ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those of her friends and kindred at the approaching for a mere human gentleman—that has no solemnity. The request was too amiable orchestra business to call him from his warm not to be conceded: and in this solicitude bed to such preposterous exercises-we take for conciliating the good-will of mere relations, he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden shaft should have "killed the flock of all affections else." The morning came: and at the Star and Garter, Richmond-the place appointed for the breakfasting-accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches-the whole corps du ballet-French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there; and Signor Sc―, and Signora Ch—, and Madame V-, with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, figurantes! at the sight of whom Merry afterwards declared, that "then for the first time it struck him seriously, that he was about to marry-a dancer." But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride-handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest-presented to him as her father-the gentleman that was to give her away-no less a person than Signor Delpini himself with a sort of pride, as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us honour!—the thought of so extraor-death by proxy in his image. But the seeds dinary a paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away under some pretence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to the nearest sea-coast, from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton; relieved from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted buffas for bridemaids. XIV.—THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK. AT what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to determine. But We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape, and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision: to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer We feel attenuated into their meagre nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to essences, and have given the hand of halfdrag into day-light a struggling and half-way approach to incorporeal being. We vanishing night-mare; to handle and examine once thought life to be something; but it he terrors, or the airy solaces. We have has unaccountably fallen from us before its too much respect for these spiritual com- time. Therefore we choose to dally with munications, to let them go so lightly. We visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to are not so stupid, or so careless as that light us to. Why should we get up? Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form or LAMB. of them. They seem to us to have as much XV.-THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE significance as our waking concerns: rather to import us more nearly, as more WE could never quite understand the nearly we approach by years to the shadowy philosophy of this arrangement, or the world, whither we are hastening. We have wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for shaken hands with the world's business; instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A we have done with it; we have discharged sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but ourself of it. Why should we get up? we to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to Man found out long sixes,-Hail, candlemanage. The drama has shut in upon us at light! without disparagement to sun or the fourth act. We have nothing here to moon, the kindliest luminary of the threeexpect, but in a short time a sick bed, and if we may not rather style thee their radiant a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death deputy, mild viceroy of the moon !—We love by such shadows as night affords. We are to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by already half acquainted with ghosts. We candle-light. They are everybody's sun and were never much in the world. Disappoint- moon. This is our peculiar and household ment early struck a dark veil between us planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed nights must our ancestors have spent, grey before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already, how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! They must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour's cheek to be sure that he understood it? This accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlantern'd nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a melange of chance carving they must have made of it!—here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse's shoulder-there another had dipped his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilised times, has never experienced this, when at some economic table he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came? The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark? or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the candle from of the man himself is so much to be deplored the smoking man; by the glimmering of the may admit of a question. We can speak a left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, little to it, being ourselves but lately but he knows it only by an inference; till recovered-we whisper it in confidence, the restored light, coming in aid of the reader,-out of a long and desperate fit of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full sullens. Was the cure a blessing? The aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how conviction which wrought it, came too he burnishes there is absolutely no such clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful thing as reading but by a candle. We have injuries-for they were mere fancies-which tried the affectation of a book at noon-day had provoked the humour. But the humour in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was itself was too self-pleasing, while it lasted— labour thrown away. Those gay motes in we know how bare we lay ourself in the the beam come about you, hovering and confession-to be abandoned all at once with teasing, like so many coquettes, that will We still brood over have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are abstracted works the grounds of it. wrongs which we know to have been imaginary; and for our old acquaintance N, whom we find to have been a truer friend than we took him for, we substitute some phantom-a Caius or a Titius-as like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied resentments on. It is mortifying to fall at once from the pinnacle of neglect; to forego the idea of having been ill-used and contumaciously treated by an old friend. Things that were born, when none but the still night, The first thing to aggrandise a man in his And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes. own conceit, is to conceive of himself as Marry, daylight-daylight might furnish the neglected. There let him fix if he can. To images, the crude material; but for the fine undeceive him is to deprive him of the most shapings, the true turning and filing (as tickling morsel within the range of selfmine author hath it), they must be content complacency. No flattery can come near it. to hold their inspiration of the candle. The Happy is he who suspects his friend of an mild internal light, that reveals them, like injustice; but supremely blest, who thinks fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the all his friends in a conspiracy to depress and sun-shine. Night and silence call out the undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we starry fancies. Milton's Morning Hymn in sing not to the profane) far beyond the Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was reach of all that the world calls joy—a deep, penned at midnight; and Taylor's rich enduring satisfaction in the depths, where description of a sun-rise smells decidedly the superficial seek it not, of discontent. of the taper. Even ourself, in these Were we to recite one half of this mystery, our humbler lucubrations, tune our best--which we were let into by our late dismeasured cadences (Prose has her cadences) satisfaction, all the world would be in love not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted, courts our endeavours. We would indite something about the Solar unpalatable only in the commencement. System.-Betty, bring the candles. with disrespect; we should wear a slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is The first sting of a suspicion is grievous; but wait-out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, there is balm XVI.—THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. and honey to be extracted. Your friend WE grant that it is, and a very serious passed you on such or such a day,-having one-to a man's friends, and to all that have in his company one that you conceived to do with him; but whether the condition worse than ambiguously disposed towards you,-passed you in the street without me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the notice. To be sure, he is something short- world in general (as these circles in the mind sighted; and it was in your power to have will spread to infinity), reflect with what accosted him. But facts and sane inferences strange injustice you have been treated in are trifles to a true adept in the science of quarters where (setting gratitude and the dissatisfaction. He must have seen you; expectation of friendly returns aside as and S, who was with him, must have chimeras) you pretended no claim beyond been the cause of the contempt. It galls justice, the naked due of all men. Think you, and well it may. But have patience. the very idea of right and fit fled from the Go home, and make the worst of it, and you earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle are a made man from this time. Shut of it, till you have swelled yourself into at yourself up, and—rejecting, as an enemy to least one hemisphere; the other being the your peace, every whispering suggestion vast Arabia Stony of your friends and the that but insinuates there may be a mistake world aforesaid. To grow bigger every -reflect seriously upon the many lesser moment in your own conceit, and the world instances which you had begun to perceive, to lessen; to deify yourself at the expense in proof of your friend's disaffection towards of your species; to judge the world—this is you. None of them singly was much to the the acme and supreme point of your mystery purpose, but the aggregate weight is positive; and you have this last affront to clench them. Thus far the process is anything but agreeable. But now to your relief comes in the comparative faculty. You conjure up all the kind feelings you have had for your friend; what you have been to him, and what you would have been to him, if he would have suffered you; how you defended him in this or that place; and his good name-his literary reputation, and so forth, was always dearer to you than your own! Your heart, spite of itself, yearns towards him. You could weep tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say you! do you not yet begin to apprehend a comfort? some allay of sweetness in the bitter waters? Stop not here, nor penuriously cheat yourself of your reversions. You are on vantage ground. Enlarge your speculations, and take in the rest of your friends, as a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as water? Begin to think that the relation itself is inconsistent with mortality. That the very idea of friendship, with its component parts, as honour, fidelity, steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. Image yourself to yourself, as the only possible friend in a world incapable of that communion. Now the gloom thickens. The little star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage you through deeper glooms than this. You are not yet at the half point of your elevation. You are not yet, believe these the true PLEASURES of SULKINESS. We profess no more of this grand secret than what ourself experimented on one rainy afternoon in the last week, sulking in our study. We had proceeded to the penultimate point, at which the true adept seldom stops, where the consideration of benefit forgot is about to merge in the meditation of general injustice-when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend whose not seeing of us in the morning (for we will now confess the case our own), an accidental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generalisation! | To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had brought in his hand the identical S- in whose favour we had suspected him of the contumacy. Asseverations were needless, where the frank manner of them both was convictive of the injurious nature of the suspicion. We fancied that they perceived our embarrassment; but were too proud, or something else, to confess to the secret of it. We had been but too lately in the condition of the noble patient in Argos : Qui se credebat miros audire tragœdos, Pol, me occidistis, amici, |