true parents of that beauty, placid and perennial in its happiness; not yet marred by the transitory but fictitious splendours of passion and excitement. Justly does the poet declare them in error who would deduce the descent of heartease from Venus and from Bacchus. Fierce agitators they of the heart; parents of Frenzy, progenitor of Crime, and Anguish, and blank Despair. Milton's own personal tastes and habits were too pure to allow him to consider Passion and Intemperance the authors of Mirth. Rural scenes, and the "sweet hour of prime," or temperate conviviality, cheered with music and elevated by intellectual intercourse, were his habitual resources for external enjoyment. He has given the same pure tastes to his cheerful man, and he has contrasted them with the feverish intoxication of passion, in the double picture he has drawn of Eve before and Eve after the commission of crime. The scenes of conjugal love and happiness in the fourth book of Paradise Lost afford the most powerful contrast to the excitement occasioned by criminal indulgence, as pictured in the ninth. The strains of the Allegro come over the senses of the fevered and toil-worn victims of care and labour like the sound of the harp, when the strings are swept by the same beloved hand which in distant years and scenes awakened harmonies that "lapped us in Elysium." The jealousies of rivalry, the anxieties of business, the cares that derive their very intensity from the depth of our affections, are charmed, like the Gorgon snakes beneath the lyre of Orpheus, into temporary oblivion. The heart expands beneath the influence of " a purer æther, a diviner air;" and we recognise the true divinity of our nature in the tranquil consciousness of a felicity beyond the control of external circumstances; a felicity which the world is equally unable to confer or to withdraw. Yet the critics would have us believe this charming little poem to be a mere pendant to the Penseroso; written, not from any original impulse, but to complete a double picture. Away with any such unworthy notion! Each, indeed, has its own beauties and its peculiar merit; they mutually set off each other: but neither of these matchless twins may be sacrificed to enhance the other's value. If the loftier spirit of imaginative poetry pervade the impersonation of the meditative man, it is because the mood in which the mind identifies itself with natural objects, and attributes to them its own sentiments, in which the pensive wanderer hears his melancholy echoed in the strains of the nightingale, and sees it imaged in the bewildered moon,· -is the most mysterious and elevated of which the mind of man is capable. Few are the beings so organised as to be susceptible, in any high degree, of emotions so subtle; few have pinions powerful enough to soar to these heights of contemplation. On the other hand, the sunny light-heartedness of innocence and health beams on many a cheek, and irradiates many a heart. There is none so dull as not to recognise its presence, or so brutal as not to rejoice in its influence. Here, therefore, the poet's task is easier and more intelligible, but we are not on that account to infer that he entered upon it with less pleasure, or executed it with less care. A hundred merry hearts echo the Allegro for one which can sympathise in the mystic sublimity of the Pen seroso. WHERE IS YOUR HAME, MY BONNIE BIRD? BY MISS E. L. MONTAGU. I. "WHERE is your hame, my bonnie bird, And wherefore chant ye wi' a voice Your sweet voice pours amain, "I hae a bonnie hame, gudewife, A hame on yonder tree; An' it's my sweet mate frae out her nest That sings again to me. An' oh, I chant the lee-lang day, That my bonnie mate may hear; An' the callow young aneath her wing May ken that I am near." II. "Whence do ye come, my bonnie hound, Wi' footstep like the fawn; An' whither, whither hae ye been Sin I missed ye at the dawn? 66 Oh, did ye gae the game to track, Or hear the laverock sing; Or did ye gae the deer to chase, Or plover on the wing?" Oh, I hae been to the field, gudewife, I did na track the fallow deer, But I drove the vulture frae the dead, III. "And why gae ye sae sad, my heart, An' fill the woods wi' sighing; An' why think ye o' the battle-field, Where the clay-cauld dead are lying? An' why beneath the auld aik tree And ever pour the saut, saut tear, E. V. RIPPINGILLE. MR. E. V. RIPPINGILLE, although he has long enjoyed a high reputation among his brother artists, has been but slenderly appreciated by the public at large. To the frequenters of exhibitions he is known chiefly by his admirable pictures of "The Post Office," "The Recruiting Party," "The Ordeal by Touch," and "Going to the Fair." He has, however, contributed but little to either the Royal Academy or British Institution; and the circumstance of his pictures having rarely or ever been engraved, has considerably diminished his opportunities of acquiring the popularity to which his merits so indisputably entitle him. Perhaps his works, although remarkable for discrimination of character, and elaborate beauty of execution, are, for the most part, painted in too low a tone to admit of their being translated to black and white advantageously. Certain it is, that he seldom superadds to the naked truth of his delineations those embellishments which are so necessary to satisfy the refined and somewhat fastidious taste of modern times. His rustics are mere rustics, and nothing more; they are invested in a remarkable degree with the peculiar character the painter desires to assign to them, but he rarely attempts to catch a grace" not directly warranted by his subject. He presents Nature, in short, As truth will have her and as bards will not. |