neglect is merited. Such men not only feel most acutely disparagement and contempt, but they are pleased and elevated in their own estimation, more than they would willingly allow, by any little token of admiration or respect on the part of the public, not so much from any value which they attach to the opinion of the public in itself, as from the sort of countenance which it lends them, when oppressed by their own misgivings. They need, as Hazlitt says in his Table Talk, a bolster to lean upon, a lining to their poor shivering, threadbare opinion of themselves." Yet they are sensible all the while of their own intellectual eminence, but even more strongly sensible of the worldly advantages of others; and even trying to set up the former, with some ostentation, as a counterpoise against the latter. These two failings are perfectly distinct in character, and, as it were, separate diseases of the mental frame. The one is a disfiguring but harmless freckle, the other an eating sore.

QUARTERLY REVIEW, 1837.

I BUT ask

Of Nature that with which she will comply;—

It is but in her summer's sun to bask,
To mingle with the quiet of her sky,
To see her gentle face without a mask,
And never gaze on it with apathy.

BYRON.

DIM as the borrow'd beams of morn and stars,
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,

Is reason to the soul and as on high
These rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear,

When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere ;
So pale grows reason at Religion's light,
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.

DRYDEN.

GOD is the first of all incorruptible Beings, eternal and unbegotten: He is not compounded of parts, there is nothing equal to him or like him. He is the author of all good, and entirely disinterested : the most excellent of all excellent beings, and the wisest of all intelligent authors: the father of equity, the parent of good laws, self-instructed, self-sufficient, and the first former of nature.

ZOROASTER.

SOONEST he speeds that most can lie and feign;
True meaning heart is had in high disdain;
Against deceit and cloaked doubleness,
What vaileth truth, or perfect steadfastness?

SIR THOMAS WYATT.

I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance

If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay;

For thou art with me here, upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest friend,
My dear, dear friend, and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

WORDSWORTH.

ACTIVE minds can never be idle with impunity.

OH grief, beyond all other griefs, when fate
First leaves the young heart desolate

In the wide world, without that only tie
For which it loved to live, or fear'd to die ;-
Lorn as the hung-up lute, that ne'er had spoken,
Since the sad day its master-chord was broken!

How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn

When throned on ocean's wave
It blushes o'er the world:
Yet both so passing wonderful !
Hath then the gloomy power
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres
Seized on her sinless soul?

Must then that peerless form,
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, those azure veins,
Which steal like streams along a field of snow,
That lovely outline, which is fair
As breathing marble, perish?

Must putrefaction's breath Leave nothing of this heavenly sight But loathsomeness and ruin? Spare nothing but a gloomy theme, On which the lightest heart might moralize? Or is it only a sweet slumber

Stealing o'er sensation,

Which the breath of roseate morning

Chaseth into darkness?

Will Ianthe wake again,

And give that faithful bosom joy
Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch
Light, life, and rapture from her smile?