pleasure could he find therein? On the other hand, should one mourning the death of a beloved friend have his attention directed to some of the witty conceits of Hudibras, he would only think the book trifling, and the person who annoyed him with it inhuman. A thousand such varieties of temperament, more or less marked than these, modify our capacities for enjoyment, and our views of the beautiful. The individual mind will most readily sympathize with an emotion of that class which it has most frequently experienced, and to which it has more suggestions leading: thus measuring all things by its own order and preëxisting states. A suitable frame of mind is that which alone can render criticism true and genial, while the pleasures of art, derived from all the abovementioned sources, are also subject to misappreciation and detraction, from being judged by persons in a frame of mind unsuited to the task. Many of the faults found by the critic in a work of art, are faults of his own mind-faults which he himself, in another state of feeling, would never have thought of. The best qualified mind is not always in a state duly to appreciate the merits of any given work; and some are by nature permanently unqualified. Had Dr. Johnson possessed the ordinary breadth and susceptibility of a human soul, he would have canceled, on some future reading, many of his remarks on Gray and Milton, turning, as they do, not upon blemishes of the authors, but errors and failures of his own capa

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE

city to perceive.

Some radical defect must have dis

qualified Jeffrey to judge of the poetry of Wordsworth, or he could not have persisted in and republished his crudities, after an interval of thirty years. No person

is competent to criticise any work of genius, if incapable of sympathizing with, and estimating aright, the spirit in which its author composed it.

CHAPTER IX.

HARMONY OF EMOTION IN A WORK.

THOUGH beauty may be reached under the guidance of so many feelings, yet any given effort to attain that end must suffer only one to take the lead, which all others enlisted shall implicitly follow. If sublimity is chosen as the guide, then all the imagery, however varied, must be of a nature accordant therewith. The complete attainment of the sublime will lead to beauty, but a failure of the former effect will inevitably frustrate the latter. Thus, in Milton's apostrophe to light, the first twelve lines are purely sublime, and although afterward a personal infirmity is introduced, and the material of what follows is drawn more from sadness, the emotion first presented is continued throughout, all the imagery being framed in relation to it; even the poet's blindness is so introduced as to enhance the effect, by way of contrast-the privation of a sublime capacity.

In Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" a picture of evening is made eminently beautiful by the successful working up of a feeling of pensive repose.

"Sweet was the sound, when oft, at evening's close, Up yonder hill the village murmur rose;

There, as I passed with careless steps and slow,
The mingling notes came softened from below;
The swain responsive to the milkmaid sung,
The sober herd that lowed to meet their young;
The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool,

The playful children just let loose from school;

The watch-dog's voice, that bayed the whispering wind,

And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind,

These all in sweet confusion sought the shade

And fill'd each pause the nightingale had made."

The key-note of this passage is given in the first line, in the words "evening's close." For the idea of evening is associated with that of rest from toil; and its influence is independently, for the most part, of a soothing nature. The succeeding imagery is admirably calculated to maintain the unity of emotion. The murmurs of the village are not represented as listened to in the street, but after they have been softened and blended by rising to some distance on the air, and they are just loud enough to detain the ear when the nightingale is silent. The listener is in a state of indolent enjoyment. He passes with careless steps and slow, and though evening has closed in, he is spoken of as in the shade: because the shade of a grove is so connected with the idea of undisturbed retirement that it might be used as its symbolical hieroglyphic. And the picture is appropriately finished by the equally fitting symbol of a summer evening, the song of the nightingale. Several trains of thought are here bound together by one common simple emotion; and the perception of separate and united fitness of all to produce

that emotion gives rise to the beauty which every one, in a suitable frame of mind, must feel upon reading the passage, while the consistently pleasing sound of the words, and smoothness of the versification, contribute their aid to the effect of the imagery.

In the following, admiration is the primary emotion, to the production of which all the particulars contribute:

"Fair clime! where every season smiles
Benignant o'er those blessed isles,
Which seen from far Colonna's hight,
Make glad the heart that hails the sight,
And lend to loneliness delight.

There, mildly dimpling, ocean's cheek
Reflects the tints of many a peak,

Caught by the laughing tides that lave
Those Edens of the eastern wave."

It would be pleasant to accumulate illustrations under the heads of various feelings, from all the arts, but it is not necessary; every reader can supply himself with abundance from the stores of his own experience. Whatever primary emotion is addressed must be taken as a guide in the selection of imagery. If any one of the particulars composing a picture introduce an emotion inconsistent with the rest, the effect of the whole is marred.

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