kind of life with which he invests the inanimate stone that we instance it:

'I followed my guide a few paces, and the hills opened again into no large space; and then all farther way is barred by a stream that, at the height of about fifty feet, gushes from a hole in the rock, and spreading in large sheets over its broken front, dashes from steep to steep, and then rattles away in a torrent down the valley: the rock on the left rises perpendicular, with stubbed yew-trees and shrubs staring from its side, to the height of at least 300 feet; but these are not the thing: it is the rock to the right, under which you stand to see the fall, that forms the principal horror of the place. From its very base it begins to slope forwards over you in one block or solid mass, without any crevice in its surface, and overshadows half the area below with its dreadful canopy. When I stood, at, I believe, four yards distance from its foot, the drops, that perpetually distil from its brow, fell on my head; and on one part of the top more exposed to the weather, there are loose stones, that hang in air, and threaten visibly some idle spectator with instant destruction; it is safer to shelter yourself close to its bottom, and trust to the mercy of that enormous mass which nothing but an earthquake can stir. The gloomy, uncomfortable day well suited the savage aspect of the place, and made it still more formidable; I stayed, not without shuddering, a quarter of an hour; and thought my trouble richly paid, for the impression will last my life.' -Mason, vol. ii. p. 287.

Mountain scenery always impressed him in the same overpowering way, as in the following brief notice (not description) of the Scottish mountains :

'I am returned from Scotland, charmed with my expedition. It is of the Highlands I speak; the Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the mountains are extatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year. None but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen, that have not been among them: their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering-shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell-grottoes, and Chinese rails. Then I had so beautiful an autumn, Italy could hardly produce a nobler scene; and this so sweetly contrasted with that perfection of nastiness, and total want of accommodation, that Scotland only can supply. Oh, you would have blessed yourself! I shall certainly go again. What a pity it is I cannot draw, nor describe, nor ride on horseback!'-Mitford, p. 349.

By the way, his love of the picturesque brought him into scenes but little suited to his fastidious refinement; his raptures are interspersed with such notices as these. Of Edinburgh: I am not sorry to have seen that most picturesque (at a distance) and nastiest (when near) of all capital cities. Here (at Dunkeld)-and he has been describing the adjacent scenery with great enthusiasm here we passed the night; if I told you how, you would bless yourself.' And he unaffectedly admits, in the midst of genuine raptures, his satisfaction that the walks are clean; for you know I am no lover of dirt.' But glorious lakes, and tumbling torrents, and prodigious mountains, and awful heights, and rushing rivers, and terrible precipices, which

draw from him the tribute due to Scotch scenery,' Since I saw the Alps I have seen nothing sublime till now,'-triumph over his disgusts. The poet gets the better of the man, precise old bachelor as he was.

His descriptions of these scenes to his friends, do not aim at poetry or power, only at simple, truthful accuracy. So that passages of higher beauty occur, as it were, by chance, and often in brief sentences; as in this evening scene among the Westmoreland Lakes:

'In the evening I walked alone down to the lake, by the side of Crowpark, after sunset, and saw the solemn colours of night draw on, the last gleam of sunshine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep serene of the waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown across them, till they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At a distance was heard the murmurs of many water-falls, not audible in the day-time; I wished for the moon, but she was dark, and to me silent,

"Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." Mason, vol. ii. p. 266. Or this pretty realizing of a giddy height,—and he seems to have been susceptible of dizziness :

'From thence I was to walk a mile over very rough ground, a torrent rattling along on the left hand; on the cliffs above hung a few goats; one of them danced and scratched an ear with its hind foot in a place where I would not have stood stock-still

66 For all beneath the moon."

Or passing notices, as

'The craggy tops of a hundred nameless hills.'

Ibid. p. 286.

'Monmouth lies on the same river, in a vale that is the delight of my eyes, and the very seat of pleasure.'

'Saddleback, whose furrowed sides were gilt by the noonday sun, whilst its brow appeared of a sad purple from the shadow of the clouds as they sailed slowly by it.'

We often come upon a rich picturesque cluster of epithets, characteristic of his poetic style; as this description of Derwent

'Opposite are the thick woods of Lord Egremont and Newland Valley, with green and smiling fields embosomed in the dark cliffs; to the left the jaws of Borrowdale, with that turbulent chaos of mountain behind mountain rolled in confusion; beneath you, and stretching far away to the right, the shining purity of the lake reflecting rocks, woods, fields, and inverted tops of hills, just ruffled by the breeze, enough to show it is alive, with the little buildings of Keswick, Crosthwaite Church, and Skiddaw for a background at a distance. Behind you, the magnificent heights of Walla crag.'— Mason, vol. ii. p. 261.

Nor was his fancy idle in appropriately peopling such scenes. How well, for instance, his 'old abbot' becomes Nettley Abbey, and adds peace to a peaceful picture:

In the bosom of the woods (concealed from profane eyes) he 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 sea. Did you observe how, as that white sail shot by and was lost, he turned and crossed himself to drive the tempter from him who threw that distraction in his way?'-Ibid. p. 294.

Nothing in Gray was wholly fancy; even this chastened mood in his 'Abbot' has its counterpart in his own personal feelings. Though on such a subject these transpire too seldom, yet there is a consolatory genuineness when we do meet with them which satisfies us that his mind was ready and apt at religious meditation, and that his philosophy was that of a Christian: as where we find him thus musing on the benefits of sorrow and bereavement:

'He who best knows our nature (for He made us what we are), by such afflictions recals us from our wandering thoughts and idle merriment; from the insolence of youth and prosperity, to serious reflection, to our duty and to Himself; nor need we hasten to get rid of these impressions; time (by appointment of the same Power) will cure the smart, and in some hearts soon blot out all the traces of sorrow: but such as preserve them longest (for it is partly left in our own power) do perhaps but acquiesce in the will of the chastiser.'-Ibid. p. 246.

Such passages as these let us into the inner mind; but this is indeed peculiarly the effect of Gray's letters, and of all we are told about him: they show us the man. And he who in his own days was known intimately but to few, who even in his immediate neighbourhood was an object of curiosity to those whom only a few walls separated from him, who, from his reserved and recluse habits, was so rare a spectacle, that we are told, when he did appear in the College walks, or other public places, intelligence ran from college to college, and the tables, if it chanced to be dinnertime, were thinned by the desertion of the young men who thronged to behold him; while if he passed on some occasion of ceremony through the quadrangle of their college, every man would take off his cap out of respect to the rare visitant,-becomes, before we have ended our studies, intimately known to us; his 'frailties' and his merits' all open, his characteristics known to us, his habits and mode of life familiar. And a very remarkable exception to his class we find him, and yet as true a poet as any, the greatest amongst them; for in his lamp burned the sacred fire, though he cherished it after a fashion of his own. In the abundance of his learning he had studied deepest and with most love what he himself calls the favourite and celestial

6

science' of Poetry; he was, in fact, that rarest of all, a philosophic poet. Not a poet who wrote philosophically; but whose philosophic temperament moulded his whole being as well as his verse; checking, subduing, moderating, holding under even the fire of genius, that no line or thought, though inspired by the Muse herself, should pass but through a severe scrutiny. Nothing hasty, rash, intemperate, could exist in that region; nor could worldly motives of vanity, or fashion, or gain. This least impetuous of poets was also the most disinterested. He despised the thought of money as an aim; nor did he, whose fortune was but small, and his means for the greater part of his life limited, ever gain, or seek to gain, a farthing by his writings. His wise and generous economy was untinctured by the slightest stain of avarice.

Not that we would disparage money as a motive for exertion. Even in the highest walk of genius it is a natural and respectable one; nor do we know an instance of any voluminous author acting without its stimulus. But the absence of this motive in the case before us has, nevertheless, its value in strengthening the claim we have put forward of deep feeling and truth. There is a common enough fallacy with respect to verse, that where art is used, the poem is artificial. Gray was indeed an accomplished artist; all the skill that Nature and knowledge and practice put within his reach, he sedulously employed to make his verse as perfect, as faultless, as sweet, as musical, as expressive as might be; but truth was throughout his end and aim-vivid, impressive, distinct truth. Seeing more distinctly, feeling more keenly than other men, he said nothing he did not mean, and he spared no pains to say that well. And this truth it is that makes his verse live; that keeps it ever fresh and young; that makes his language as much the language of to-day as it was of a hundred years back. How few poets, though many there are of greater name than his, and it may be of more fertile, teeming imagination, -have left behind them, as he has, so many scenes and subjects indissolubly connected with his images and pictures of them! The evening time, the twilight hour, rustic labours and village life, the circumstances of pomp and state, poetry, history, and art, fame, friendship, remembrance, the yearnings of our common nature, the shudderings on the verge of the grave-these themes will always be associated with the words of power which once defined them; and while our country retains its characteristics, and our language its purity, the stanzas in which our poet has enshrined his musings can never become obsolete or forgotten.

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ART. VI.-1. Lectures on Social Science, and the Organization of Labour. By JAMES HOLE. 8vo. London: Chapman.

1851.

2. The First Report of the Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations. To which is added, a Report of the Cooperative Conference held in London, at the Society's Hall, 34, Castle Street East, on the 26th and 27th of July, 1852. London: Lumley. 1852.

3. Report of the Cooperative Conference, held at Manchester, on the 15th and 16th August, 1853, at the Cooper Street Institute. With Appendices. London: Lumley, and Shorter, Hall of Association, 34, Castle Street East, Oxford Street.

4. Five Years in the Land of Refuge; a Letter to the Members of the Council of the late Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations, now reconstituted under the title of the Association for Promoting Industrial and Provident Societies. By JULES LECHEVALIER ST. ANDRÉ. 8vo. London: Richardson.

1853.

5. Journal of Association, 1852, January to June. London: Bezer.

6. The Master Engineers and their Workmen. Three Lectures on the Relations of Capital and Labour; delivered by request of the Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations, at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution, on the 13th, 20th, and 27th of February, 1852. By J. M. LUDLOW, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister-at-Law. London: Bezer. 1852.

7. The Christian Socialist, Vols. I. and II. London: Printed by the Working Printers' Association. John Tupling, 320, Strand.

IN estimating the value of new schemes and theories, a great distinction must be drawn between the anticipation of final results, and the attempt at immediate measures. Nothing can exceed the folly of the recent talk of Peace Societies discouraging necessary armaments, and expecting to bring nations to a parley without a front of defence. Yet any one who will take the trouble to read Ramsden's Sermons on 'The Origin and Ends of Government,' and War and the Final Cessation of all Hostilities,' preached in the year 1800, and to follow the reflections they suggest, will learn to see as decidedly the