Bunyan, at least, felt in the first instance | bald compared to John Howe's or Jeremy no great joy, and no selfish satisfation at all Taylor's; it has no beauty; no golden images in his marvellous dreams. Unlike Caliban, sparkle on his page; but his figures are forms; he sometimes cried "not to dream again." his images are characters; he does not decoDid he ever awake, like poor De Quincey, in rate, but create; and though seeming, like struggles, and cry out "I shall sleep no that prophet of old, to stand in a valley of more?" Whether awake or asleep, his visions dry bones, he soon causes them to live and seemed to have passed before him swiftly, as move-an exceeding great army, fresh with clouds in a wind-tost sky-himself as helpless color, strong of sinew, and prepared for the as the wanderer who watches their veering battle. In him imagination exists-not as a shapes and changeful shadows amid the soli- dilution, but as an intense essence; and, while tary hills. He had thus a "dreadful post of the least florid of writers, he is the most poetobservation;" but it did not darken every ical of thinkers. In this point he resembles hour, but brightened on and on, till, behold! Dante, who, while possessed of infinite inventthe morning was spread upon the mountains, iveness and sublimest conception, is as literal and in a cloudless sky the "sun rose upon and hard in his diction as Defoe. But he has Christian, and he had daylight all the rest of similes, scattered, though sparingly, over his his journey."-Something, indeed, of childish poem; whereas, all Bunyan's are derived from gratulation does appear in the prefatory poem Scriptures-as if he were afraid to adorn the to the second part of the "Pilgrim," but it is borders of that solemn way with any flowers child-like, the mere momentary crowing of an but those which had been transplanted from infant; and is speedily swallowed up in the the garden of God. fresh glories which dawn upon his touched and ever-advancing spirit. How sublime this perpetual attitude of reception! And how little does a mere literary man-perpetually on tiptoe-now seeking to smile down, and now to frown up inspiration -or lashing himself into a false furor by selfish passion, look beside Bunyan lying prostrate before the Invisible Power, which "moves him at times," and draws forth from him the simplest, yet noblest music. And while remembering the vast difference between the inspiration of prophecy and of genius, we may nevertheless say, that not more abandoned to the power of supernal influence was Ezekiel, when lifted up by a lock of his hair between earth and heaven-or when watching the dreadful wheels as they moved in the might of the unseen Spirit, than was the tinker of Elstowe, when following the footsteps of Christian in that immortal pilgrimage-or when beleaguering Mansoul with those multitudinous hosts of darkness. His visions came upon him as he sat still and expectant, like those cloven tongues of fire which crowned the heads of the disciples at Pentecost. We have alluded to Ezekiel. Some critics have ventured to deny him the high poetic. quality which they concede to Isaiah and Jeremiah. Now we admit that his language and imagery are not so rich as theirs; but then, how grand the objects and the scenery he beholds and describes. His style serves severely to daguerreotype the vast fire-edged and wind-swept visions which crossed his daring and solitary soul. It is the same with Bunyan. His style seems poor and This peculiarity is quite in keeping with Bunyan's child-like character. Children seldom speak in metaphor; but they are all essentially poets; they live in a world of illusion. A garden walk becomes to them a pilgrim's path, which they crowd with imaginary characters and adventures. A puddle near it is an Atlantic with a thousand ships sailing on its bosom, with perpetual conflictions of storm and calm. They weave everlasting little Robinson Crusoes, and Progresses of their own, and even when they sleep, the fine shuttle of their fancy continues to move in its aërial loom of dreams. This poetic tendency is too often crushed by worldly influences; but in some favored souls, it survives and becomes the germ of the artist. But in Bunyan and Bunyan alone-it seems to have remained entire, unchilled by worldly feelings; for of these he had little-unmodified by culture-for his culture was slender-and having defied time itself to cool its virgin flame. Whether dreaming or awake, a blackguard or a saint, in youth, manhood, or age, in the pulpit, or with the pen in his hand, living or dying, John Bunyan was equally and always a child. The exceeding earnestness of the man is the next quality we notice in him. Many talk as if earnestness were like Californian gold-a thing newly-discovered, and not as old as man or God. And yet it is a lesson, verily, taught us alike by material objects and spiritual powers. Are not angels in earnest in their varied ministrations to man? and are not even devils in terrible earnest, as they struggle against the laws of the universe and the "silent magnanimity of Nature and her God?" | and is not that awful Being himself in earnest, as He pursues his immeasurable plans for man's good and his own glory? Verily, this is no world for triflers, and, least of all, for trifling professors of the most earnest of all faiths. A Christian without earnestness, with what comparison shall we compare him? He reminds us of a galvanized corpse, with motion in the limbs, but with no bloom on the cheek, or life in the heart-it smiles but it is coldit moves, but it is dead. No such feeble factitious Christian was John Bunyan. All his works beat with heart, with passionate purpose, with deep faith, and with the reverberations of past suffering. Every work he has written is a chapter in his autobiography; and the more unintended the more vital the chapter is. We wonder that Thomas Carlyle has never described the earnestness of Bunyan. Had he tried it, it might have been in language something like this:-"Here, too, under a poor shed of Bedfordshire, there appeared a brave, truehearted man, striving forward, under the immensities, and toward the eternities, bearing, in his own stout dialect, a burden on his back, and seeking, as with unutterable groanings, to cast it from him and be free. No sham woes were his, no hearsay was hell, no simulacrum was sin, no vague vapor death, to him. He had been in the outer, nay, the outmost darkness; he had awoke from terrific sleep, and felt the worm that dieth not around his neck, and heard at his bed-side the ripple of the slow-moving waves of the unquenchable fire. He had been in the "iron cage," and in the grim dungeons of Despair; had groped in his bosom for the key called Promise; and had shouted in trembling joy as he saw from Mount Clear a little of the glory of the city. Nay, in the Black River he had once and again dipped his feet, long before he was called to pass through it. Honor to thee, brave pilgrim, for thou also wert a hero; and with all thy tinkering thou hast not mended but made one right manly piece of work, which shall live long in the memory of men." All this Carlyle might say, and it were all true, but not the whole truth. Bunyan, indeed, fled from his burden of sin and his City of Destruction, but it was into the arms of a Saviour. His burden clung to him like the gripe of death till he saw the cross and the sepulchre, and felt, without being able fully to express, save by tears, the divine mystery, the awful incarnation of love exhibited there. Carlyle's "Sartor," seeks after peace as sin cerely as Bunyan, but in haste, or pride, or some fatal blindness, he overlooks the cross, overleaps the sepulchre, and stumbles here and there, till by a retrograde motion, he gains the town of False Security, which is hard by the City of Destruction, and which trembles at times, in sympathy with the earthquakes, muttering fitfully below its devoted towers. Or, shall we rather say, Bunyan is his own Christian, a manful struggler, who, if he falls, rises again and pursues his journey; who, if he wanders, returns to the way; and who, if he trembles, trembles forward; while "Sartor" too often resembles Mr. Weary-of-the-world (not weaned from the world), whose life was a long suicide, who fed on bile, and mistook the recoil of hatred and disgust at the earth for humble, prayerful, and simple-minded search after a better country. Many, we dare say, are disposed to say of Bunyan, as Joseph's brethern said of him, in a sneering spirit, "Behold this dreamer cometh !" Pshaw," a mere half-lunatic man of genius." But let such, for their own sakes, beware of entering into controversy with this dreamer, else he will make a fool of them all. Let them beware, too, of remaining too long in his eye, else he may hold them up on his rude calotype to immortal scorn. This lunatic dreamer can argue as acutely as any casuist or schoolman. He can, by the quietest touch of sarcasm, dropped as from the shadow of his strong hand, wither up a pompous pretender, tear off the mantle of a hypocrite, expose a fool and blast an impostor. This dreamer is, at times, dangerous, alike in his earnest anger, and in the cool naïveté of his satire. He has a rough forceful logic, ay, and a "tinkler tongue" of his own. His dreams are dramas, rich, vivid, varied as Shakspeare's. He carries along with him a great key which can open every lock of human nature,-the chapels of its worship, the dungeons of its despair, its airy roofs of grandeur, and its pleasant halls of mirth. He paints at one time a Beulah, and at another a by-path to hell; now a Mercy, and now a Madame Wanton; now greenheaded Ignorance, and now Mr. Greatheart: now giant Maul, and now the three Shining ones; now the den of Diabolus, and now that City which hath no need of the sun. Truly has it been said, "Oh rare John Bunyan, what an intense particle of power was deposited in thy rude body and ruder soul! With a burnt stick for a pencil, what graphic, pathetic, sublime, true, powerful, and tremendous pictures hast thou drawn!" "Mighty," too, is this dreamer "in the Scriptures," and his enemies must know that when he holds a sword in his hand it is no misty meteor, but a right Jerusalem blade, it is the two edged sword of the Spirit, it has been bathed in heaven, and it glows and glitters "anointed for the slaughter." The Bible we have called Bunyan's one book; and his case corroborates the common notion, beware of the man of one book; of one who by frequent perusals has drunk so deeply into a book's spirit, has got so much into its thought and feeling,-travels, in short, so easily and naturally in its track, that without any conscious imitation his works become duplicates of the original. This is true of other books, but much more of the Bible. It is a Pactolus, and he who bathes in it comes out dipped in gold; nay, it resembles that other fabled stream which made the bather invulnerable and immortal. Bunyan had read little else; he had read it too in circumstances which burnt and branded its language upon his soul; he had read it as its blessed words swam on his eyesight through tears; he had read it amid the Slough of Despond; by the red lightnings of Sinai; and as he gazed upwards from the Delectable hills to the far-streaming glory of the city; even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, he had continued to clasp while unable to see it; every chapter in it was a chapter in his history, and every verse touched and thrilled some chord in his heart. Like the poor man's lamb "it lay in his bosom, and was to him as a daughter." Many millions have loved the Bible, but we question if any one surpassed or equalled Bunyan in the depth and fervour of his love. Many have framed concordances, and made entire transcriptions of it, but Bunyan's concordance was his memory, and it lay all transcribed, every word and syllable of it, in his heart. a simple-minded faith in divine revelation-the glorious lines of truth and beauty, which, rising from earth, and stooping from heaven, meet and converge in the cross-the doctrine of atonement, shining, in the shape of an uplifted lamb through the darkness of a guilty earth the importance of humility-the progressive character of the Christian life-the warlike attitude of the Christian himself-the resistance he meets at every step-the fate of the miserable pretenders to his faith and walk, who entangle and annoy him—his constant dependence upon supernatural aid—his feebleness and frequent falls-the personal character of real Christianity-the increasing clearness of his path-the certainty of his coming to his journey's end-the fact that the complexion of his death bed is determined by that of his life, and the type which the individual believer forms of the history of the church as a whole; these are some of the important truths which, apart from special dogmas, are presented in the pictured page of Bunyan. But how they seem to live, and move, and swell, and fructify there! How different from the dry catalogues, and dead rattling autumn-leaves of our catechisms and creeds. Let our theological students burn their systems, and apply themselves to John Bunyan. They often lose the Christian path in mazes, or sink it in marshes, or carry it along roads uniformly flinty; he invests it with the vitality, the variety, and the beauty of real life; and whether it be with a sunbeam or a flash of lightning, or a glare of hell-fire, or the chiaro-scuro of death's valley, that he shows that narrow way, it is always clear, as if cut out now in blackest ebony, and now in whitest ivory; but in both distinct and vivid as the "terrible crystal, and the body of heaven in its clearness." We pass now from Bunyan's general qualities to his writings, although our space warns us to be rapid in our remarks. We shall omit his theological treatises, properly so called, and also his minor allegories, such as Bunyan's theology is now despised by many who admire his genius; and yet, when stripped of the phraseology and severed from the mistakes of his age, his book seems The Life and Death of Mr. Badman." The to contain the best, clearest, and boldest ex- "Visions of Heaven and Hell," usually printed hibition of truth ever given by uninspired in his works, are decidedly not his; their man. Man's anomalous condition by nature better passages are in style above him, and -the fearful and hereditary woe which hangs their worse are in spirit beneath him. The over his cradle-the dark something, call it author, our readers will remember, introduces a rent, or fissure, or fatal flaw, which mars Hobbes into hell, and minutely describes his his being ab origine-the God-inspired thirst punishment and feelings there. The Bunyan for light, safety, and a sublimer existence of the "Pilgrim," even had he seen that which comes over him-the struggles through spirit in torment, would, like his own heroes which this feeling must be born-the worth- near the open mouth of the pit, have passed lessness of mere human merit-the import-on in silent awe and sorrow. "The Visions ance of the Spirit's teaching-the power of of Heaven," again, are apparently written by a scholar, who quotes Milton, and rounds | may obtain"), now a walk-(“walk ye as splendid sentences. We confine ourselves to the "Grace Abounding," the "Holy War," and the "Pilgrim's Progress." The first is his heart turned inside out-is his inner history minutely and lingeringly portrayed; this lifts it far out of the sphere of mere art; literary merit it has hardly any; the little chapters into which it is divided are successive throbs of his big heart. The strangest thing about it is the clearness and self-possession, which not only distinguish his record of his past sufferings, but which have evidently been with him through every step of the terrible process. It is as though a madman were to feel with his own finger his pulse while at the wildest; it is as though a martyr in a burning fiery furnace were to measure his paces through the fire, or to count the minutes of his agony. Bunyan proves himself equal for tasks like these. All the agonized experiences of his heart-its tumults-its treacherous quiet-its fluctuations, so speedy, between the tempest and the calm-its trances, dreams, and strange imaginings, have been observed, as by some calm collateral eye, and have been jotted down, as by the firm finger of a bystander. That eye and that finger are those, in fact, of Bunyan's own clear and powerful intellect, which had the art of standing aside from the fierce rush of his fancy, and of beholding, remembering, and registering its whirling words and yet wilder conceptions. It is conscious frenzy, a fearful gift, only possessed by two or three since Bunyan, one of whom, strange to tell, was Rousseau. Had children of the light"), and now a battle And yet, though somewhat worn, the old parliamentary soldier enters on the "Holy War" with marvellous spirit. It is a dream, less vraisemblable, less varied, less beautiful than the Pilgrim, but full of rugged power and unique purpose. There are florid wars as well as books, with fine and empty flourishes of endeavor, with nidering commanders and faint-hearted troops. Bunyan's is of a different kind. It is earnest, fierce; all scabbards tossed away, no armor for backs, and victory or death the watchword of the day. The field is wide and one-" Mansoul" -the hosts are twain-those who are called chosen and faithful, and those who are the serfs of sin and Satan. The commanders are also two, the Word made flesh, his garments dyed in blood, his eyes as a flame of fire, his face more marred than that of man, and the Prince of Darkness, with pride and fury, glaring through his miserable eyes, with the scars of thunder on his cheek, hold Bunyan's confessions, however, unlike Rousseau's, are almost entirely of spiritual sin and spiritual struggle. His sins were all of the spirit and none of the flesh. Whatever ardor there might be originally in his temperament, was soon drained out of it, into the reservoirs of his imagination and heart, and these in their turn either slept or stormed, to the lulling zephyrs or the rushing blasts of his religion. Sore for a season is the contest around the wanderer between the sun and the wind; but the wind at last sub-ing, in defiance, his garment of gloom around sides, and the sun shining from a higher sphere, and burning with a purer blaze, sheds upon his path what seems only a mightier moonlight, a holier day, so soft is its warmth, so gentle its glare, and so shorn and meck its effulgence. his scorched frame, and saying "Evil, be thou my good ;" and saying again-" What matter where if I be still the same?"-the result one; for it has been settled from everlasting that Mansoul shall be saved, Diabolus defeated, and "that great country Universe" The life of the Christian is described in made as happy and beautiful as the throne Scripture under many analogies. Three, round which it revolves. Let those who however, are most common and most strik- would see in what living fire, in what crowding. It is now a race-("so run that yeing figures-not of speech, but of action—in what bare yet burning words, and with what | are still two or three we have never seen sucprofusion of martial incident, and eloquence cessfully represented, if even attempted at of martial dialogue, Bunyan tells this brief all. One is the interior of the City of Debut pregnant tale, read his "Holy War;" struction. Who, going to work on the hints. although, we fear, it lies now neglected as dropped by Bunyan, shall paint us the Lustsome old claymore, which once reeked at gory lanes, Murder-alleys, Theft-corners, and broad Culloden. Blasphemy-squares of that fearful place, with the lightnings ever and anon dipping down into its midst, and with the scowl of heaven forming a permanent and prophetic blackness over its walls? Then there is Beelzebub's Castle lowering over against the bright Wicket-gate, with one solitary watchman pacing along its battlements, night and day, haggard with his eternal vigil, and call archers to take their aim. Then there is Turnaway, brought back by devils, and with the words inscribed on his back, "Wanton Professor and Damnable Apostate." And, tion the FACE of Ignorance, with the blank of vacuity and the blackness of darkness mingling in its expression, as he is refused admittance at the gate, and told, that he who could scarcely go forward must be taken in a whirlwind back! Not so with his "Pilgrim's Staff." That who has not seen and handled, and now wept over, and now worshipped, beside? Who has forgot his emotions on reading this wonderful book, which, for the first time, seemed to realize to him his early faith in Christianity? It is to us, at least, an era in our life. We read it beside our mother's knee; and never can we forget the Dreamer, oring, as each new pilgrim approaches, on his that road which his genius has mapped out for evermore. Never can we forget the cave where he dreamed the dream--the Man with the Book in his Hand-the Slough of Despond-the Apparition of Sleep-Pliable turn-in fine, there is still waiting for representaing to the wrong Side-the Starry Wicketgate shining through the darkness-the cliffs of Sinai overhanging the bewildered wanderer-the Interpreter's house with its wonderous visions-the Man in the Cage-and Him, the Nameless, rising from the dream of the Judgment-seat-the Hill Difficulty, with the two dreary roads of Danger and Destruction diverging from its base-the arbor halfway up-the lions on the summit-the House called Beautiful-that very solitary place, the Valley of Humiliation-that "other place," the Valley of the Shadow of Death -the Town of Vanity-the green meadow called Ease the dungeons of Despair-the Delectable Mountains-the short cut to hell -the Enchanted Ground-Beulah, that lovely land where the sun shineth night and day -the Dark River, over which there is no bridge the ridges of the Everlasting Hills rising beyond! Never can we forget even the little well-worn copy of "Cooke's Classics," with its dark binding, its crude prints, and its torn-out leaves here and there, which contained the precious treasure, and on which we can hardly now think or look, without tears-so deeply are joys and sorrows, with which no stranger may intermeddle, bound up and blended with its memory. We may sum up what we have further to say of the "Pilgrim," under some remarks on its pictures, its characters, its scenes, and the comparative merits of its two parts. It is the only perfect picture-book in literature. Every page of it might be illustrated; nay, is illustrated already by the painter's hand. Many of its pictorial points have had full justice done to them by artists, but there The variety of the characters in this book is wonderful, and the vividness of their portraiture. So is the intensity of the individualism of all and each, even of those who represent large classes of men. But perhaps the most surprising thing is the liking Bunyan entertains and makes us entertain for all of them. It is so with all creators. But it is less strange in mere artists, like Shakspeare and Scott, than in one whose art was subordinate to his earnestness. Whatever be the cause, the effect is certain. We may condemn, we must pity, but we do not, and cannot hate, one even of the vile and depraved characters introduced into this parable. We sigh behind Pliable; we would box the ears of Obstinate, indeed, but we would box him onwards; and we feel a sneaking kindness even for Worldly Wiseman, for Shame, for Adam the First, for Green-headed Ignorance, and his complaisant ferryman. Why? Because, first, their author unconsciously felt, and unconsciously wished us to feel, the same; because, secondly, all genius has covered, with a like catholic mantle, the basest and lowest of its handiworks, even as the sun dyes worlds and worms in the same radiance, and gilds the clouds of the sky, and the webs of the spider with the same gold; and because, thirdly, it must do so from its peculiar power, which is that of looking on a broad scale, and in a mild light, as if at |