and yet contribute to its beauty. On the other hand, I doubt if the Cathedral of Strasburg would create the emotion of sublimity, notwithstanding its towering magnitude, and dusky colour, were it an awkward and misshapen mass, and without beauty in the form and finishing of its details. In short, the qualities of beauty and sublimity shade so insensibly into one another, that it seems impossible to draw a strict line of demarcation between them. Any proposition for this purpose I should consider open to attack.

C. Mine, I believe, will apply better to mental, than material, objects. In a poem, for example, beautiful passages ought to be perspicuous; for beauty is a quality which should be perceptible at once, and require no study to find it out. Beautiful images, too, for the same reason, should be presented with all the illumination and clearness of outline which verbal portraiture can produce. If they are shown under a faint and uncertain light, their beauty may be suspected. But obscurity in a poem often creates or heightens the sublime; and when this is not the case, it is offensive.

R. Your doctrine I believe might pass, when not too strictly stated; for if sifted with rigour, I suppose exceptions might be found to it. At present, however, I shall only remark, on the subject of obscurity, that, though among the most powerful instruments in the hands of the poet, it is one which requires the nicest judgment to manage with success, and in the management of which, I suspect, our greatest writers have sometimes erred. When describing objects which are grand, because incomprehensible, if, in the impatient throes of their genius to express its new conception, they inadvertently take the aid of a single obvious and familiar idea, it instantly degrades the whole; as a drop of water thrown among vapour makes the dim and flickering volume collapse to its original bulk. Superhuman agents should always be presented under such a haze, as to deter us from attempting to form a clear image of them. If they are described by something which is exclusively human, the mind will

eagerly catch at the help to comprehension supplied by such a hint, and bring down the unearthly being to a conformity with itself. The gods of antiquity are seldom sublime; because the poets exhibit them without that cincture of holy and unapproachable shade, and without that apparent dread or despair of explanation, which repels every hope of understanding, or even imagining their attributes. When Ovid makes Jupiter sculk with a paramour under the trees, because, he says, they will thus escape the eye of Juno, he is not only human, but meanly human. Even when the gods are introduced more respectably, sitting in their council-room, and making speeches; the description is so circumstantial, and the agency so exactly like our own, as to make us forget that there is any difference between the nature of the agents. Our fancy resorts to a court of Aldermen, or of India Directors, and paints the scene from a counterpart, in which sublimity is the last thing it should look for. I know not if Milton himself can be acquitted of similar oversights; though, of all poets, he was perhaps the most successful in availing himself of the obscure, and breathing round his work that atmosphere of hallowing and overawing mystery, in which objects are beheld, not only superior in magnitude, but altogether dissimilar to every thing earthly, in form, character, and substance. The umbered horrors of his infernal assembly must be felt by all; yet its debates and proceedings so nearly resemble a council of war, in a discomfited army, that we can scarcely prevent the mind from flying to this prototype; and by employing it to give distinctness to our conceptions, we must, in so far, impair their portentous sublimity. The same sort of objection will apply to the angel conversing over his dessert of fruit with Adam and Eve: And when two persons of the Trinity are represented as communing, and giving alternate opinions on the disorders of creation, we gladly turn to the explanatory picture of a human father and son, in earnest conference on matters of deep concern; and, like school-boys whom a translation withdraws from the original, we dwell on the last of these two scenes, till

we almost forget that there is any difference of dignity between them. The Godhead is an object so essentially unlike ourselves, and every thing conceivable, that the mind is disposed to rest in the belief of its mere infinite existence, without any struggle to form discriminate ideas of its nature and actions. But when Milton analyses the specific motives, and traces the succession of thoughts in the divine mind, and especially when he makes it resort to the artificial aids of logic and eloquence, this humble disposition insensibly abates. We obtain a measure for what before was infinite; we compare, and compute the difference between the wis dom of the Deity and that of man, to which the poet makes it so nearly similar in its operations; and by the very act of venturing to do so, the greatness of the former sinks to insignificance, in contrast with what we believed it, while wrapt in the unfathomable obscurity of abstract entity.

C. The error seems to be still greater, when a superhuman being is made to employ, not only the mental, but the material instruments, which, under the pressure of necessity, men have invented to assist their feebleness. What can be more ludicrous, than the proposal, in the Iliad, of Jupiter to the other gods, that he and they should pull at the opposite ends of a chain, to try their strength? As we read this passage, we can scarcely forbear a smile at the boyish tugging of the two parties, and almost think we hear them crying Yo ho. Soon after, the same god finds himself unable to predict the fates of two combatants, till he weigh them, like a huckster of prophecy, in a pair of scales; a conceit which Milton has been so injudicious as to copy. Milton also makes the Creator take the help of a pair of compasses, in sketching the circuit of the future universe; a mechanical particularity fatal to the brief, emphatic, and unexplained affirmation, that he called it into existence "by the word of his power."

R. You would advise the poet to state the results, but not the processes, on the same principle which made Johnson say to Oglethorpe, who was a good thinker, but a bad

speaker, "When you preside in courts of justice, give your judgments, but not your reasons. Very bad reasons may be given for very good judgments."

"

C. True. But let me add, that these boni Homeri do not mend matters by the stateliness of their verses, nor by telling us that the paltry implements were made of gold. This, on the contrary, betrays their consciousness that every extrinsic decoration was required, to withdraw attention from the intrinsic meanness of the idea.

R. Like the husband, in the story of the three wishes, who consoles his wife, when the pudding attached itself to her nose, with a promise, that as his last remaining wish should be for wealth, he would enclose the officious and offensive proboscis in a sil

ver case.

C. Milton's description of Satan is deservedly admired, for, in my opinion, notwithstanding the present hypercritical humour into which we have slid, it exhibits the noblest conception of such a being which poet or painter ever formed. Yet even here, perhaps, he is chargeable with a slip of the kind which we are discussing, by making that circumstantial and exact, which should rather have been abandoned to the exaggeration of fancy. The staff of the fiend is said to have been as tall as the mast of an Admiral's ship. Here we have a given standard, by which, like an ellwand, we can settle the stature of him who should have been dimly shewn to us "towering above all height." According to the usual proportion of the staff to the man, he must have been about 240 feet: a figure, to be sure, of terrific procerity, and sufficient for grenadier size, even in an army of demons; but its sublimity would, I think, have been more complete, had it defied altogether the possibility of measureinent, by being half-shrouded in such a phrase as Virgil's caput inter nubila condit.

R. An idea in the 6th book seems to me still more unguarded. The invisible potency of thunder, and the spiritual energies with which the AImighty baffles his foes, are conceived to be something incomprehensibly great; far exceeding, and totally dif

ferent from all terrestrial means of offence, till the poet introduces the devils employing pieces of ordnance, by which, for a while at least, the battle is kept in suspense. He thus offers a precise datum for calculating the force of those terrors, under which, while they remained indistinct and mysterious, our imagination sunk, without daring to form a speci

fic idea of their nature. But this diffidence ceases, as soon as we know that they were just sufficient to overcome the power of artillery.

V. Ohe jam satis! We are really driving too fast. Were it possible for Milton to overhear our literary gossip, I have little doubt that he would smile with scorn at our presumption. Arrogant, conceited, and impertinent as modern criticism has become, it is scarcely credible that three civil gentlemen should, by a sober glass of wine, be so strangely acidulated into as many Zoili; and for every filbert they break, should find a blemish in that divine poem, which only one individual, since the world began, was gifted with ability to execute, and which approaches nearer than any other production of human genius to a work of inspiration. Addison, I think, has praised some of the passages which have censuyou red; and, with all deference for the wisdom of the censurers, I shall still believe, that,

What Milton wrote, and Addison approv'd,

Must sure be right.

(Here the footman entered, and said that Mrs Carter was expecting us in the drawing-room.)

V. This is most seasonable. We shall make a good exchange of cant for coffee, and terminate our aspiring dialogue at its highest point of elevation. It began with my English, and ends with the battle of the angels.

R. Yet you will find that all our topics were connected. The fila

ment, to be sure, was sometimes so fine as to be scarcely visible, but was never entirely dissevered. When the stream of conversation is permitted to flow as easy and unconstrained as ours has been, its course will generally follow the line of beauty, never broken, yet ever bending; and

VOL. IX.

I would counsel him, who delights in the luxury of such a conversation, never to decline the offer of a Chance Dinner. G. RELTON.

THE CARAVAN IN THE DESERTS.

CALL it not Loneliness, to dwell
To pierce the forest's twilight maze,
In woodland shade, or hermit dell;
Or from the Alpine summit gaze;
For Nature there all joyous reigns,
And fills with life her wild domains:
A bird's light wing may break the air,

A fairy stream may murmur there;
A bee the mountain-rose may seek,
A chamois bound from peak to peak;
An eagle, rushing to the sky,

Wake the deep echoes with his cry;
And still some sound, thy heart to cheer,
Some voice, though not of man, is near.
But he, whose weary step has trac'd
Mysterious Afric's awful waste,
Whose eye Arabia's wilds hath view'd,
Can tell thee what is Solitude!
It is, to traverse lifeless pìains
Where everlasting stillness reigns,
And billowy sands, and dazzling sky,
Seem boundless, as Infinity!
It is, to sink with speechless dread
In scenes unmeet for mortal tread,
Sever'd from earthly being's trace,
Alone amidst unmeasur'd space.
"Tis noon-and fearfully profound
Silence is on the desert round.

Supreme she reigns, above, beneath,

With all the attributes of Death!
No bird the blazing heav'n may dare,
No insect 'bide the scorching air;
The ostrich, though of sun-born race,
Seeks a more shelter'd dwelling-place;
The lion slumbers in his lair,
The serpent shuns the noontide glare;
But slowly winds the patient train
Of camels, o'er the blasted plain,
Where they and man may brave alone
The terrors of the burning zone.
Faint not, oh Pilgrims! though on high
As a volcano flame the sky;
Shrink not, though, as a furnace glow,

The dark red seas of sand below;
Though not a shadow, save your own,
Across the dread expanse is thrown:
Mark, where your feverish lips to lave,
Wide spreads the fresh transparent wave!
Urge your tir'd camels on, and take
Your rest beside yon glist'ning lake;
Thence, haply, cooler gales may spring,
And fan your brows with lighter wing.
Lo! nearer now, its glassy tide
Reflects the date-tree on its side:
Speed on! pure draughts and genial air,
And verdant shade await you there;
3 E

tame;

Faint with despondence, worn with toil,
They sink upon the burning soil;
Resign'd, amidst those realms of gloom,
To find their death-bed and their tomb.
But onward still!-yon distant spot
Of verdure can deceive you not.
Yon palms, which tremulously seem'd
Reflected as the waters gleam'd,
Along th' horizon's verge display'd,
Still rear their slender colonnade,
A landmark, guiding o'er the plain,
The Caravan's exhausted train.

Fair is that little Isle of Bliss,
The desert's emerald Oasis.
A rainbow on the torrent's wave,
A gem, embosom'd in the grave,
The sunbeam of a stormy day,
Its beauty's image might convey;
Beauty, in horror's lap that sleeps,
While silence round her vigil keeps.
Rest, weary Pilgrims! calmly laid
To slumber in th' Acacia-shade.

And oh! to Afric's child how dear!
The voice of fountains gushing near!
Sweet be your slumbers! and your dreams,
Of waving groves and rippling streams!
Far be the serpent's venom'd coil
From the brief respite won by toil!
Far be the awful shades of those
Who deep beneath the sands repose,
The hosts, to whom the desert's breath
Bore swift and stern the call of death!
Sleep! nor may scorching blast invade
The freshness of th' Acacia-shade;
But gales of heav'n your spirits bless
With life's best balm-forgetfulness;
Till night from many an urn diffuse
The treasures of her world of dews.
The day hath clos'd-the moon on high
Walks in her cloudless majesty.

A thousand stars to Afric's heav'n
Serene magnificence have given ;
Pure beacons of the sky, whose flame
Shines forth eternally the same.
Blest be their beams! whose holy light*
Shall guide the camel's footsteps right,
And lead, as with a torch divine,
The Pilgrim to his Prophet's shrine.
-Rise! bid your Isle of Palms adieu,
Again your lonely march pursue,
While winds of night are freshly blowing,
And heav'ns with softer beauty glowing.

-Tis silence all-the solemn scene
Wears, at each step, a ruder mien ;
For giant-rocks, at distance pil'd,
Cast their deep shadows o'er the wild.
Darkly they rise-what eye hath view'd
The caverns of their solitude?
Away!-within those awful cells,
The savage lord of Afric dwells!
Heard ye his voice ?-the Lion's roar
Swells as when billows break on shore;
Well may the camel shake with fear,
And the steed pant-his foe is near.
Haste, light the torch-bid watch-fires
throw

Far o'er the waste a ruddy glow ;

bruise

Their aromatic breath diffuse;
Where softer light the sunbeams pour,
Through the tall palm and sycamore,
And the rich date luxuriant spreads
Its pendent clusters o'er your heads.
Nature once more, to seal your eyes,
Murmurs her sweetest lullabies;
Again each heart the music hails,
Of rustling leaves and sighing gales;

* The mirage, or nitrous sand assuming the appearance of water.

+ The extreme languor and despondence produced by the Simoom, even when its effects are not fatal, have been described by many travellers.

Of flames that scare him from his prey!
Within their magic circle press,
Oh wanderers of the wilderness!
Heap high the pile, and, by its blaze,
Tell the wild tales of elder days:
Arabia's wondrous lore-that dwells
On warrior deeds and wizard spells,
Enchanted domes, 'mid scenes like these,
Rising to vanish with the breeze;
Gardens, whose fruits are gems, that shed
Their light where mortal may not tread,
And genii, o'er whose pearly halls,
Th' eternal billow heaves and falls.
With charms like these, of mystic power,
Watchers! beguile the midnight hour.
Slowly that hour hath roll'd away,
And star by star withdraws its ray.