forgotten Swift's satiric lesson to a young author, how, with an empty head and full common-place book, he might boldly start up a giant of erudition and capacity, encyclopædic and unfathomable. A book of thoughts, not extracts, is proposed. And it is pleasant to recognise the practice in scholars of ancient days: "Sometimes I hunt," said Pliny, "but even then I carry with me a pocket-book, that while my servants are busied in disposing the nets and other matters, I may be employed in something that may be useful to me in my studies; and that, if I miss my game, I may at least bring home some of my thoughts with me, and not undergo the mortification of having caught nothing." Beethoven walked in the streets of Vienna with his tablet in his hand. The sudden gushes of fancy are often the brightest. that the common-places are to be neglected: They form an important episode in the narrative of intellectual progress. If a book be a harvestfield, there must be a gathering of sheaves into the garner. PARADISE LOST and the TRANSFIGURATION grew out of the gleanings of memory. The collections of a morning walk become the memoranda of the painter. Gainsborough formed landscape-models upon his table; broken stones, Not herbs, and fragments of glass expanded into rocks, trees and water. Few men of genius have taken the trouble of recording their feelings or studies. One or two precious legacies have perished by accident or design. But when the full light is wanting, an unexpected illumination frequently breaks over a character, from a passage in the published works of the author. A page of the journal is broken up, and melted into the poem, or essay. Shakspere's sonnets are a chapter of autobiography, although unreadable till criticism finds the key. Raffaelle's drawings were his diary; Shenstone's garden, his confessions. Cowper's letters and Wordsworth's poetry reflect the features of their writers, as face answers to face in water. The notion of a journal implies variety. Gray confessed that his reading wandered from Pausanias to Pindar; mixing Aristotle and Ovid, like bread with cheese. He might have sheltered himself under a noble example. Lord Bacon considered it necessary to contract and dilate the mind's eye-sight; regarding the interchange of splendour and gloom as essential to the health of the organ. The reader may test the rule by trying it on his natural eyes. In a gorgeous summer day, let him come suddenly from a thick screen of branches, turning his face towards the sun, and then to the grass. Every blade will be reddened, as if a fairy procession had gone by. The colour is not in the grass, but in the eye; as that contracts, the glare vanishes. Subject the mental sight to a similar experiment. After wandering in the dim recesses of history or metaphysics, let the inward eye be lifted to the broad, central, glowing orbs of Shakspere, Milton, or Hooker, and immediately cast down upon the common surface of daily life. Objects become hazy and discoloured; the dilation of the nerve of thought dazzles and bewilders the vision. It is wise, therefore, to familiarize the seeing faculty of the understanding to different degrees of lustre. Sunshine and twilight should temper one another. Despise nothing. After Plato take up Reid; closing Dante, glance at Wharton; from Titian walk away to K. du Jardin. If a letter be conversation upon paper, a journal is a dialogue between the writer and his memory. Now he grows red with Horace, scolding the innkeeper because the bad water had taken away his appetite; and before the strife of tongues has subsided, he sits down with Shakspere, under a chesnut-tree in Sir Thomas Lucy's park. Thoughts must ever be the swiftest travellers, and sighs are not the only things wafted "from Indus to the Pole " in a moment. Most people are conscious sometimes of strange and beautiful fancies swimming before their eyes :the pen is the wand to arrest, and the journal the mirror to detain and fix them. The mind is visited with certain seasons of brightness; remote events and faded images are recovered with startling distinctness, in sudden flashes and irradiations of memory; just, to borrow a very striking illustration, as the sombre features and minute objects of a distant ridge of hills become visible in the strong gleams of sun, which fall on them for an instant, and then vanish into darkness. My own journal may afford a faint impression of the advantages and charms of which that form of writing is susceptible. But the instrument itself is not affected by the faults of the exhibitor. We are not to deny the transparency of a glass, because the face which it reflects be plain or uninteresting. Let the student make the attempt, and he may be able to apply to himself and his friends the graceful recollection of Pope in his epistle to Jervas: How oft in pleasing tasks we wear the day, MAY 2nd. At length, the weather begins to soften; there is something of " a vernal tone" in the wind among the fir-trees. The time of green leaves is come again; every moment the day grows lovelier-warm, cool, sunshiny, cloudy. The year's contraries mixed and melted into each other with a spirit of beauty and bloom, shedding itself over and throughout all, and subduing everything to itself. Thomson chose such sweet airs and purple lights to bathe his Castle of Indolence - a season atween June and May, Half prankt with spring, with summer half imbrown'd. It is delicious now to creep under the scented copses the green-wood side along, until you steal on the leafy haunt of the wood lark. There is love in this idleness. I know that formal John Wesley put a brand on it: "never be unemployed, never be triflingly employed, never while away time." Such an admonition might be expected from one of whom Johnson left this character: "John Wesley's conversation is good, but he is never at leisure; he is always obliged to go at a certain hour." When Lord Collingwood said, that a young person should not be allowed to have two books at |