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SOME NEW JOTTINGS IN MY NOTE-BOOK. | the sentiment of the old wise Greek; and I

FIRST GATHERING.

BY A DREAMER.

From the Dublin University Magazine.

"I wish you saw me half starting out of my chair; with what confidence, as I grasp the elbow of it, I look up, catching the idea, even sometimes before it half-way reaches me! I believe in my conscience, I intercept many a thought which Heaven intended for another man." "-STERNE.

66 They tell but dreams."-MRS. HEMANS.

One.

THERE is one wish my heart has always faltered in, nor could I bring myself to give it to my friends; and yet it is so commonly spoken, and so generally esteemed a kind one, that it may appear extraordinary to refuse one's assent to it. I allude to the custom, on new-year's days, and birth days, and the other little eras of a person's life, of wishing him many returns of them. I do not think the prayer a good one, and have always paused in uttering it. And wherefore? Because I may not recognize in old age a blessing. I remember the altered form, the failing memory, the palsied mind, the closedup heart and I ask myself, Are these the goods I would give my friend? And more than these; I call to mind that those who live long, die over and over again in losing their beloved ones; and that hope, and joy, and health, all perish, even while the poor body yet lives on. Thus the protracted life presents only the wider field for the sorrowful invasion of change and grief.

Schiller, with his wonted felicity, gives us a glimpse of the profound deep of desolation in this couplet :

"Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer,

Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunche nichts mehr."

And so, with the old man the world has truly become an empty place. His co-mates, who started with him in the same morning of life, are long since at rest in their dusty graves. Some died abroad, and some in their own land. Some lingered on through months, or even years, of pain; others were struck down in a passing moment. Some died happily, and at peace; others in want and misery unspeakable. At all events, they are gone, and his heart sinks within him as he feels he is alone; and he wonders when he thinks how strange all things have become, and how differently people speak and act now from what they did when he was a boy. "Whom Heaven loves, dies early," was JULY, 1844.

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see nothing in it abhorrent to Christian feeling, or that would prevent one giving as their best wish-"A happy death, andone in youth!"

Two.

Might not a curious paper be written on the last verses of our poets, and an attempt made to show that in them those glorious spirits took, perhaps unconsciously, no unmeet farewell of the muse? The last lines written by Lord Byron were:—

Seek out-less often sought than found-
A soldier's grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.

Shelley's last poem, and perhaps the most mystical of any he wrote, is called "The Triumph of Life," and was in great part composed as he floated on that fatal sea which was so soon to ingulf him. Its conclusion is :

After a brief space

From every form the beauty slowly waned;
From every firmest limb and fairest face
The strength and freshness fell like dust, and
left

The action and the shape, without the grace
Thus on the way

Of life..

Mask after mask fell from the countenance

And form of all; and long before the day Was old, the joy which waked, like heaven's glance,

And some grew weary of the ghastly dance,
The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died;

And fell, as I have fallen, by the wayside;Those soonest from whose forms most shadows past,

And least of strength and beauty did abide. Then, what is life? I cried.

The lingering sweetness of the last notes of the Hemans has not yet quitted our ears, and her "Sabbath Sonnet" was the tender adieu the daughter of music, with failing fingers, took of her harp. It followed-how fitly !-her magnificent lyric, "Despondency and Aspiration," and told that the restless longings of that lofty strain were all fulfilled, and oh, how abundantly! She died in early summer, and this was the broken melody of the poor sufferer on her last Sabbath morning. Memories of the sunshiny fields of her own England came across her soul, the peacefulness which seems pre-eminently cast over nature during the hallowed

hours, the happy groups wending their way alike from hall and from hamlet, towards the gray church-tower, whence the sweet jangling chimes are issuing-and then the touching allusion to her own fee

bleness

I may not tread

With them those pathways, to the feverish bed Of sickness bound;-yet, oh my God! I bless Thy mercy, that with Sabbath peace hath filled My chastened heart, and all its throbbings stilled To one deep calm of lowliest thankfulness.

Another, and an altered, gust from the wind-harp! Yes; the breezy tones are changed, and the instrument obeys the unseen agent's ministration. Is not the human soul the instrument we speak of; and feelings, do they not sweep its chords, and shake out responses, ay! and to widely different vibrations?

William Motherwell, whose Scottish ballads have brought tears to the eyes of many a snooded maiden of his own country, and whose wild Norse legends have yet more powerfully affected the men, is the next I shall refer to for illustration of my position. With a sense of coming mortality creeping over him, and a feeling as though the long grass were already waving above his head, and with the natural desire not wholly to pass away from men's memories, the poet passionately entreats, in his last lines, to be remembered. He asks himself, will there be any to visit his grave, and pace it round thinking of him, and sit down by his side, as he lies there cold and senseless, and name his name, now growing unfamiliar? And then, while half hoping and half doubting, he calls to mind that the dead have no need of this tribute, even as they so rarely receive it; and his conclusion is a kind of palinode of all his preceding wishes. I quote from memory, but I am sure I quote correctly:

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ing,

Let no tear start;

Three.

One thing you will learn fast enough in the world, for it is potent in such teachingthat is, to be suspicious. Oh! cast from you for ever the hateful lesson. Men do not think how much of their innocency they are laying down, when they assume a clothing whose texture is guile. Beware of this mock protection; for you can hardly use it without practising deceit. I do not ask you to trust always; but I would have you think well of men until you find them otherwise. When you are once deceived, either by an acted or a spoken falsehood, trust that person no

more.

I had it once laid down to me as an axiom

by a very dear friend, (and I am so satisfied of the precept's truth as to make it a rule of my life,) that persons rarely suspect others except of things which they are capable of doing themselves. Yes; these shadows of doubting are generally flung from some bad realities within. You are looking at your own image when you see so much vileness in your neighbor's face. How much better might not we ourselves become, if we used more largely to others that blessed charity which thinketh no evil!

Four.

There can be little doubt but that, with all its absurdities, heraldry is a most ancient science. The twelve Hebrew tribes bore on their banners insignia, under which the dying patriarch Jacob had typified them (Gen. xlix). The supporters of our own national arms were regal emblems, even in the days of Balaam. When that bold bad man would speak of the victories and power of Israel, he selects those two animals in illustration (Numbers xxiii. 22, 24; xxiv. 8, 9)-the lion, as the emblem of conquest; the unicorn, of strength.

Five.

I am assured by the friend who has faIt were in vain; for time has long been knelling, vored me with them, that the following

Sad one, depart!'

I could extend this considerably; but it is often pleasanter to suggest than to enlarge.

spirited lines have never been printed. I do not think they will suffer from a comparison even with Shelley's, and only regret I cannot name the translator :

TO THE LARK.

From the Welsh of Dafydd ab Gwilyn, a bard of the fourteenth century.

I.

Sentinel of the morning light!
Reveller of the spring!

How sweetly, nobly, wild thy flight,

Thy boundless journeying;

Far from thy brethren of the woods, alone,
A hermit cloister before God's throne !

II.

Oh! wilt thou climb the heavens for me,
Yon rampart's starry height-
Thou interlude of melody

Twixt darkness and the light;

And seek, with heaven's first dawn upon thy crest,
My lady love, the moonbeam of the west!

III.

No woodland caroller art thou:

Far from the archer's eye,

Thy course is o'er the mountain brow,
Thy music in the sky;

Then fearless float thy path of cloud along,
Thou earthly denizen of angel song!

Sir.

* With regard to friends. Our little being is so much wrapped up in our personal experience, and this experience so much constitutes our whole world, that any one who becomes dear to us, is invariably depreciated, as to his former life, when he was a stranger to us. This may be done unconsciously, but, I think, occurs almost assuredly. We never think that our friend's feelings were as warm, his thoughts as generous, his heart as open, long before we knew him; and should any change divide us, how little do we deem he thinks as deeply, feels as sensibly, lives as completely as ever! Self so much constitutes with us every thing, that where we are not present, there is a kind of annihilation of all things else. Let us take our departure from any place, and can we imagine then (at least with any degree of conviction) every thing happening as really as when we were there? Let friendship exist between us and any one, however worthy of it, and can we from our heart feel the same sympathy in that friend's former life, which passed ere our intimacy began? No! our present love may teach us to hear of it with gladness; but never can we dwell upon it with the same enduring pleasure as we do upon the scenes and incidents in which we have been ourselves sharers.

keep present with us the littleness of our share in worldly matters. How comparatively less than nothing is our busiest conduct; and yet to us this little portion is every thing! And then, on all sides of us, the vast mechanism of the world is going smoothly on, and hundreds of events hourly occurring, of which we know nothing, simply because we do not witness them. Neither do we recollect that what we have seen occurred just as independently ere we were present, and shall go on just as uninterruptedly when we have departed-that not with them cometh a change, but with us-and that man falsely charges upon nature the alterations he himself is made to undergo.

Seven.

Truly, the world is a lovely place. Not the minutest blade of grass, or the humblest flower, I pass by without a blessing; or the perishing ephemeron, or the everlasting hills; or the faint tinkling streamlet, or the full, far-sounding ocean-all alike in their perfections, though differing in their degrees

-all these are glorious to my eye and senses. link-man is the outcast, the spoiler, the But man!-here is the rending of the divine doomed. He is no more what he once was, ther proof of the recessity for a change in and what he ought to be; and I seek no furhis nature and destinies.

The world-I mean the world of nature -is lovely. Tell me, dear reader, have you ever looked up straight into the clear heavens, when they were mirroring as soft a blue as your mistress's eye, and thought for an instant what Space was, without feeling a weight suddenly plucked off from your head, and a moving thrill which made your pulses leap within you, from the vague sense of habitation bearing the same relation to locality that eternity does to time? And then, when you saw the smiling fields stretching far, far away on all sides of you, which led off your eye to rest at last on the distant hills, did you not pant to cast yourself abroad on that glorious scene, and involuntarily

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Once more: is there not something in

And truly may we become wise, if we thus expressibly awful in the solitary magnifi

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heart against all the gentler sympathies; and the apprehension of childishness, and its imputation to us, prevent our entering into their little feelings, and giving them their due weight and importance.

cence of the noon-day sun, as he pours down | ality to each with whom we mix. those ceaseless tides of glory on this lower selfish feeling of making the world one world?-when you think that he is at one thing, and ourselves the other, closes up the and the same moment shining for countless miles on the expanse of the glittering sea, and visiting the shady forest, the lonely country, the peopled city; the palace of the nobles, the hut of the beggar; the happy home of health, the heaped-up hospital; the rich, the proud, the rejoicing; the wretched, the dying, the dead, and the green graves. Yes, all these things, so widely differing, yet forming part of the same human life, that glorious eye takes in at once!

Eight.

I do not think we sufficiently sympathize with our juniors in years. That false pride, that dearly-bought experience, through which we maintain a superiority over them, dispose us too much to overlook their many beautiful traits of character. We do not remember that these little people, in their own selves, and so far as their unripened sensibilities carry them, are each of them the centre of a circle, the moving point round which revolves the whole world beside. Neither do we think often enough, that there is a freshness in these young souls which may profitably revive our jaded hearts, and an honesty of purpose like an atmosphere surrounding them, which it would be well for us sometimes to breathe; and that lastly, by "becoming as little children" we are getting taught by those who, of all instructors on earth, are nearest heaven; for they have come most recently from it, and its fragrance is still floating about

them.

Yet who remembers not the days of his boyhood? What traveller, even in the midst of toilsome and busy years, when manhood had hardened his heart, and disappointment taught him to rejoice no more on earth, did not turn his eye backward to his father's manly welcome, the tender reception from his mother, his young sisters' proud trusting in him, and his happy home, whither no care nor sorrow could pursue him—the family hearth was a sanctuary, and there he was safe.

and

The innocence of childhood, consisting, as it does, in the ignorance of evil, is for me the one charm which makes it so like what I dream of heaven. Alas! how often, when I gazed on the fair hair of the young, eyes that looked no evil, have I in my heart shed tears that such whiteness of soul was no longer mine own-bitter tears of repentance, but ineffectual ones likewise, for they were the lament for what had long since departed. The fruit had been tasted, and the paradise of primeval harmlessness wandered from for ever.

Nine.

O, the littleness of human knowledge! All that we know is, nothing can be known. Mystery of mysteries are we full often to ourselves; and if we know not what is in us-if when we cast the glance of anxious inquiry within, and ask individually, "What am I?" the hollowness of vacuity only reverberates the question-How can we hope to comprehend what is not of ourselves?

I envy not the man who can look on the open countenance of the true-hearted boy, or the fair and delicate face of girlhood, with those pensive eyes and long golden hair, and not call to mind his own by-gone years, nor seek to read for those untried The world talk of "mental acquirespirits what is written for them in the book ments." Mental acquirements! and what of daily life. Were I to try to feel like are they? The astronomer will tell you him, I should not succeed; for I regard the that Science has now, like the giants of young with an intense sympathy. Remem-old, scaled the heavens; yea, that he, even bering most vividly, as I do, when I was he, has in his wisdom meted out the stars one of them, and recollecting the upward-that he has computed their number, and feeling wherewith I used to regard the full- discovered their positions-that he has obgrown, I cannot help now shaping my served their progress, and marked their thoughts downwards, and becoming one varied revolutions. But turn, and ask the with them again. It may be, that we do same wise man something further, and benot give in this world sufficient individu- hold his emptiness! Ask him, What is any

one of those glowing orbs of which he so vaunteth his knowledge? Is it only

"A speck of tinsel fixed in heaven To light the midnights of his native town;"

or, is it a world like unto our own? Are cares, and fears, and sorrows all there, enveloping it like a sky? and is it only its measureless distance which invests it with such lustre ? Do its tenants contemplate this earth with feelings at all akin to ours, when we regard their world? Do they long to discover what beings people so glorious a fabric, and gazing, do they

"Wonder what is there, So beautiful it seems?"

Ask him, then, any of these questions, and where is his knowledge?

Ten.

All persons of a highly-wrought and imaginative disposition, must have found how much clearer they are able to think in the night season than during the garish hours of day. Some say, the passions are more awake then; it may be so, but I am sure the intellect is more awake also. Jean Paul has a pretty conceit, to explain to us why our thoughts are more vivid, more marked, more copious, while the material world is wrapped in gloom. He says something like this, if I do not wrong him :

"The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night, for the same reason that the cages of birds are darkened, so that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and stillness of darkness. Ideas, which the day converts into smoke and mist, during the night stand about us, light and flames; like the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, and which seems in the daytime a pillar of cloud, but is by night a column of fire."

Again, visit the physiologist, and inquire of him, where is that thinking portion of man, his true self, seated? He can tell you much of its divine functions, but nothing of its real nature; he can dilate on its mighty The superior claims of the ebon goddess and mysterious powers, but what tangible are so well put forth here, that I need make idea can he afford you of itself? Bring no addition.

him to the new-made corpse-the temple in ruins, from which the guardian deity is departed the signet, whereon Ichabod, the word of wo, is engraven-and ask him, where in that tabernacle abode its inmate? whence arose that strange communion between earth and heaven? How came the worm and the god to be united in that weak frame? Alas, he can give you no reply; or should he try to reason out the question, he may lead you, apparently, a step or two further, and then will be compelled to desist.

The great Sanctuary of Knowledge mortal foot has never entered; the veil which separates it from our gaze, has not yet been uplifted; and though at times we fancy we have advanced beyond our fellows towards treading its unseen recesses, we in reality but touch the curtain which trembles in our hold; and the densest mist that beclouds us is-ourself! Things alien to us we can fancy we understand; the world that is about us we can, in our hours of musing, contemplate and admire; but the world within passeth knowledge. The mind, though itself the seat of understanding, like the eye-so Locke compares itcannot view itself; and thus remains in ignorance of its own true nature.

Eleven.

We speak of the treasures of affection in this world-has the spirit-land none such? Even from the millions of bursten hearts, who have hence travelled thitherwards, may not stores of it be gathered, richer, purer, more disinterested, (inasmuch as lacking the impulse of the passions,) than any this world can bestow? Have we dear ones dwelling with us above earth ?—are there not some also beneath it?-and whose affection is the more unchanging? Which of them will love us on still without coldness or fretfulness-without caring for our imperfections without heeding our unkindness-without blaming our injustice or wrong; but ever, ever, looking upon us with the same tender eyes, taking all wrong, giving none, and watching over us for good, untired, unwearied, undeparting!

Alas, alas! it is the living change, not the dead, in their affection and natures. I have read of the Arab city, in which the inhabitants were in one night changed to stone. Whatever had been the occupation of each at that particular moment, in that did the cold hand fix him-in that he remained for ever and ever. So is it with

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