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such observances; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveler. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion.

Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, or are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale, we choose to linger abed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape and mold them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daylight a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; to handle and examine the terrors or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid or so careless as that imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourselves of it. Why should we get up? We have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing here to expect but in a short time a sickbed and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the world. Disappointment

VII-156

early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in playhouses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are superannuated. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world, and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We once thought life to be something, but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up? Complete. Number XI.

THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB

COULD never quite understand the philosophy of this arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes. Hail candlelight! without disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of the three if we may not rather style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon! We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candlelight. They are everybody's sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! They must have lain

about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees
could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile,
and handled a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he understood it?
This accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a
sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition
of those unlanterned nights. Jokes came in with candles. We
wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How
did they sup? What a mélange of chance carving they must have
made of it! Here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted
a horse's shoulder; there another had dipped his scooped palm in
a kid skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk.
There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even
in these civilized times, has never experienced this, when at some
economic table he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited
for the flavor till the lights came? The senses absolutely give
and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark,
or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the candle
from the smoking man: by the glimmering of the left ashes, he
knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an in-
ference; till the restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories,
reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles
his puffs! how he burnishes! There is absolutely no such thing
as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a
book at noonday in gardens, and in sultry arbors; but it was
labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about
you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that will have
you all to themselves, and are jealous of your abstractions. By
the midnight taper the writer digests his meditations. By the
same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch
the flame, the odor. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the
influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the
sun's light.
They are abstracted works —

"Things that were born when none but the still night
And his dumb candle saw his pinching throes."

Marry, daylight-daylight might furnish the images, the crude material; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing (as mine author hath it), they must be content to hold their inspiration of the candle. The mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night and silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's "Morning

Hymn in Paradise," we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight; and Taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best-measured cadences (Prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors," or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted courts our endeavors. We would indite something about the Solar System. -Betty, bring the candles.

Complete. Number XII.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

(1775-1864)

ALTER SAVAGE LANDOR was born at Warwick, England, January
He lived to be eighty-five years old, and, ac-

30th, 1775.

cording to his passionate admirer, Algernon Charles Swinburne, “in the course of this long life he won for himself such a double crown of glory in verse and in prose as had been won by no other Englishman but Milton." That Landor was a man of the most highly developed intellect. is unquestionable, and but for a most singular contradiction he might have been the greatest force in the literature of the nineteenth century. An extreme Republican in his politics, he was in all his literary sympathies an intellectual aristocrat of the severest and most exclusive type. By his politics he alienated the class to which he belonged by virtue of the habits of his mind, and by the haughtiness of his intellectual superiority he excluded from his circle the masses with whom he sympathized. What he stood for in the poetry of the nineteenth century was illustrated when, after publishing his poem of "Gebir» in a first edition in English, he corrected it in a second English edition, and then translated it into Latin, in order to satisfy his own sense of harmony. According to Mr. Swinburne, the Latin version "has a might and melody of line, and a power and perfection of language," by virtue of which "it must always dispute the palm of precedence with the English version.” We may well believe it, and regret the more on account of it that Landor's genius was not led by the necessary study of the past to a fuller recognition of the demands of the present and the future. Of his prose writings, his "Pericles and Aspasia," published in 1836, best exhibits the fullness of his knowledge of classical subjects, while his "Imaginary Conversations" (1821-48) more nearly approximates the level of modern taste. His tragedy of "Count Julian," which appeared in 1812, is generally considered the best of his poems, and his admirers sometimes class it with Milton's "Samson Agonistes." Landor's career was erratic. He was expelled from Oxford for firing a gun at the window of a peculiarly obnoxious Tory. In 1808 he served as a volunteer against Napoleon in Spain, and in 1811 married Miss Julia Thuillier, a banker's daughter, with whom he "fell in love at first sight" and from whom he finally separated. Much of his life was spent in Italy, where he died Seplember 17th, 1864.

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