clouds; nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover cliff; but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb; and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables,* that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds: "And as they bow their hoary tops, relate In murmuring sounds the dark decrees of fate; Cling to each leaf, and swarm on every bough." At the foot of one of these squats me I (il penseroso), and there I grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol around me, like Adam in paradise, before he had an Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do there. In this situation I often converse with my Horace, aloud too; that is, talk to you; but I do not remember that I ever heard you answer me. I beg pardon for taking all the conversation to myself; but it is entirely your own fault. We have old Mr. Southernf at a gentleman's house, a little way off, who often comes to see us; he is now seventy-seven years old, and has almost wholly lost his memory, but is as agreeable as an old man can be; at least I persuade myself so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko. I shall be in town in about three weeks. Adieu." * "Reverend vegetable" is a phrase of Steele's for a common-place old man. † Southern lived nine years longer. When he was a young man, he knew Dryden; and here is Gray, a youth, in company with Dryden's acquaintance. It is always pleasant to observe these links of celebrity. TO RICHARD WEST.* [BAD SPIRITS RECOLLECTIONS OF HUSBANDS AND STATESMEN AT SCHOOL.] ΜΙΝ LONDON, May 27th, 1742. INE, you are to know, is a white melancholy, or rather leucocholy,† for the most part; which, though it seldom laughs, or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls joy or pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state, and ça ne laisse que de s'amuser. The only fault of it is insipidity; which is apt now and then to give a sort of ennui, which makes one form certain little wishes that signify nothing. But there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, that has somewhat in it like Tertullian's rule of faith, "credo quia impossibile est," for it believes, nay, is sure of everything that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and, on the other hand, excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything that is pleasurable. From this, the Lord deliver us; for none but he and sunshiny weather can do it. In hopes of enjoying this kind of weather, I am going into the country for a few weeks, but shall be never the nearer any society, so if you have any * Son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, by a daughter of Bishop Burnet. His tastes were very like Gray's, and he promised to attain celebrity, but died of a consumption the year following the date of this letter, at the age of twenty-six. Melancholy signifying black choler, leucocholy would be white choler. Gray pleasantly coins the word for the occasion. Does nothing but trifle. I believe because it is impossible. Gray might have added (and perhaps he meant to do so by what follows) that Tertullian, who was a cruel bigot, held another rule of faith, equally reasonable, namely, I believe because it is horrible. charity you will contrive to write. My life is like Harry the Fourth's supper of hens: "poulets à la broche, poulets en ragôut, poulets en hâchis, poulets en fricasées ;* reading here, reading there; nothing but books with different sauces. Do not let me lose my dessert then; for though that be reading too, yet it has a very different flavor. The May seems to be come since your invitation;† and I promise to bask in her beams, and dress me in her roses : "Et caput in vernâ semper habere rosâ."‡ I shall see Mr. too, for he has got a boy. and his wife, nay, and his child Is it not odd to consider one's contemporaries in the grave light of husband and father? There are my Lords and they are statesmen; do not you remember them dirty boys playing at cricket? As for me, I am never a bit the older, nor the bigger, nor the wiser than I was then; no, not for having been beyond sea. Pray, how are you? TO THE REVEREND NORTON NICHOLLS. [BANTER OF FORMAL EXCUSES AND FINE EXORDIUMS—SOUTHAMPTON--AN ABBOT-SUNRISE.] Nov. 19, 1764. RECEIVED your letter at Southampton; and as I would wish to treat everybody according to their own rule and measure of good breeding, have, against my inclination, waited till now before I answered it, purely out of fear and * Roast chicken, ragooed chicken, hashed chicken, fricaseed chicken. † West had written an ode to May, addressed to his friend. respect, and an ingenuous diffidence in my own abilities. If you will not take this as an excuse, accept it at least as a wellturned period, which is always my principal concern.* So I proceed to tell you, that my health is much improved by the sea. Not that I drank it, or bathed in it, as the common people do; no! I only walked by it, and looked upon it. The climate is remarkably mild, even in October and November; no snow has been seen to lie there for these thirty years past; the myrtles grow in the ground against the houses, Guernsey lilies bloom in every window; the town, clean and well-built, surrounded by its old stone walls, with their towers and gateways, stands at the point of a peninsula, and opens full south to an arm of the sea, which, having formed two beautiful bays on each hand of it stretches away in direct view, till it joins the British Channel. It is skirted on either side with gently rising grounds, clothed with thick wood; and directly across its mouth rise the high lands of the Isle of Wight at distance, but distinctly seen. In the bosom of the woods (concealed from profane eyes) lie hid the ruins of Nettley Abbey; there may be richer and greater houses of religion, but the abbot is content with his situation. See there, at the top of that hanging meadow, under the shade of those old trees that bend into a half-circle about it, he is walking slowly (good man!) and bidding his beads for the souls of his benefactors, interred in that venerable pile that lies beneath him. Beyond it (the meadow still descending) nods a thicket of oaks that mask the building, and have excluded a view too garish and luxuriant for a holy eye; only on either hand they leave an opening to the blue glittering Did you not observe how, as that white sail shot by and was lost, he turned and crossed himself, to drive the tempter * A banter probably of some apologetical formality on the part of Nicholls. sea. from him that had thrown that distraction in his way? I should tell you that the ferryman who rowed me, a lusty young fellow, told me that he would not for all the world pass a night at the Abbey (there were such things seen near it), though there was a power of money hid there. From thence I went to Salisbury, Wilton, and Stonehenge: but of these things I say no more. They will be published at the University press. P.S.-I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history; which was, that (in the course of my late tour) I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough to be at the sun's levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapors open gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreaths, and the tide (as it flowed gently in upon the sands) first whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue, and all at once a little line of insufferable brightness that (before I can write these five words) was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on paper; yet I shall remember it as long as the sun, or at least as long as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before? I hardly believe it. IT TO THE SAME. [A MOTHER-SCENERY OF KENT.] 1765. T is a long time since, that I heard you were gone in haste into Yorkshire on account of your mother's illness; and the same letter informed me that she was recovered, otherwise I had then wrote to you only to beg you would take care of her, and to inform you that I had discovered a thing |