views being misconceived, or their motives misunderstood. Men fall out readily with those, with whom fortune falls out first; but divine is the allegory of Homer, where he describes the children of Jupiter, flying after injustice, and accusing her at the throne of heaven. As a recompense for this invidious cruelty of mankind, the solitude, which visits the cultivated mind in misfortune, is like the solitude of a man, who makes his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the society of himself. A sweet and peaceful constancy unfolds new perceptions of beauty; and he feels himself in possession of a wealth, far more intrinsic than all the golden tripods, that decorated the temples of Apollo or Jupiter Ammon: health; imagination; judgment; and consciousness of virtue.-Blest with these, Fortune scatters over his regrets the veil of oblivion; Time sheds a lustre over his " snowy locks;" Fame erects to him a monument; Honour sketches the design; and Justice prescribes, and dignifies the epitaph. Retiring from life with pleasure, with gratitude, and expectation, In happier scenes to dwell, He bids the cheerless world farewell. The rising and setting of the sun; the splendour of Orion in a night of autumn; and the immensity of the ocean,-far beyond the pencil of painters, or the imagery of poets,-awaken ideas of power, awful and magnificent. Raised above the level of human thought, the soul acknowledges a wild and terrible grandeur; while recognising in the heavens, a Sea, covering sea, Sea without shore; Chaos seems, as it were, to have yielded to order; and infinity, in one solemn picture, astonishes every faculty of the mind. But, Who shall tempt, with wandering feet, The dark unfathomed infinite abyss, And through the palpable obscure find out In the ocean we contemplate a Being, capable of measuring all its waters "in the hollow of his hand1;" and who seems to our finite imaginations to have exercised, in forming it, the greatest possible exertion of omnipotence. Philosophy itself acknowledges, in its contemplation, all the fire and enthusiasm of poetry. In man, and in the works of man, we observe no permanent order. The laws of Nature, on the contrary, for ever are the same: operating with equal constancy, whether in the Scythian, the Atlantic, or the Indian; the Antarctic or Pacific. When the waves swell with storms; the sky darkens with clouds; and rocks reverberate, till echo wearies in repeating their sounds; how vast is the conception of a power, alone capable of commanding obedience to his mandate: "Silence, ye troubled waves; and thou, deep, peace;" Said then th' omnific word;-" your discord cease." Hushed to repose, a calm and sedate majesty glides, as it were, upon the azure; the spirit of Jehovah seems to 66 move upon the face of the waters;" while every wave recoils to the beach in murmurs, seeming to modulate an hymn, more sacred than the orisons of a catholic virgin. 'Isaiah, xl. 12. CHAPTER V. NoT the larger objects of landscape only have the power of administering to our pleasure;-earths and stones1, their component parts, possess the same faculty; if we begin by investigating the first principles of geology, and finish with the conclusion, that the entire substance of our globe is metalline and consequently a combustible compound. But the subject, I am aware, is uncongenial to your taste; I shall, therefore, turn to the consideration of those sounds, odours, and colours, which, contributing, with more or less effect, serve to increase those general sensations of harmony, which are received from the various objects and appearances of nature. Who has not listened, with satisfaction, to the song of the lark, the hum of bees, and the murmuring of rivulets? Mecenas was cured of continual watchfulness by the falling of water; and Pliny relates an anecdote of a Roman nobleman, who would recline upon a couch beneath one of his beech trees, and be lulled to slumber by In some districts of Peru the Indians have no idea of stones. When any of them, therefore, voyage to Borja or Lamas, they are filled with admiration at the sight of them; picking them up, and preserving them for a time, as if they were diamonds. • Vid. Peregrination of Father Sobreviela in 1790 to the lake of Gran 10. Present State of Peru, 1805, 4to. p. 420. Cocama, p. the falling of rain. Of a fine summer's evening, too, how delightful is it to pause upon the side of a hill, which overlooks a favourite village, and listen to the various sounds, which come softened by the distance. II. If some sounds in nature are beautiful, many are there, also, which assume the character of sublimity; and some, which partake of the nature of both. Such are those gentle breathings of the wind, after a storm, resembling sounds produced from the combustion of hydrogen gas; and which Gray, with much felicity, compares to the voices of "Eolian harps;" admitting of agreeable interruptions, like the cadences, which divide one harmonic period from another. To such sounds Mason alludes in the following passage: Can music's voice, can beauty's eye, A charm, so suited to my mind, As drops this little weeping rill; Soft trickling down the moss grown hill? While through the west, where sinks the crimson day, Those notes, which are, at intervals, heard from animals and birds, are equally gratifying to the soul. "The wild dove," says an Arabian poet', "soothes me with her notes; like me she has a dejected heart." Serage Alwarach. III. Of those sounds', which partake of a sublime character, what can be more truly so, than the falling of cataracts; the rolling of thunder; the shrieks and cries of marine birds; or the roaring of the woods at midnight, from which, as Lucretius observes, man first taught himself music :--the deep howlings of the storm, occasionally subsiding into a general hush; and those analogous sounds, with little or no definite meaning, which Ossian calls the "spirit of the mountains," and to which Virgil alludes in his fifth Bucolic3. Which in his tuneful course the wind draws forth From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores. Wordsworth. 2 In another place he says, that man learned music from the language of birds: At liquidas avium voces imitarier ore Ante fuit multo, quam lævia carmina cantu Lib. v. 1. 1379. The first oracle of Greece is said to have been delivered by a black female, who spoke the language of birds. 3 Nam neque me tantûm venientis sibilus Austri, Thus Chenevix in his comedy of the Mantuan Revels. By hill or valley, forest, mead, or fount; Ecl. v. 1. 82. |