefaced truth; the fair ideas of things; the yet legible precepts that relate to practice. Be hold! with what accuracy the broken pieces shew these to have been engraven by the finger of God, and how they now lie torn, and scatter'd, one in this dark corner, another in that, buried in heaps of dirt and rubbish. There is not now a system, an entire table of coherent truths to be found, or a frame of holiness, but some shiver'd parcels. And if any, with great toil and labour, apply themselves to draw out here one piece, and there another, and set them to gether, they serve rather to show how exquisite the Divine workmanship was in the original composition than for present use, to the excellent purposes for which the whole was first design'd. Some pieces agree, and own one another; but how soon are our enquiries and endeavours nonplust and superseded! How many attempts have been made since that fearful fall and ruin of this fabrick, to compose again the truths of so many several kinds into their distinct orders, and make up frames of science, or useful knowledge; and, after so many ages, nothing is finisht in any one kind. Sometimes truths are misplac'd, and what belongs to one kind is transferred to another, where it will not fitly match; sometimes falsehood inserted, which shatters or disturbs the whole frame. And what is with much fruitless pains done by one hand, is dasht in pieces by another; and it is the work of a following age to sweep away the fine-spun cobwebs of a for they cannot be wrought in, so as to take hold of the soul, but hover as faint, ineffectual notions, that signify nothing. Its very fundamental powers are shaken and disjointed, and their order, towards one another, confounded and broken. So that what is judg'd considerable is not consider'd. What is recommended as eligible and lovely, is not loved and chosen. Yea, the truth which is after godliness, is not so much disbeliev'd, as hated, held in unrighteousness, and shines as too feeble a light in that malignant darkness which comprehends it not. You come amidst all this confusion, as into the ruin'd palace of some great prince, in which you see here the fragments of a noble pillar, there the shatter'd pieces of some curious imagery, and all lying neglected and useless among heaps of dirt. He that invites you to take a view of the soul of man, gives you but such another prospect, and doth but say to you, behold the desolation, all things rude and wast. So that should there be any pretence to the divine presence, it might be said, If God be here, why is it thus? The faded glory, the darkness, the disorder, the impurity, the decay'd state in all respects of this temple, too plainly show the Great Inhabitant is gone." From "The Living Temple" of John How! Sometimes we have fears about our memory that it is decaying; for, lately many ordinary yet interesting Occurrences and events, which we regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, have been slipping away almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the merry, and, worse, the merry upon the mournful-confusion, by no fault of ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces-tears where smiles were a duty as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded and religion hallowed a sacrifice of tears. Yet we forget no beautiful or glorious passage—in prose or verse-that had been committed to memory, either by the heart or by the soul-and, like another star stealing through the sky to join its constellation-lo! another Light of Song. "On man, on nature, and on human life, Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed; And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes The good and evil of our mortal state. -To these emotions, whensoe'er they come, Of moral strength, and intellectual power; Of the individual mind that keeps her own To conscience only, and the law supreme Of that intelligence which governs all; I sing fit audience let me find, though few!' "So prayed, more gaining than he asked, the bard, Holiest of men.— -Urania, I shall need Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such Descend to earth, or dwell in highest heaven! Nor aught of blindest vacancy-scooped out By help of dreams, can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our minds, into the Mind of Man, My haunt, and the main region of my song. An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves Or a mere fiction of what never was? (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external world Can it be called) which they with blended might Within the walls of cities; may these sounds And are we the defenders of the faith-never to see more of the "Recluse". but the "Excursion"-the great Philosophical Poem, of the design and scope of which these matchless lines have been said by Wordsworth to be "a kind of Prospectus?" What right has the next age to exclude us from such a possession? What right has the poet? We men alive love and reverence him-what 66 say, that the admiration of their species has been divided to the two classes of minds which have been thus distinguished from one another. Now, it seems reasonable to suppose that, if, in the character of an individual, or in the character of a nation, these two spirits could be united in equal measure, and, at the same time, in great strength, that character would appear to us the very excellence of our nature; but if either should be in great excess, it is to be apprehended that in such a mind, and much more in such a nation, great defects, and of immediate consequence, would manifest themselves. It appears to be the opinion of Wordsworth that in our own country, in this age, at least, the spirit of action is carried to pernicious excess. The nature of the injurious consequences of each several excess may be best understood by considering a little more fully what is the essential nature of the spirit itself. The The spirit of thought or speculation turns the mind inward upon itself; its essence is retirement from the external world, from all outward life, into the recess of its own thoughts, into the depth of its own being. danger of such a spirit is the separation of the mind from those affections by which we are united to men. It is to be expected that the mind, forsaking the life of the world to retire to a life within itself, may become selfloving, and lose alike the use and the estimation of those principles of its nature by which it is drawn and constrained to make sacrifice of itself upon requisition of the welfare of others. It is also to be expected that in thus relinquishing the natural happiness of |