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ings, of its delicate touches, of its delightful allusions, of its illustrative associations. Who that reads the poetry of Gray does not feel that it is the refinement of classical taste which gives such inexpressible vividness and transparency to his diction? Who that reads the concentrated sense and melodious versification of Dryden and Pope, does not perceive in them the disciples of the old school, whose genius was inflamed by the heroic verse, the terse satire, and the playful wit of antiquity? Who that meditates over the strains of Milton does not feel that he drank deep

At "Siloa's brook, that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God;"

that the fires of his magnificent mind were lighted by coals from ancient altars?

From "Address at Harvard," 1826.

MODERN AUTHORSHIP.

JOSEPH STORY.

AUTHORS no longer depend upon the smiles of a favored few. The patronage of the great is no longer submissively entreated or exultingly proclaimed. Their patrons are the public: their readers are the civilized world. They address themselves not to the present generation alone, but aspire to instruct posterity. No blushing dedications seek an easy passport to fame, or flatter the perilous condescension of pride. No illuminated letters flourish on the silky page, asking admission to the courtly drawing-room. Authors are no longer the humble companions or dependants of the nobility; but they constitute the chosen ornaments of society, and are welcomed to the gay circles of fashion and the palaces of princes. Theirs is no longer an unthrifty vocation, closely allied to penury; but an elevated profession, maintaining its thousands in lucrative pursuits. It is not with them as it was in the days of Milton, whose immortal Paradise Lost" drew five sterling pounds, with a contingent of five more, from the reluctant bookseller.

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My lord Coke would hardly find good authority, in our day, for his provoking commentary on the memorable statute of the fourth Henry, which declares that "none henceforth shall use to multiply gold or silver, or use the craft of multiplication;" in which he gravely enumerates five classes of beggars, ending the catalogue, in his own quaint phraseology, with "poetasters," and repeating, for the benefit of young apprentices of the law, the sad admonition,

"Sæpe pater dixit, Studium, quid inutile tentas?
Mæonides nullas ipse reliquit opes."

From "Address at Harrard,” 1826.

9

THE DEMEANOR OF BOOKS.

JOHN MILTON.

Ir is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life. From "Areopagitica."

NATIONAL VIGOR.

JOHN MILTON.

As in a body when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital, but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, by casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs, and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, des

tined to become great and honorable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.

From "Areopagitica."

ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

GEORGE P. MARSH.

Or all countries known in history, the North American republic is most conspicuously marked by the fusion, or rather the absence of rank and social distinctions, by community of interests, by incessant and all-pervading intercommunication, by the universal diffusion of education, and the abundant facilities of access, not only to the periodical conduits, but to the permanent reservoirs of knowledge. The condition of England is in all these respects closely assimilated to that of the United States; and not only the methods, but the instruments, of popular instruction are fast becoming the same in both; and there is a growing conviction among the wise of the two great empires, that the highest interests of both will be promoted by reciprocal good-will and unrestricted intercourse, perilled by jealousies and estrangement.

Favored, then, by the mighty elective affinities, the powerful harmonic attractions, which subsist between the Americans and the Englishmen as brothers of one blood, one speech, one faith, we may reasonably hope that the Anglican tongue on both sides of the Atlantic, as it grows in flexibility, comprehensiveness, expression, wealth, will also more and more clearly manifest the organic unity of its branches, and that national jealousies, material rivalries, narrow interests, will not disjoin and shatter that great instrument of social advancement, which God made one, as he made one the spirit of the nations that use it. From "Lectures on the English Language."

DEGREES OF IMAGINATION.

LEIGH HUNT.

THERE are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as follows:-First,

that which presents to the mind any object or circumstance in everyday life; as when we imagine a man holding a sword, or looking out of a window;-second, that which presents real, but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves, or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier ;-third, that which combines character, and events directly imitated from real life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable parts of the histories of Priam and Macbeth, or what may be called natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural ;-fourth, that which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as Homer's gods, and Shakspeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears, Ariosto's hippogriff, &c. ;-fifth, that which, in order to illustrate or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the coming of night-time; sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a word, as in Milton's "motes that people the sunbeams;" sometimes in concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing, past or even future, as in the "starry Galileo" of Byron, and that ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet "murdered" applied to the yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio

So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode towards fair Florence;-

sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton's grey-fly winding its “sultry horn," which epithet contains the heat of a summer's day;-sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a variety of circumstances take color from one, like nature seen with jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine; as when in Lycidas, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death; or, in the Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking of love

or in the

Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno,

E d'amor ragionasse quella riva !—

Orlando Innamorato, Canto iii.

or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself; witch element" of the tragedy of Macbeth and the May-day night of Faust;-seventh, and last, that which by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description.

From "Imagination and Fancy."

THE CATARACT OF NIAGARA.

CHATEAUBRIAND.

WE arrived at the brink of the cataract, which had before announced itself by a terrible roar. It is formed by the river Niagara, which unites Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The height of the fall is one hundred and forty-four feet; from Lake Erie to the precipice the descent is quite rapid; and at the moment of the fall, it is less a river than a sea, whose whelming torrents press together as if into the hungry mouth of a great gulf. The cataract is divided into two branches, and is bent like a horse-shoe. Between the two falls is a small island, which hangs with all its trees over the chaos of waters. The volume of the river which is precipitated at the south, is rounded into a vast cylinder, and then unrolls itself into a sheet of snow, shining in the sunlight with every variety of color. That which falls at the east descends in a frightful shadow; one might fancy a column of water from the ancient deluge. A thousand rainbows curve and mingle in the abyss. The wave, as it strikes the quivering rock, is thrown back in whirlwinds of foam, which rise higher than the forest, like the smoke of a vast furnace. Pines, chestnuts, rocks cut into fantastic forms, are the decorations of the scene. Eagles, borne along by the current of air, descend whirling into the bottom of the gulf; where also are often found the broken carcases of elks and bears.

Translated from "Le Génie du Christianisme."

ITALY.

HORACE BINNEY WALLACE.

AN era is it in the history of any man, when for the first time he crosses the Alps. A sympathy is touched and developed, that shall vibrate and expand for ever. Upon that soil, we learn that Imagination and Sentiment are the Italian elements of our nature. All things seem ideal, poetic, visionary. Splendors that the northern world knows only by half-heavenly flashes that fade before they can be felt, here are natural and permanent. From the valleys and plains of Italy the lustre of summer is never wholly withdrawn, and winter seems but a tardier spring. Elsewhere we have glimpses of her life in conservatories, and when we enter the guarded retreats where orange-trees and olives and myrtles are garnered up as creating around them a kind of sacred soullife, we say, "This is like Italy." Its atmosphere is fragrance, its soil is beauty, its canopy a glory unimaginable. Its air is a prism to turn the common light into enchantment. What melodies of color,-violet, rose, purple,—roll along its steeps! Yet the true fascination of Italy

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