Even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are formed.-Childe Harold. Yet monsters from thy large increase we find, Engendered in the slime thou leav'st behind.-DRYDEN: The Medal. I am not altogether of such clay As rots into the souls of those whom I survey.-Childe Harold. Had formed me of another sort of clay.-CHURCHILL. What exile from himself can flee? To zones though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where'er I be, The blight of life, the demon Thought.-Childe Harold. Patriæ quis exul se quoque fugit?-HORACE: Ode to Grosphus. Vide also Epist. XI. 28. To-morrow for the Mooa we depart, But not to-night,-to-night is for the heart.-BYRON: The Island. Cras ingens iterabimus equor.-HORACE: Ode to Manutius Plancus. To-morrow we shall traverse the great brine.) DRYDEN, alluding to his work, says, When it was only a confused mass of thoughts tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and there either to be chosen or rejected by the judgment.—Rival Ladies (1664). : BYRON thus appropriates the idea : As yet 'tis but a chaos Of darkly brooding thoughts; my fancy is In her first work, more nearly to the light Holding the sleeping images of things For the selection of the pausing judgment.-Doge of Venice, I. 2. And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep.-BYRON: Don Juan. RICHARDSON had said, long before, Indeed, it is to this deep concern that my levity is owing; for I struggle and struggle, and try to buffet down my cruel reflections as they rise; and when I cannot, I am forced to try to make myself laugh that I may not ery ; for one or other I must do: and is it not philosophy carried to the highest pitch for a man to conquer such tumults of soul as I am sometimes agitated by, and in the very height of the storm to quaver out a horse-laugh? Clarissa Harlowe, Let. 84. There is an Italian proverb used, in the extravagance of flattery, to compliment a handsome lady, expressive of this idea :"When nature made thee, she broke the mould.” BYRON uses it in the closing lines of his monody on the death of Sheridan : Sighing that Nature formed but one such man, And broke the die,-in moulding Sheridan. SHAKSPEARE also says, in the second stanza of Venus and Adonis, Nature that made thee, with herself at strife, Saith that the world hath ending with thy life, Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas. (From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step.) This saying, commonly ascribed to NAPOLEON, was borrowed by him from TOM PAINE, whose works were translated into French in 1791, and who says,— The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again. Tom Paine, in turn, adopted the idea from HUGH Blair, who says, in one place,— It is indeed extremely difficult to hit the precise point where true wit ends and buffoonery begins. In another, It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfect bombast Finally, BLAIR borrowed the saying from LONGINUS, a celebrated Greek critic and rhetorical writer, who, in a Treatise On the Sublime, uses the same expression, with this slight modification, that he makes the transition a gradual one, while Blair, Paine, and Napoleon make it but a step.* A curious instance of bathos occurs in Dr. Mavor's account of Cook's voyages:-"The wild rocks raised their lofty summits till they were lost in the clouds, and the valleys lay covered with everlasting snow. Not a tree was to be seen, nor even a shrub big enough to make a tooth-pick." Where highest woods, impenetrable To sun or starlight, spread their umbrage broad And brown as evening.-MILTON. The shades of eve come slowly down, The woods are wrapped in deeper brown.-SCOTT: Lady of the Lake. The term brown, applied to the evening shade, is derived from the Italian, the expression "fa l'imbruno" being commonly used in Italy to denote the approach of evening. 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore; And coming events cast their shadows before. CAMPBELL: Lochiel's Warning. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.-SHELLEY: Defence of Poetry. A similar form of expression occurs in PAUL'S Epistle to the Hebrews, x. 1. The wolf's long howl by Oonalaska's shore. CAMPBELL: Pleasures of Hope. Stolen from a line in an obscure poem called the Sentimental Sailor: The screaming eagle's shriek that echoes wild, The wolf's long howl in dismal concert joined, &c. Perhaps in some lone, dreary, desert tower That Time had spared, forth from the window looks, While from above, the owl, musician dire, Screams hideous, harsh, and grating to the ear. BRUCE: Loch Leven. In the Fragments attributed to OSSIAN by Baron de Harold, Fingal paints the following beautiful word-picture : I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they are desolate: the flames had resounded in the halls, and the voice of the people is heard no more; the stream of Cutha was removed from its place by the fall of the walls; the thistle shoots there its lowly head; the moss whistled to the winds; the fox looked out of the windows, and the rank grass of the walls waved round his head; desolate is the dwelling of Morna: silence is in the house of her fathers. And again : The dreary night owl screams in the solitary retreat of his mouldering ivycovered tower.-Larnul, the Song of Despair. The Persian poet quoted by Gibbon also says,— The spider hath hung with tapestry the palace of the Cæsars; the owl singeth her sentinel-song in the watch-towers of Afrasiab.-FIRDOUSI. What 'tis you are, and we must shortly be ?-BLAIR: Grave. The dead! the much-loved dead! Who doth not yearn to know What heart but asks, with ceaseless tone, For some sure knowledge of its own?-MARY E. LEE. Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven; and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness-broken body.-FULler. The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made. Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become, As they draw near to their eternal home.-WALLER: Divine Poesie. Oh! let no mass be sung, No ritual read; In silence lay me down Among the dead.-HEINE: Memento Mori. The great German poet was evidently familiar with Horace : Absint inani funere næniæ, Luctusque turpes et querimonia; Mitte supervacuos honores.-Lib. II. Carmen 20. I am old and blind; Men point at me as smitten by God's frown; Yet am I not cast down. I am weak, yet strong; I murmur not that I no longer see; O merciful One! When men are farthest, then art Thou most near; Thy glorious face Is leaning toward me, and its holy light On my bended knee I recognise Thy purpose clearly shown; I have naught to fear! This darkness is the shadow of Thy wing: Beneath it I am almost sacred,-here Can come no evil thing, &c.-ELIZABETH LLOYD., The resemblance of these lines to the following passage from MILTON'S Second Defence of the People of England is so striking that we are inclined to regard them as a paraphrase: Let me then be the most feeble creature alive, so long as that feebleness serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and immortal spirit, so long as in that obscurity in which I am enveloped the light of Divine Presence more clearly shines. Then in proportion as I am weak, I shall be invincibly strong; and in proportion as I am blind, I shall more clearly see. Oh that I may thus be perfected by feebleness, and irradiated by obscurity! And indeed in my blindness I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the favor of the Deity, who regards me with more tenderness and compassion in proportion as I am able to behold nothing but himself. Alas for him who insults me, who maligns and merits public execration! For the divine law not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack,-not indeed so much from the privation of my sight, as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity, and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure. Prototypes. THE FALLS OF LANARK. THE following lines in an album formerly kept at the inn at Lanark evidently suggested to Southey his playful verses on The Cataract of Lodore: What fools are mankind, And how strangely inclined |