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which must have penetrated the mind of Spenser, ere he conceived the glorious idea of

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Heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb?

Nor is it to be supposed that the lawyer, one whose youthful days, the days of the romance and chivalry of the imagination, are spent in poring over volumes, which can only operate in rendering "darkness visible," and in wrapping up that in mystery and clouds which nature intended to form as clear as "daylight truth's salubrious skies," should unlearn what he has learned; and, deeming

" where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise,"

at length accord to the omnipotence of Virtue, and agree with Milton in his Comus,' that the lion of the desert itself would turn away abashed from the face of innocent beauty. Lord Mansfield, ere he devoted his attention to "law's dry musty arts," shewed so great an aptitude for polite letters, that Pope himself bewails

"How sweet an Ovid was in Murray lost.".

And Judge Blackstone, ere he thought of com

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posing his Commentaries on the Laws, wrote verses, which at least augured well of what he might have accomplished in that way. Akenside brought out his Pleasures of Imagination,' when a very young man; took to the study of medicine, was made physician to the Queen, and then published lyrics, which nobody cares about reading.

As Wordsworth most truly and poetically observes,

"The world is too much with us, early and late.”

Counting-houses and ledgers have taken the place of generosity, romance, and chivalry; and though they have made us richer, have undoubtedly added little to our intellectual character as a nation. Life has become a scene of everyday experience, of sickness, dullness, and formality; etiquette has succeeded to simplicity, and ardour of spirit has left its place to politeness. In a short time, it will be impossible for us to conceive of such men as Alfred, or Lord Surrey, James Crichton, or Sir Philip Sidney.

The poetry of life is the sublimated essence of human existence, and not the every-day casualties that surround us and beset us; consequent

ly an incessant intercourse with these alone, and the perpetual exercise of the judging and reasoning faculties, obliging the imagination to lie unused and dormant, has a deadening, a chilling, a withering influence on the mind, and tends entirely to obliterate those feelings and aspirations, on which the production of poetry depends. The poetical constitution, above all others, is remarkable for its delicacy, as the fineness of its conceptions sufficiently indicates; and it, no doubt, is as impossible to preserve this undestroyed, and untainted, amid the dull routine of the world, as it would be to expect fleetness and nimbleness in the animal that has been accustomed to the slow step and unvarying paces of a loaded wain. The beauty of the fields and the sublimity of the mountains come to be considered in no other light, but that of their utility, as being barren of pasture, or rich of grain, what rent they bring, and what is the extent of their acres. The ocean, whose waters teach" Eternity,-Eternity, and Power," comes to be regarded, only in as far as it furnishes a communication between us and distant lands, for the extension of commerce. Man, "with the human face divine," is not considered so much

as a Being of majestic attributes, and an immor.. tal destiny, but as being of few days, and full of trouble, a petty insignificant creature, full of fraud and deceit, and selfishness, and subject to an infinite variety of diseases and infirmities. Woman is not the demi-celestial object, without whose presence earth would be a wilderness, the paragon of ideal beauty, subsisting on the strength of the affections, which bind her to stronger man; but a necessary part of society, increasing its comforts, and keeping up the race. Childhood is not the state of innocent beauty and simplicity, of pure thoughts and warm feelings, but the idiocy of our minds, which requires training, and correction, and cultivation, to render us sober men, and useful citizens.

These are the common opinions of society, the chilling and disheartening truths, which we hear from all lips "every day, and all day long," -and they are unpoetical. How is it to be supposed, then, that the men who are continually exposed to the withering influence of these current maxims, and who, to preserve unanimity, are obliged to echo them back, and to concur in their infallibity-how is it to be supposed, that they are to throw off the load that

oppresses them-to forget what they hear every day-and to shut their eyes to every thing that is passing around them—and, in despite of their contracted and desolate view of human nature and the external world, form a bower of happiness for themselves, in the paradise of imagination ?*

ADDISON'S OPINION OF BLANK VERSE.

"MR. ADDISON was not a good-natured man, and very jealous of rivals. Being one evening in company with Philips, and the poems of Blenheim and The Campaign being talked of, he made it his whole business to run down blank verse. Philips never spoke till between eleven and twelve o'clock, nor even then could do it in his defence. It was at Jacob Tonson's; and a gentleman in the company ended the dispute by asking Jacob what poem he ever got the most by? Jacob immediately named Milton's Paradise Lost."

SPENCE.

* We are indebted for this able article to " Blackwood's

Magazine."

VOL. III.

C

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