CHAPTER XXXIII.

Poetical Anomalies of Shape.

IT is not one of the least instances of the force of habit to see how poetry and mythology can reconcile us to shapes, or rather combinations of shape, unlike anything in nature. The dogheaded deities of the Egyptians were doubtless not so monstrous in their eyes as in ours. The Centaurs of the Greeks, as Ovid has shown us, could be imagined possessing beauty enough for a human love story; and our imaginations find nothing at all monstrous in the idea of an angel, though it partakes of the nature of the bird. The angel, it is true, is the least departure from humanity. Its wings are not an alteration of the human shape, but an addition to it. Yet, leaving a more awful wonder out of the question, we should be startled to find pinions growing out of the shoulder-blades of a child; and we should wait with anxiety to see of what nature the pinions were, till we became reconciled to them. If they turned out to be ribbed and webbed, like those of the imaginary dragon, conceive the horror! If, on the other hand, they became feathers, and tapered off, like those of a gigantic bird, combining also grace and splendor, as well as the power of flight, we can hardly fancy ourselves reconciled to them. And yet again, on the other hand, the flying women, described in the Adventures of Peter Wilkins, do not shock us, though their wings partake of the ribbed and webbed nature, and not at all of the feathered. We admire Peter's gentle and beautiful bride, notwithstanding the phenomenon of the graundee, its light whalebone-like intersections, and its power of dropping about her like drapery. It even becomes a matter of pleasant curiosity. We find it not at all in the way. We can readily apprehend the delight he felt at possessing a creature so kind

and sensitive; and can sympathize with him in the happiness of that bridal evening, equally removed from prudery and grossness, which he describes with a mixture of sentiment and voluptuousness beyond all the bridals we ever read.

To imagine anything like a sympathy of this kind, it is of course necessary that the difference of form should consist in addition, and not in alteration. But the un-angel-like texture of the flying apparatus of fair Youwarkee (such, if we remember, is her name) helps to show us the main reason why we are able to receive pleasure from the histories of creatures only halfhuman. The habit of reading prevents the first shock; but we are reconciled in proportion to their possession of what we are pleased to call human qualities. Kindness is the great elevator. The Centaurs may have killed all the Lapithæ, and shown considerable generalship to boot, without reconciling us to the brute part of them; but the brutality melts away before the story of their two lovers in Ovid. Drunkenness and rapine made beasts of them;-sentiment makes human beings. Polyphemus in Homer is a shocking monster, not because he has only one eye, but because he murders and eats our fellow-creatures. But in Theocritus, where he is Galatea's lover, and sits hopelessly lamenting his passion, we only pity him. His deformity even increases our pity. We blink the question of beauty, and become one-eyed for his sake. Nature seems to do him an injustice in gifting him with sympathies so human, and at the same time. prevent them from being answered; and we feel impatient with the all-beautiful Galatea, if we think she ever showed him scorn as well as unwillingness. We insist upon her avoiding him with the greatest possible respect.

These fictions of the poets, therefore, besides the mere excitement which they give the imagination, assist remotely to break the averseness and uncharitableness of human pride. And they may blunt the point of some fancies that are apt to come upon melancholy minds. When Sir Thomas Brown, in the infinite range of his metaphysical optics, turned his glass, as he no doubt often did, towards the inhabitants of other worlds, the stories of angels and Centaurs would help his imaginative good

nature to a more willing conception of creatures in other planets unlike those on earth: to other "lords of creation ;" and other, and perhaps nobler humanities, noble in spirit, though different in form. If indeed there can be anything in the starry end. lessness of existence, nobler than what we can conceive of love and generosity.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Spring and Daisies.

SPRING, while we are writing, is complete. The winds have done their work. The shaken air, well tempered and equalised, has subsided; the genial rains, however thickly they may come, do not saturate the ground, beyond the power of the sun to dry it up again. There are clear crystal mornings; noons of blue sky and white cloud; nights, in which the growing moon seems to lie looking at the stars, like a young shepherdess at her flock. A few days ago she lay gazing in this manner at the solitary evening star, like Diana, on the slope of a valley, looking up at Endymion. His young eye seemed to sparkle out upon the world; while she, bending inwards, her hands behind her head, watched him with an enamored dumbness.

But this is the quiet of Spring. Its voices and swift movements have come back also. The swallow shoots by us, like an embodied ardor of the season. The glowing bee has his will of the honied flowers, grappling with them as they tremble. We have not yet heard the nightingale or the cuckoo; but we can hear them with our imagination, and enjoy them through the content of those who have.

Then the young green. This is the most apt and perfect mark of the season, the true issuing forth of the Spring. The trees and bushes are putting forth their crisp fans; the lilac is loaded with bud; the meadows are thick with the bright young grass, running into sweeps of white and gold with the daisies and buttercups. The orchards announce their riches, in a shower of silver blossoms. The earth in fertile woods is spread with yellow and blue carpets of primroses, violets, and hyacinths, over which the birch-trees, like stooping nymphs, hang with their thickening hair. Lilies-of-the-valley, stocks, columbines, lady.

smocks, and the intensely red piony which seems to anticipate the full glow of summer-time, all come out to wait upon the season, like fairies from their subterraneous palaces.

Who is to wonder that the idea of love mingles itself with that of this cheerful and kind time of the year, setting aside even common associations? It is not only its youth, and beauty, and budding life, and the "passion of the groves," that exclaim with the poet,

Let those love now, who never loved before;

And those who always loved, now love the more.*

All our kindly impulses are apt to have more sentiment in them, than the world suspect; and it is by fetching out this sentiment, and making it the ruling association, that we exalt the impulse into generosity and refinement, instead of degrading it, as is too much the case, into what is selfish, and coarse, and pollutes all our systems. One of the greatest inspirers of love is gratitude,not merely on its common grounds, but gratitude for pleasures, whether consciously or unconsciously conferred. Thus we are thankful for the delight given us by a kind and sincere face; and if we fall in love with it, one great reason is, that we long to return what we have received The same feeling has a considerable influence in the love that has been felt for men of talents, whose person or address have not been much calculated to inspire it. In spring-time joy awakens the heart; with joy, awakes gratitude and nature and in our gratitude, we return, on its own principle of participation, the love that has been shown

us.

This association of ideas renders solitude in spring, and solitude in winter, two very different things. In the latter, we are better content to bear the feelings of the season by ourselves: in the former they are so sweet as well as so overflowing, that we long to share them. Shakspeare, in one of his sonnets, describes himself as so identifying the beauties of the Spring with the thought of his absent mistress, that he says he forgot them in their own character, and played with them only as with her