SHADOWS AND LIFE. 11 fulness, and decline of genius or life. In a green, over-bowered lane, where birds shake dew and blossoms from the hedgerows, and spots of sun chequer the wayside grass, look for your own your face, your shadow is at your back. And has it ever been otherwise with poet, painter, or man of noble thought and magnificent enterprise? with Milton or Columbus? Long and wearisome is their road to glory; steep and entangled is the path towards the rising orb of Fame. They behold not the shadow which they cast; it stretches after them-cheering others, not themselves. Retrace your steps down the glimmering lane. Let it be evening. What a change! Warm streaks of light gild the edges of bird-homes, and sleep in the dim hollows of mossy oaks : O'er the heath the heifer strays, Trudging as the ploughmen go, To the smoking hamlet bound, Lengthened o'er the level ground. Where is your own shadow now? It has sprung twenty feet before you, as if it were rushing up the garden, to sit down in the parlour, before you can turn the corner. It is a race between you and your shadow; but you will never overtake it while you travel from the sun. Can you make no simile out of this? When the day of intellectual life sets, and the pilgrim of poetry, eloquence, or art, walks away from the glory of the morning, where is his shadow? It is thrown forward into the untrodden paths of the future, and lengthens at every step, into the rich orchards of a remoter and sunnier climate. You have the history of the mind's shadow in the Shakspere of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But you may still sit and play with similes, Loose types of things through all degrees. In this wood-path, where the violets cluster so thick under the elm, it is curious to watch the play of leaves on the grass. When THE ROBIN ON THE PALING. 13 the sun shines, and not even a summer breath ruffles the boughs, the images of trees lie unbroken. The sharp, irregular outline of each leaf is reflected. But the faintest breeze breaks the shadow. The wing of a bird drives another shade over it; the heedless moth —a fly—a gnat, disperses it. The trees of fancy and taste are troubled by the same accidents. They fling their soft images of bloom over the sequestered walks of thought; but the slightest things—the breath of envy, the twinkle of popularity—disorder their beauty. Waller, for a moment, obscures Milton and Walpole buzzes down the sweet warble of Thomson. The shadow gives a parallel for a life as well as for a genius. That man fleeth like a shadow and never continueth in one stay, is among the most touching lessons of the dead. Our kindred, not less than our own recollections, illustrate the Psalmist : for ever as we run, We cast a longer shadow in the sun! Prophet and the And now a charm, and now a grave is won. I am pleased to trace out the resemblance in my summer rambles; and when I see myself climbing the silver beech, and losing my head in the top branches, a moral is not wanting. There is another and a livelier comparison. Sometimes I walk up to the park-paling, and endeavour to look my own shadow in the face; but it is gone, and the robin, The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast, which sat on the top and seemed to sing to it, is vanished also. Here is a simile full of purifying truth. I remember, with good Arthur Warwick, that all our pleasures are shadows, thrown by prosperous sunlight along our journey, and ever deceiving and flying us most when most we follow them. The vapoury form on the mossy pales, with the robin singing over its head, is only the emblem of some empty dream that walks through life by our side, with Hope carolling above it, and disappearing when reflection draws near, and looks at it with calm and earnest eye. But, while I moralize, the sun is sinking fast, the slanting ray, From every herb and every spiry blade, Mine, spindling into longitude immense, In spite of gravity and sage remark, That myself am but a fleeting shade--- MAY 4TH. READ a discourse of John Smith, whom Coleridge calls not the least star in the constellation of Cambridge men, the contemporaries of Taylor. Smith was a native of Achurch, near Oundle, Northamptonshire. He was a pupil of Whichcot, at Emmanuel, and died before he had completed his thirty-third year. Bishop Patrick, who knew him well, and preached his funeral sermon, exclaimed, in the fervour of his admiration, "What a man would he have been, if he had lived as long as I have done!" He declared that Smith "spake of God and religion as he never heard man speak." We notice in his thoughts a calm largeness of idea, that is very impressive. For example:-"All those discourses which have been written for the soul's heraldry, will not blazon it so well to us as itself will do. When we turn our eyes in upon it, it will soon tell us its own royal pedigree and noble extraction, by those sacred hieroglyphics which it bears upon itself." Again:-" And because all those scattered rays of beauty and loveliness which we behold spread up and down, all the world ZOOLOGY OF POETS. 15 over, are only the emanations of that inexhaustible light which is above, therefore should we love them all in that, and climb up always by those sunbeams unto the Eternal Father of Light." This thought is in the Platonic spirit of Spenser. And with equal nobleness of language he portrays the defaced condition of the human mind; its splendour darkened and the handwriting of the Creator almost worn out. "These principles of divine truth which were first engraven on man's heart with the finger of God are now, as the characters of some ancient monument, less clear and legible than at first." Coleridge, in the third volume of his Literary Remains, observes of the theological school of Smith-" Instead of the subservience of the body to the mind (the favourite language of our Sidneys and Miltons), we hear nothing at present but of health, good digestion, pleasurable state of general feeling, and the like." MAY 5TH. A COUNTRY clergyman, Mr. Nowell, has lately published some pleasing corrections of the zoology of our poets. The subject is attractive. Perhaps natural history, in its varieties of field, hedge, and woodland, is the element of decorative knowledge in which the poetical mind is most deficient. Even Thomson mistook the nature of the gad-fly, and spoke of its attack as collective, instead of solitary. Byron need not have amended his comparison of Napoleon, at Waterloo, to the eagle, Tearing with bloody beak the fatal plain,— for though all birds of prey begin the assault with their talons, the beak is the instrument of vengeance and death. Milton, having later lights of science, is sometimes more incorrect than Shakspere. Mr. Nowell selects his sketch of the ant |