THE NIGHTINGALE'S EYE.

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year after year. Who can tell the rush of sorrow into the mind of the nightingale, landed from a Syrian garden about the 12th of April, and suspended in a parlour-nook on the following evening!

Its eye has a painful capacity of showing pain the iris becomes contracted. And if birds have some of our feelings, they have more than our ingenuity. Not to mention their architecture and educational economy, they know the hour of the day

without clocks. The goat-sucker, or churn-owl, begins its lonely song at sunset, and never loses a minute; so that in a village where, in still weather, the Portsmouth evening gun is often heard, the boom and the note intermingle. If a signal were given, the two sounds could not be more even.

AUGUST 1ST.

MR. ROGERS is reported to have expressed astonishment that Prior is not more read. But the poet outlawed himself. Johnson's theory about his fitness for a lady's table will now find very few advocates. I wish it were otherwise. Some of his serious verses are marked by great beauty and elegance. Take these, to Bishop Sherlock:

No more with fruitless care and cheated strife,
Chase fleeting pleasure through the maze of life.

save us still, still bless us with thy stay;

O want thy heaven, till we have learnt the way.

His Solomon, though rough, and deficient in variety of interest, is sown with thoughts and images of pensive grace, that dwell on the memory:

Vex'd with the present moment's heavy gloom,
Why seek we brightness from the years to come?
Disturb'd and broken, like a sick man's sleep,
Our troubled thoughts to distant prospects leap,
Desirous still what flies us to o'ertake;

For hope is but the dream of those that wake.

The last line is scarcely excelled by Pope's description of

faith, our early immortality.

PRIOR CHARACTERISED.

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The thought is of Greek origin, as I was reminded by an accomplished Reviewer of this Journal. In 1696, a translated life of Aristotle was published, containing, among other sayings of the Philosopher, the remarkable sentiment" Hope is the dream of one that awaketh : and Prior was in the habit of borrowing illustrations from obscure books.

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But the strength of Prior lay in his pleasant narrative and sparkling fictions; in those he was a master. One of his warmest admirers in this style was the author of John Gilpin: "What suggested to Johnson the thought that the Alma' was written in imitation of Hudibras,' I cannot conceive. In former years, they were both favourites of mine, and I often read them; but I never saw in them the least resemblance to each other, nor do I now, except that they are composed in verse of the same measure. Cowper's criticism is scarcely correct. Butler was evidently the model of Prior. The difference is that of temperament. The earlier poet seems to compose with the toil of thoughtful scholarship; the later, with the ease and enjoyment of a quick and sportive fancy. Hudibras has a learned, ponderous look and sound; Alma clatters along with the jingle of good spirits. Goldsmith, who could not understand it, admitted parts to be very fine.

We see in all the gayer efforts of Prior a fitness and economy of phrase, to which his contemporaries or successors have seldom attained. A comparison with Gray is the severest ordeal of criticism; but in the following stanza, Prior wins the crown. It is a curious instance of the vanity of all human genius, that the finer original should have been forgotten in the weaker imitation. The thought has become proverbial-a coin passed into the general currency; but the name of Prior is rubbed

out:

PRIOR.

If we see right, we see our woes:
Then what avails it to have eyes?
From ignorance our comfort flows;
The only wretched are the wise.

GRAY.

Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

Prior is numbered among the last of English rhymers who adorned heroines with Diana's quiver, or borrowed Mercury for a messenger. I do not see why the classic properties should have been abandoned as useless. The fictions of mythology are so many elements of the picturesque. In this sense the greatest painters regarded them. It is absurd to talk of belief or reality. The Olympian people are like the old armour of Rembrandt, or the purple mantle of Titian. I cannot agree with Johnson, that pagan machinery is uninteresting to us, or that a goddess in Virgil makes us weary. Besides being a source of the decorative in poetry and art, Greek and Latin mythology filled up the want of domestic interest. In the Æneid, the mother of the hero sheds the charms of womanhood over the adventures and perils of her son. She diffuses a sense of beauty, like summer-time. The reader never loses sight of Venus. Or, if she recede from the eye, the colouring bloom of her face and robe still flows along the narrative; as the sunshine, sinking behind thick trees for a moment, leaves the grass warm with its recent splendour.

AUGUST 2ND.

AMUSEMENT is the waking sleep of labour; when it absorbs thought, patience, or strength, that might have been seriously employed, it loses its distinctive character, and becomes the task

work of idleness. For this reason, an elegant occupation of leisure hours may become very questionable to a Christian mind, keeping a debtor-and-creditor account of time. In any case, the opinions of a Bishop and a Poet are worth hearing :

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