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The notion of a journal implies variety. Gray confessed that his reading ranged 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 then 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 Warton; from Titian walk away to K. du Jardin. The student is like the floating honey-gatherers of Piedmont and France—

Careless his course, yet not without design.

So through the vales of Loire the bee-hives glide,
The light raft dropping with the silent tide.

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,

BEAUTIFUL FANCIES.

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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

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Most people are conscious sometimes of strange and beautiful fancies swimming before their eyes :-the pen is the wand to arrest, and the journal is 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 affords 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 is plain or uninteresting. Let the reader 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,
While summer suns roll unperceived away.

MAY 1ST.

AT length, the "fair enjewell'd May" is "blown out of April;" there is something of "a vernal tone" in the wind among the fir-trees, and the delicious line of Chatterton may be read in

King-cups bursting with the morning dew.

The time of green leaves is come again; every moment the day grows lovelier-warm, cool, sunshiny, cloudy. The year's contraries melt into each other, with a spirit of beauty shedding bloom over 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.

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It is delicious now to creep through the green trees, and along the scented hedges,

Where blows the woodbine faintly streaked with red,

until you steal on the leafy haunt of the woodlark. Good Mrs. Barbauld expresses my wish in her pretty ode to Spring ;

Now let me sit beneath the whitening thorn,

And mark thy spreading tints steal o'er the dale;
And watch with patient eye

Thy fair unfolding charms.

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 the same time, he fell into a similar error of judgment. Variety is the bloom of life; even animals feel it, and sheep soon loathe the sweetest grass in the same field. The blackbird, that pipes in the warm leaves before my window, is a witness against the preacher and the admiral. He tired of the limeshade, and is finishing his song on an apple-branch, that swings him further into the sun. He wanted a change.

Then what is whiling away time? When Watt sat in the chimney-corner, observing the water force up the cover of the saucepan, he aroused the anger of his relations; but he was discovering the steam-engine. Sir Walter Scott, walking one day by the banks of the Yarrow, found Mungo Park, the traveller, earnestly employed in casting stones into the stream, and watching the bubbles that followed their descent. "Park, what is it that engages your attention?" asked Sir Walter. "I was thinking how often I had thus tried to sound the rivers in Africa, by

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