Periodical literature is a type of many of the most beautiful things and interesting events in nature; or say, rather, that they are types of it—the Flowers and the Stars. As to Flowers, they are the prettiest periodicals ever published in folio—the leaves are wire-wove and hot-pressed by Nature's self; their circulation is wide over all the land; from castle to cottage they are regularly taken in; as old age bends over them, his youth is renewed; and you see childhood poring upon them pressed close to its very bosom. Some of them are ephemeral—their contents are exhaled between the rising and setting sun. Once a-week others break through their green, pink, or crimson cover; and how delightful, on the seventh day, smiles in the sunshine the Sabbath Flower—a Sunday publication perused without blame by the most religious—even before morning prayer! Each month, indeed, throughout the whole year, has its own Flower periodical. Some are annual, some biennial, some triennial, and there are perennials that seem to live for ever—and yet are still periodical—though our love will not allow us to know when they die, and phoenix-like reappear from their own ashes. So much for Flowers—typifying or typified;—leaves emblematical of pages—buds of binding—dew-veils of covers—and the wafting away of bloom and fragrance like the dissemination of fine feelings, bright fancies, and winged thoughts. The Flowers are the periodicals of the earth—the Stars are the periodicals of heaven. With what unfailing regularity do the numbers issue forth! Hesperus and Lucifer! ye are one concern. The Pole-star is studied by all nations. How popular the poetry of the Moon! On what subject does not the Sun throw light? No fear of hurting your eyes by reading Look, then, at all paper periodicals with pleasure, for sake of the Flowers and the Stars. Suppose them all extinct, and life would be like a flowerless earth, a starless heaven. We should soon forget the Seasons. The periodicals of the External would soon all lose their meaning, were there no longer any periodicals of the Internal. These are the lights and shadows of life, merrily dancing or gravely stealing over the dial; remembrancers of the past—teachers of the present—prophets of the future hours. Were they all dead, Spring would in vain renew her promise—wearisome would be the interminable summer days—the fruits of autumn tasteless—the winter ingle blink mournfully round the hearth. What are the blessed Seasons themselves, in nature and in Thomson, but periodicals of a larger growth? We should doubt the goodness of that man's heart, who loved not the periodical literature of earth and sky—who would not weep to see one of its flowers wither—one of its stars fall—one beauty die on its humble bed—one glory drop from its lofty sphere. Let them bloom and burn on—flowers in which there is no poison, stars in which there is no disease—whose blossoms are all sweet, and whose rays are all sanative—both alike steeped in dew, and both, to the fine ear of nature's worshipper, bathed in music. Pomposo never reads Magazine poetry—nor, we presume, ever looks at a field or wayside flower. He studies only the standard authors. He walks only in gardens with high brick walls—and then admires only at a hint from the head-gardener. Pomposo does not know that many of the finest poems of our day first appeared in magazines—or, worse still, in newspapers; and that in our periodicals, daily and weekly, equally with the monthlies and quarterlies, is to be found the best criticism of poetry anywhere extant, superior far, in that unpretending form, to nine-tenths of the learned lucubrations of Germany—though some of it, too, is good—almost as one's heart could desire. What is the circulation even of a popular Good people have said, and it would be misanthropical to disbelieve or discredit their judgment, that our Prose is original—nay, has created a new era in the history of Periodical Literature. Only think of that, Christopher, and up with your Tail like a Peacock! Why, there is some comfort in that reflection, while we sit rubbing our withered hands up and down on these shrivelled shanks. Our feet are on the fender, and that fire is felt on our face; but we verily believe our ice-cold shanks would not shrink from the application of the red-hot poker. Peter has a notion that but for that red-hot poker the fire would go out; so to humour him we let it remain in the ribs, and occasionally brandish it round our head in moments of enthusiasm when the Crutch looks tame, and the Knout a silken leash for Italian Greyhound. Old Simonides—old Mimnermus—old Theognis—old Solon-old Anacreon—old Sophocles—old Pindar—old Hesiod—old Homer—and old Methuselah! What mean we by the word old? All these men are old in three lights—they lived to a raven age—long long ago—and we heard tell of them in our youth. Their glory dawned on us in a dream of life's golden prime—and far away seems now that dawn, as if in another world beyond a million seas! In that use of the word "old," far from us is all thought of dotage or decay. Old are those great personages as the stars are old; a heaven there is in which are seen shining, for ever young, all the most ancient spiritual "orbs of Song." In our delight, too, we love to speak of old Venus and of old Cupid—of old Eve and of old Cleopatra—of old Helen and of old Dalilah; yea, of old Psyche, though her aerial wings How full of endearment "old boy!"—"old girl!" "Old Christopher North!"—"old Maga!" To our simplest sayings age seems to give a consecration which youth reveres. And why may not our hand, withered somewhat though it be, but yet unpalsied, point out aloft to heedless eyes single light or constellation, or lily by herself or in groups unsuspected along the waysides of our mortal pilgrimage? Age like ours is even more lovable than venerable; and, thinking on ourselves, were we a young woman, we should assuredly marry an old man. Indeed, no man ought to marry before thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty; and, were it not that life is so short, soon enough at threescore and ten. At seventy you are sager than ever, though scarcely so strong. You and life love each other as well as ever; yet 'tis unpleasant, when sailing on Windermere or Lochlomond with your bride, to observe the Man in the Honeymoon looking at you with a congratulatory grin of condolence, to fear that the old villain will smile over your grave in the Season of Kirns and Harvest Homes, when the fiddle is heard in every farmhouse, and the bagpipes are lowing like cattle on a thousand hills. Fain would he insure his life on the Tipperary Tables. But the enamoured annuitant is haunted with visions of his own Funeral deploying in a long line of chariots—one at the head of all armed with scythes—through the city, into the wide gates of the Greyfriars. Lovely is his bride in white, nor less so his widow in black—more so in grey, portentous of a great change. Sad, too, to the Sage the thought of leaving his first-born as yet unborn—or if born, haply an elfish Creature with a precocious countenance, looking as if he had begun life with borrowing ten years at least from his own father—auld-farrant as a Fairy, and gash as the Last of the Lairds. Dearly do we love the young—yea, the young of all animals—the young swallows twittering from their straw-built shed—the young lambs bleating on the lea—the young bees, God bless them! on their first flight away off to the heather—the young butterflies, who, born in the morning, will die of old age ere night—the young salmon-fry glorying in the gravel at the first feeling of their fins—the young adders basking, ere they can bite, in the sun, as yet unconscious, like sucking Oh! lad of the lightsome forehead! Thou art smiling at Us; and for the sake of our own Past we enjoy thy Present, and pardon the contumely with which thou silently insultest our thin grey hairs. Just such another "were we at Ravensburg." "Carpe Diem" was then our motto, as now it is yours; "no fear that dinner cool," for we fed then, as you feed now, on flowers and fruits of Eden. We lived then under the reign of the Seven Senses; Imagination was Prime Minister, and Reason, as Lord-Chancellor, had the keeping of the Royal Conscience; and they were kings, not tyrants—we subjects, not slaves. Supercilious as thou art, Puer, art thou as well read in Greek as we were at thy flowering age? Come close that we may whisper in thine ear—while we lean our left shoulder on thine—our right on the Crutch. The time will come when thou wilt be, O Son of the Morning! even like unto the shadow by thy side! Was he not once a mountaineer? If he be a vainglorious boaster, give him the lie, Ben-y-glo and thy brotherhood—ye who so often heard our shouts mixed with the red-deer's belling—tossed back in exultation by Echo, Omnipresent Auditress on youth's golden hills. Know, all ye Neophytes, that three lovely Sisters often visit the old man's solitude—Memory, Imagination, Hope. It would be hard to say which is the most beautiful. Memory has deep, dark, quiet eyes, and when she closes their light, the long eyelashes lie like shadows on her pensive cheeks, that smile faintly as if the dreamer were half asleep—a visionary slumber, which sometimes the dewdrop melting on the leaf will break, sometimes not the thunder-peal with all its echoes. Imagination is a brighter and bolder Beauty, with large lamping eyes of uncertain colour, as if fluctuating with rainbow light, and with features fine as those which Grecian genius gave to the Muses in the Parian Marble, yet in their daring delicacy defined like the face of Apollo. As for Hope All our great prose-writers owe the glory of their power to our great poets. Even Hobbes translated Homer as well—that is as ill—as Thucidydes; the Epic in his prime after eighty; the History in his youth at forty; and it is fearful to dream what the brainful and heartless metaphysician would have been, had he never heard of the Iliad and the Odyssey. What is the greatest of prose-writers in comparison with a great poet? Nay—we shall not be deterred by the fear of self-contradiction (see our "Stroll to Grassmere") from asking who is a great prose-writer? We cannot name one; they all sink in Shakespeare. Campbell finely asks and answers— "Without the smile from partial beauty won, Oh! what were man? a world without a sun." Suppose the world without poetry—how absurd would seem the Sun! Strip the word "phenomena" of its poetical meaning, and forthwith the whole human race, "moving about in worlds realised," would lose their powers of speech. But, thank Heaven! we are Makers all. Inhabiting, we verily believe, a real, and substantial, and palpable outer world, which nevertheless shall one day perish like a scroll, we build our bowers of joy in the Apparent, and lie down to rest in a drapery of Dreams. Thus we often love to dream our silent way even through the noisy world. And dreamers are with dreamers spiritually, though in the body apart; nor wandering at will think they whence they come, or whither they are going, assured by delight that they will reach their journey's end—like a bee, that in many a musical gyration goes humming round men's heads and tree-tops, aimlessly curious in his joy, yet knowing instinctively the straight line that intersects all those airy circles, leading to and fro between his hive in the garden and the honey-dew on the heather hills. What can it be that now recalls to our remembrance a few lines of Esop, the delightful old Fabulist, the Merry and Wise, who set our souls a-thinking and our hearts a-feeling in boyhood, by moral lessons read to them in almost every "What weary woe, what endless strife Bring'st thou to mortal men, O Life! Each hour they draw their breath. Alas! the wretches all despair To flee the ills they cannot bear, But through the gates of Death. And yet how beautiful art Thou On Earth and Sea—and on the brow Of starry Heaven! The Night Sends forth the moon Thee to adorn; And thee to glorify the Morn Restores the Orb of Light. Yet all is full of Pain and Dread; Bedrench'd in tears for ever shed; The darkness render'd worse By gleams of joy—and if by Heaven A Blessing seemeth to be given, It changes to a curse." Even in our paraphrase are not these lines very impressive? In the original they are much more solemn. They are not querulous, yet full of lamentation. We see in them not a weak spirit quarrelling with fate, but a strong spirit subdued by a sense of the conditions on which life has been given; conditions against which it is vain to contend, to which it is hard to submit, but which may yet be borne by a will deriving strength from necessity, and in itself noble by nature. Nor, dark as the doctrine is, can we say it is false. Intellect and Imagination may from doleful experiences have too much generalised their inductions, so as to seem to themselves to have established the Law of Misery as the Law of Life. But perhaps it is only thus that the Truth can be made available to man, as it regards the necessity of Endurance. All is not wretchedness; but the soul seeks to support itself by the belief that it is really so. Holding that creed, it has no excuse for itself, if at any time it is stung to madness by misery, or grovels in the dust in a passion of grief; none, if at any time it delivers itself wholly up, abandoning itself to joy, and acts as if it trusted to the permanence It is not for ordinary minds to attempt giving utterance to such simplicities. On their tongues truths become truisms. Sentiments, that seem always fresh, falling from the lips of moral wisdom, are stale in the mouths of men uninitiated in the greater mysteries. Genius colours common words with an impressive light, that makes them moral to all eyes—breathes into them an affecting music, that steals into all hearts like a revelation and a religion. They become memorable. They pass, as maxims, from generation to generation; and all because the divinity that is in every man's bosom responds to the truthful strain it had of yore itself inspired. Just so with the men we meet on our life-journey. One man is impressive in all his looks and words, on all serious or solemn occasions; and we carry away with us moral impressions from his eyes or lips. Another man says the same things, or nearly so, and perhaps with more fervour, and his locks are silver. But we forget his person in an hour; nor does his voice ever haunt our solitude. Simonides—Solon—Esop!—why do such lines of theirs as those assure us they were Sages? The same sentiments are the staple of many a sermon that has soothed sinners into snoring sleep. Men take refuge even in ocular deception from despair. Over buried beauty, that once glowed with the same passion that consumes themselves, they build a white marble tomb, or a green grass grave, and forget much they ought to remember—all profounder thoughts—while gazing on the epitaph of letters or flowers. 'Tis a vision to their senses, with which Imagination would fain seek to delude Love. And 'tis well that the deception prospers; for what if Love could bid the Are we sermonising overmuch in this our L'Envoy to these our misnamed Recreations? Even a sermon is not always useless; the few concluding sentences are sometimes luminous, like stars rising on a dull twilight; the little flower that attracted Park's eyes when he was fainting in the desert, was to him beauteous as the rose of Sharon; there is solemnity in the shadow of quiet trees on a noisy road; a churchyard may be felt even in a village fair; a face of sorrow passes by us in our gaiety, neither unfelt nor unremembered in its uncomplaining calm; and sweet from some still house in the city stir is "The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise." We daresay you are a very modest person; but we are all given to self-glorification, private men and public, individuals and nations; and every one Era and Ego has been prouder than another of its respective achievements. To hear the Present Generation speak, such an elderly gentleman as the Past Generation begins to suspect that his personal origin lies hid in the darkness of antiquity; and worse—that he is of the Pechs. Now, we offer to back the Past Generation against the Present Generation, at any feat the Present Generation chooses, and give the long odds. Say Poetry. Well, we bring to the scratch a few champions—such as, Beattie, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, Bowles, Burns, Baillie, Campbell, Graham, Montgomery, Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hunt, Hogg, Shelley, Keates, Pollok, Cunningham, Bloomfield, Clare, and risum teneatis amici—Ourselves. "All with waistcoats of red and breeches of blue, And mighty long tails that come swingeing through." And at sight of the cavalcade—for each poet is on his Pegasus—the champions of the Present Generation, accoutred in Heroes, alive or dead, of the Past Generation, we bid you hail! Exceeding happiness to have been born among such Births—to have lived among such Lives—to be buried among such Graves. O great glory to have seen such Stars rising one after another larger and more lustrous—at times, when dilated with delight, more like Moons than Stars—like Seraphs hovering over the earth they loved, though seeming so high up in heaven! To whom now may the young enthusiast turn as to Beings of the same kind with himself, but of a higher order, and therefore with a love that fears no sin in its idolatry? The young enthusiast may turn to some of the living, but he will think more of others who are gone. The dead know not of his love, and he can hold no communion with the grave. But Poets never die—immortal in their works, the Library is the world of spirits; there they dwell, the same as in the flesh, when by meditation most cleansed and purified—yet with some holy change it seems—a change not in them but in us, who are stilled by the stillness, and attribute something supernatural to the Living Dead. Since first this Golden Pen of ours—given us by One who meant it but for a memorial—began, many years ago, to let drop on paper a few careless words, what quires so distained—some pages, let us hope, with durable ink—have accumulated on our hands! Some haughty ones have chosen to say rather, how many leaves have been wafted away to wither? But not a few of the gifted—near and afar—have called on us with other voices—reminding us that long ago we were elected, on sight of our credentials—not indeed without a few black balls—into the Brotherhood. The shelf marked with our initials exhibits some half-dozen volumes only, and has room for scores. It may not be easily found in that vast Library; but, humble member as we are, we feel it now to be For kindness shown when kindness was most needed—for sympathy and affection—yea, love itself—for grief and pity not misplaced, though bestowed in a mistaken belief of our condition, forlorn indeed, but not wholly forlorn—for solace and encouragement sent to us from afar, from cities and solitudes, and from beyond seas and oceans, from brethren who never saw our face, and never may see it, we owe a debt of everlasting gratitude; and life itself must leave our heart, that beats not now as it used to beat, but with dismal trepidation, before it forget, or cease to remember as clearly as now it hears them, every one of the many words that came sweetly and solemnly to us from the Great and Good. Joy and sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by sympathy with them, we acknowledge our brotherhood with all our kind. We do far more. The strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is lightened, while those who at the time are not called to bear, are yet willing to involve themselves in the sorrow of a brother. So soothed by such sympathy may a poor mortal be, that the wretch almost upbraids himself for transient gleams of gladness, as if he were false to the sorrow which he sighs to think he ought to have cherished more sacredly within his miserable heart. One word embraces all these pages of ours—Memorials. Friends are lost to us by removal—for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten. But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some Why so sad a word—Farewell? We should not weep in wishing welfare, nor sully felicity with tears. But we do weep because evil lies lurking in wait over all the earth for the innocent and the good, the happy and the beautiful; and, when guarded no more by our eyes, it seems as if the demon would leap out upon his prey. Or is it because we are so selfish that we cannot bear the thought of losing the sight of the happiness of a beloved object, and are troubled with a strange jealousy of beings unknown to us, and for ever to be unknown, about to be taken into the very heart, perhaps, of the friend from whom we are parting, and to whom in that fear we give almost a sullen farewell? Or does the shadow of death pass over us while we stand for the last time together on the sea-shore, and see the ship with all her sails about to voyage away to the uttermost parts of the earth? Or do we shudder at the thought of mutability in all created things—and know that ere a few suns shall have brightened the path of the swift vessel on the sea, we shall be dimly remembered—at last forgotten—and all those days, months, and years that once seemed eternal, swallowed up in everlasting oblivion? With us all ambitious desires some years ago expired. Far rather would we read than write nowadays—far rather than read, sit with shut eyes and no book in the room—far rather than so sit, walk about alone anywhere "Beneath the umbrage deep That shades the silent world of memory." Shall we live? or "like beasts and common people die?" There is something harsh and grating in the collocation of these words of the "Melancholy Cowley;" yet he meant no harm, for he was a kind, good creature as ever was born, and a true genius. He there has expressed concisely, but too abruptly, the mere fact of their falling alike and together into oblivion. Far better Gray's exquisite words, "On some fond breast the parting soul relies!" The reliance is firm and sure; the "fond breast" is faithful to its trust, and dying, transmits it to another; till after two or three transmissions—holy all, but fainter and dimmer—the pious tradition dies, and all memorial of the love and the delight, the pity and the sorrow, is swallowed up in vacant night. Posthumous Fame! Proud words—yet may they be uttered in a humble spirit. The common lot of man is, after death—oblivion. Yet genius, however small its sphere, if conversant with the conditions of the human heart, may vivify with indestructible life some happy delineations, that shall continue to be held dear by successive sorrowers in this vale of tears. If the name of the delineator continue to have something sacred in its sound—obscure to the many as it may be, or non-existent—the hope of such posthumous fame is sufficient to one who overrates not his own endowments. And as the hope has its root in love and sympathy, he who by his writings has inspired towards himself when in life, some of these feelings in the hearts of not a few who never saw his face, seems to be justified in believing that even after final obliteration of Hic jacet from his tombstone, his memory will be regarded with something of the same affection in his Remains. |