monasteries, or religious foundations with a monastic character, arose. These foundations, as the religion aspired to soften the habits, might seem to pacify the face of the land. They were commonly placed, by some intuitive yearning after repose and security, in spots either themselves beautiful by nature, by the bank of the river, in the depth of the romantic wood, under the shelter of the protecting hill; or in such as became beautiful from the superior care and culture of the monks,—the draining of the meadows, the planting of trees, the home circle of garden or orchard, which employed or delighted the brotherhood. These establishments gradually acquired a certain sanctity: if exposed like other lands to the ravages of war, no doubt at times the fear of some tutelary saint, or the influence of some holy man, arrested the march of the spoiler. If the growth of the English monasteries was of necessity gradual, the culture around them but of slow development (agricultural labour does not seem to have become a rule of monastic discipline), it was not from the want of plentiful endowments, or of ardent votaries. Grants of land and of moveables were poured with lavish munificence on these foundations; sometimes tracts of land, far larger than they could cultivate, and which were thus condemned to sterility. The Scottish monks are honourably distinguished as repressing, rather than encouraging this prodigality. The Roman clergy, if less scrupulous, might receive these tributes not merely as offerings of religious zeal to God, but under a conviction that they were employed for the improvement as well as the spiritual welfare of the people. Nor was it only the sacred mysterious office of ministering at the altar of the new God, it was the austere seclusion of the monks, which seized on the religious affections of the Anglo-Saxon convert. When Christianity first broke upon their rude but earnest minds, it was embraced with the utmost fervour, and under its severest forms. Men were eager to escape the awful punishments, and to secure the wonderful promises of the new religion, by some strong effort, which would wrench them altogether from their former life. As the gentler spirit of the Gospel found its way into softer hearts, it made them loathe the fierce and rudely warlike occupations of their forefathers. To the one class the monastery offered its

rigid course of ceremonial duty and its ruthless austerities, to the other its repose. Nobles left their halls, queens their palaces, kings their thrones, to win everlasting life by the abandonment of the pomp and the duties of their secular state, and, by becoming churchmen or monks, still to exercise rule, or to atone for years of blind and sinful heathenism.

History of Latin Christianity.

P. 339, 1. 15. Habits. Evidently in the proper sense of "dress," not "customs."

SINCE

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, and was drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822. To prefer or to equal Shelley's prose to his poetry is a merely uncritical freak of judgment. His prose is, however, of excellent quality, both in his letters, which are among the most charming of their kind, and in his too few essays and miscellaneous writings.

THE LAKE OF COMO.

INCE I last wrote to you we have been to Como, looking for a house. This lake exceeds any thing I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the arbutus islands of Killarney. It is long and narrow, and has the appearance of a mighty river winding among the mountains and the forests. We sailed from the town of Como to a tract of country called the Tremezina, and saw the various aspects presented by that part of the lake. The mountains between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are covered on high with chesnut forests (the eating chesnuts, on which the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig-trees, and olives, which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I cannot name, grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white among the dark forests. Beyond, on the opposite shore, which

faces the south, the mountains descend less precipitously to the lake, and although they are much higher, and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and the lake a range of lower hills, which have glens and rifts opening to the other, such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here are plantations of olive, and orange, and lemontrees, which are now so loaded with fruit, that there is more fruit than leaves, and vineyards. This shore of the lake is one continued village, and the Milanese nobility have their villas here. The union of culture and the untameable profusion and loveliness of nature is here so close, that the line where they are divided can hardly be discovered. But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana; so called from a fountain which ebbs and flows every three hours, described by the younger Pliny, which is in the court-yard. This house, which was once a magnificent palace, and is now half in ruins, we are endeavouring to procure. It is built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake, together with its garden, at the foot of a semicircular precipice, overshadowed by profound forests of chesnut. The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you are clusters of cypress-trees of an astonishing height, which seem to pierce the sky. Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the Pliniana are immensely large, but ill furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such immense laurel-trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, are most delightful.

Letters from Italy.

POETRY.

POETRY is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends

all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship,-what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave-and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces between their suggestions, by the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself: for Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for