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as sacred treasures. The sorrows over which it sheds its influence are "ill-bartered for the garishness of joy;" for they win us softly from life, and fit us to die smiling. It endures, not only while fortune changes, but while opinions vary, which the young enthusiast fondly hoped would never forsake him. It remains when the unsubstantial pageants of goodliest hope vanish. It binds the veteran to the child by ties which no fluctuations even of belief can alter. It preserves the only identity, save that of consciousness, which man with certainty retains-connecting our past with our present being by delicate ties, so subtle that they vibrate to every breeze of feeling; yet so strong that the tempests of life have not power to break them. It assures us that what we have been we shall be, and that our human hearts shall vibrate with their first sympathies while the species shall endure.

ness and low ambition froze not "the genial current of the soul." The meanest and most ungifted have their gentle remembrances of early days. Love has tinged the life of the artisan and the cottager with something of the romantic. The course of none has been along so beaten a road that they remember not fondly some resting-places in their journeys; some turns of their path in which lovely prospects broke in upon them; some soft plats of green refreshing to their weary feet. Confiding love, generous friendship, disinterested humanity, require no recondite learning, no high imagination, to enable an honest heart to appreciate and feel them. Too often, indeed, are the simplicities of nature and the native tendernesses of the soul nipped and chilled by those anxieties which lie on them "like an untimely frost." "The world is too much with us." We become lawyers, politicians, merchants, and forget that we are men, and sink in our transitory We think that, on the whole, Mackenzie is vocations that character which is to last for the first master of this delicious style. Sterne, ever. A tale of sentiment-such as those of doubtless, has deeper touches of humanity in that honoured veteran whose works we would some of his works. But there is no sustained now particularly remember-awakens all these feeling-no continuity of emotion-no extendpulses of sympathy with our kind, of whose ed range of thought, over which the mind can beatings we had become almost unconscious. brood in his ingenious and fantastical writings. It does honour to humanity by stripping off its His spirit is far too mercurial and airy to suffer artificial disguises. Its magic is not like that him tenderly to linger over those images of by which Arabian enchanters raised up glit- sweet humanity which he discloses. His cletering spires, domes, and palaces by a few ca- verness breaks the charm which his feeling balistic words; but resembles their power to spreads, as by magic, around us. His exquidisclose veins of precious ore where all seemed site sensibility is ever counteracted by his persterile and blasted. It gently puts aside the ceptions of the ludicrous, and his ambition brambles which overcast the stream of life, after the strange. No harmonious feeling and lays it open to the reflections of those deli- breathes from any of his pieces. He sweeps cate clouds which lie above it in the heavens."that curious instrument, the human heart," It shows to us the soft undercourses of feeling, which neither time nor circumstances can wholly stop; and the depth of affection in the soul, which nothing but sentiment itself can fathom. It disposes us to pensive thoughtexpands the sympathies-and makes all the half-forgotten delights of youth 'come back upon our hearts again," to soften and to cheer us.

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Too often has the sentiment of which we have spoken been confounded with sickly affectations in a common censure. But no things can be more opposite than the paradoxes of the inferior order of German sentimentalists and the works of a writer like Mackenzie. Real sentiment is the truest, the most genuine, and the most lasting thing on earth. It is more ancient as well as more certain in its operations than the reasoning faculties. We know and feel before we think; we perceive before we compare; we enjoy before we believe. As the evidence of sense is stronger than that of testimony, so the light of our inward eye more truly shows to us the secrets of the heart than the most elaborate process of reason. Riches, honours, power, are transitory-the things which appear, pass away-the shadows of life alone are stable and unchanging. Of the recollections of infancy nothing can deprive us. Love endures, even if its object perishes, and nurtures the soul of the mourner. Sentiment has a kind of divine alchymy, rendering grief itself the source of tenderest thoughts and farreaching desires, which the sufferer cherishes

with hurried fingers, calling forth in rapid succession its deepest and its liveliest tones, and making only marvellous discord. His pathos is, indeed, most genuine while it lasts; but the soul is not suffered to cherish the feeling which it awakens. He does not shed, like Mackenzie, one mild light on the path of life; but scatters on it wild coruscations of evershifting brightness, which, while they sometimes disclose spots of inimitable beauty, often do but fantastically play over objects dreary and revolting. All in Mackenzie is calm, gentle, harmonious. No play of mistimed wit, no flourish of rhetoric, no train of philosophical speculation, for a moment diverts our sympathy. Each of his best works is like one deep thought, and the impression which it leaves, soft, sweet, and undivided as the summer evening's holiest and latest sigh.

The only exception which we can make to this character, is the Man of the World. Here the attempt to obtain intricacy of plot disturbs the emotion which, in the other works of the author, is so harmoniously excited. A tale of sentiment should be most simple. Its whole effect depends on its keeping the tenor of its predominant feeling unbroken. Another defect in this story is, the length of time over which it spreads its narrative. Sindall, alone, connects the two generations which it embraces, and he is too mean and uninteresting thus to appear both as the hero and the chorus. When a story is thus continued from a mother to a daughter, it seems to have no legitimate

boundary. The painful remembrances of the | matchless in their kind. Never was so much former interferes with our interest for the of the terrific alleviated by so much of the latter, and the present difficulties of the last pitiful. The incidents are most tragic; yet deprive us of those emotions of fond retro-over them is diffused a breath of sweetness, spection, which the fate of the first would which softens away half their anguish, and otherwise awaken. Still there are in this tale reconciles us to that which remains. Our scenes of pathos delicious as any which even minds are prepared, long before, for the early the author himself has drawn. The tender nipping of that delicate blossom, for which pleasure which the Man of Feeling excites is this world was too bleak. Julia's last interwholly without alloy. Its hero is the most view with Savillon mitigates her doom, partly beautiful personification of gentleness, pa- by the joy her heart has tasted, and which tience, and meek sufferings, which the heart nothing afterwards in life could equal, and can conceive. Julia de Roubigné, however, is, partly by the certainty that she must either on the whole, the most delightful of the au- become guilty or continue wretched. Nothing thor's works. There is, in this tale, enough of can be at once sweeter and more affecting plot to keep alive curiosity, and sharpen the than her ecstatic dream after she has taken interest which the sentiment awakens, without the fatal mixture, her seraphical playing on any of those strange turns and perplexing the organ, to which the waiting angels seem incidents which break the current of sympa- to listen, and her tranquil recalling the scenes thy. The diction is in perfect harmony with of peaceful happiness with her friend, as she the subject-"most musical, most melan- imagines her arms about her neck, and fancies choly" with "golden cadences" responsive that her Maria's tears are falling on her boto the thoughts. There is a plaintive charm som. Then comes Montaubon's description in the image presented to us of the heroine, of her as she drank the poison:-"She took too fair almost to dwell on. How exquisite is it from me smiling, and her look seemed to the description given of her by her maid, in a lose its confusion. She drank my health! letter to her friend, relating to her fatal mar-She was dressed in her white silk bed-gown, riage:"She was dressed in a white muslin ornamented with pale, pink ribands. Her night-gown, with striped lilac and white cheek was gently flushed from their reflection; ribands; her hair was kept in the loose way her blue eyes were turned upwards as she you used to make me dress it for her at Bel- drank, and a dark-brown ringlet lay on her ville, with two waving curls down one side shoulder." We do not think even the fate of of her neck, and a braid of little pearls. And "the gentle lady married to the Moor" calls to be sure, with her dark, brown locks resting forth tears so sweet as those which fall for the upon it, her bosom looked as pure white as Julia of Mackenzie! the driven snow. And then her eyes, when she gave her hand to the count! they were cast down, and you might see her eyelashes, like strokes of a pencil, over the white of her skin-the modest gentleness, with a sort of sadness too, as it were, and a gentle heave of her bosom at the same time." And yet, such is the feeling communicated to us by the whole work, that we are ready to believe even this artless picture an inadequate representa-young imagination shall vanish, and the tion of that beauty which we never cease to feel. How natural and tear-moving is the letter of Savillon to his friend, describing the scenes of his early love, and recalling, with intense vividness, all the little circumstances which aided its progress! What an idea, in a single expression, does Julia give of the depth and the tenderness of her affection, when describing herself as taking lessons in drawing from her lover, she says that she felt something from the touch of his hand "not the less delightful from carrying a sort of fear along with that delight: it was like a pulse in the soul!" The last scenes of this novel are

We rejoice to know and feel that these delicious tales cannot perish. Since they were written, indeed, the national imagination has been, in a great degree, perverted by strong excitements, and "fed on poisons till they have become a kind of nutriment." But the quiet and unpresuming beauties of these works depend not on the fashion of the world. They cannot be out of date till the dreams of

deepest sympathies of love and hope shall be chilled for ever. While other works are extolled, admired, and reviewed, these will be loved and wept over. Their author, in the evening of his days, may truly feel that he has not lived in vain. Gentle hearts shall ever blend their thought of him among their remembrances of the benefactors of their youth. And when the fever of the world "shall hang upon the beatings of their hearts," how often will their spirits turn to him, who, as he cast a soft seriousness over the morning of life, shall assist in tranquillizing its noontide sorrows!

"THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY."

Here are we in a bright and breathing world.-Wordsworth.

[NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.]

WE esteem the productions which the great | the spirit of gladness. There is little of a medinovelist of Scotland has poured forth with tative or retrospective cast in his works. startling speed from his rich treasury, not Whatever age he chooses for his story, lives only as multiplying the sources of delight to before us: we become contemporaries of all thousands, but as shedding the most genial his persons, and sharers in all their fortunes. influences on the taste and feeling of the peo-Of all men who have ever written, excepting ple. These, with their fresh spirit of health, Shakspeare, he has perhaps the least of exhave counteracted the workings of that blast-clusiveness, the least of those feelings which ing spell by which the genius of Lord Byron once threatened strangely to fascinate and debase the vast multitude of English readers. Men, seduced by their noble poet, had begun to pay homage to mere energy, to regard virtue as low and mean compared with lofty crime, and to think that high passion carried in itself a justification for its most fearful excesses. He inspired them with a feeling of diseased curiosity to know the secrets of dark bosoms, while he opened his own perturbed spirit to their gaze. His works, and those imported from Germany, tended to give to our imagination an introspective cast, to perplex it with metaphysical subtleties, and to render our poetry "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." The genius of our country was thus in danger of being perverted from its purest uses to become the minister of vain philosophy, and the anatomist of polluted

natures.

keep men apart from their kind. He has his own predilections-and we love him the better for them, even when they are not ours-but they never prevent him from grasping with cordial spirit all that is human. His tolerance is the most complete, for it extends to adverse bigotries; his love of enjoyment does not exclude the ascetic from his respect, nor does his fondness for hereditary rights and timehonoured institutions prevent his admiration of the fiery zeal of a sectary. His genius shines with an equal light on all-illuminating the vast hills of purple heath, the calm breast of the quiet water, and the rich masses of the grove-nów gleaming with a sacred light on the distant towers of some old monastery, now softening the green-wood shade, now piercing the gloom of the rude cave where the old Covenanter lies-free and universal, and bounteous as the sun-and pouring its radiance with a like impartiality "upon a living and rejoicing world."

We shall not attempt, in this slight sketch, to follow our author regularly through all his rich and varied creations; but shall rather consider his powers in general of natural description-of skill in the delineation of cha racter-and of exciting high and poetical interest, by the gleams of his fancy, the tragic elevation of his scenes, and the fearful touches which he delights to borrow from the world of spirits.

"The author of Waverley" (as he delights to be styled) has weaned it from its idols, and restored to it its warm, youthful blood, and human affections. Nothing can be more opposed to the gloom, the inward revolvings, and morbid speculations, which the world once seemed inclined to esteem as the sole prerogatives of the bard, than his exquisite creations. His persons are no shadowy abstractions-no personifications of a dogmano portraits of the author varied in costume, but similar in features. With all their rich In the vivid description of natural scenery varieties of character, whether their heroical our author is wholly without a rival, unless spirit touches on the godlike, or their wild Sir Walter Scott will dispute the pre-eminence eccentricities border on the farcical, they are with him; and, even then, we think the novelmen fashioned of human earth, and warm ist would be found to surpass the bard. The with human sympathies. He does not seek free grace of nature has, of late, contributed for the sublime in the mere intensity of burn- little to the charm of our highest poetry. Lord ing passion, or for sources of enjoyment in Byron has always, in his reference to the mathose feverish gratifications which some would jestic scenery of the universe, dealt rather in teach us to believe the only felicities worthy grand generalities than minute pictures, has of high and impassioned souls. He writes used the turbulence of the elements as symeverywhere with a keen and healthful relish bols of inward tempests, and sought the vast for all the good things of life-constantly re- solitudes and deep tranquillity of nature, but freshes us where we least expected it, with a to assuage the fevers of the soul. Wordsworth sense of that pleasure which is spread through-who, amidst the contempt of the ignorant the earth" to be caught in stray gifts by who- and of the worldly wise, has been gradually ever will find," and brightens all things with and silently moulding all the leading spirits

of the age-has sought communion with nature, for other purposes than to describe her external forms. He has shed on all creation a sweet and consecrating radiance, far other than "the light of common day." In his poetry the hills and streams appear, not as they are seen by vulgar eyes, but as the poet himself, in the holiness of his imagination, has arrayed them. They are peopled not with the shapes of old superstition, but with the shadows of the poet's thought, the dreams of a glory that shall be. They are resonant-not with the voice of birds, or the soft whisperings of the breeze, but with echoes from beyond the tomb. Their lowliest objects a dwarf bush, an old stone, a daisy, or a small celandine-affect us with thoughts as deep, and inspire meditations as profound, as the loveliest scene of reposing beauty, or the wildest region of the mountains-because the heart of the poet is all in all-and the visible objects of his love are not dear to us for their own colours or forms, but for the sentiment which he has linked to them, and which they bring back upon our souls. We would not have this otherwise for all the romances in the world. But it gladdens us to see the intrinsic claims of nature on our hearts asserted, and to feel that she is, for her own sake, worthy of deep love. It is not as the richest index of divine philosophy alone that she has a right to our affections; and, therefore, we rejoice that in our author she has found a votary to whom her works are in themselves "an appetite, a feeling, and a love," and who finds, in their contemplation, "no need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied, or any, interest unborrowed from the eye." Every gentle swelling of the ground-every gleam of the water-every curve and rock of the shore-all varieties of the earth, from the vastest crag to the soft grass of the woodland walk, and all changes of the heaven from "morn to noon, from noon to latest eve,"―are placed before us, in his works, with a distinctness beyond that which the painter's art can attain, while we seem to breathe the mountain air, or drink in the freshness of the valleys. We perceive the change in the landscape at every step of the delightful journey through which he guides

us.

Our recollection never confounds any one scene with another, although so many are laid in the same region, and are alike in general character. The lake among the hills, on which the cave of Donald Bean bordered-that near which the clan of the M'Gregors combated, and which closed in blue calmness over the body of Maurice-and that which encircled the castle of Julian Avenel-are distinct from each other in the imagination, as the loveliest scenes which we have corporally visited. What in softest beauty can exceed the description of the ruins of St. Ruth; in the lovelily romantic, the approach to the pass of Aberfoil; in varied lustre, the winding shores of Ellangowan bay; in rude and dreary majesty, the Highland scenes, where Ronald of the Mist lay hidden; and in terrific sublimity, the rising of the sea on Fairport Sands, and the perils of Sir Arthur Wardour and his daughter? Our author's scenes of comparative barrenness are enchanting by the vividness of his details, and

the fond delight with which he dwells on their redeeming features. We seem to know every little plot of green, every thicket of copse-wood, and every turn and cascade of the stream in the vale of Glendearg, and to remember each low bush in the barren scene of her skirmish between the Covenanters and Claverhouse, as though we had been familiar with it in childhood. The descriptions of this author are manifestly rendered more vivid by the intense love which he bears to his country-not only to her luxuriant and sublime scenery, but "her bare earth, and mountains bare, and grass in the green field." He will scarcely leave a brook, a mountain ash, or a lichen on the rocks of her shore, without due honour. He may fitly be regarded as the genius of Scotland, who has given her a poetical interest, a vast place in the imagination, which may almost compensate for the loss of that political independence, the last struggling love for which he so nobly celebrates.

"The author of Waverley" is, however, chiefly distinguished by the number, the spirit, and the individuality of his characters. We know not, indeed, where to begin or to end with the vast crowd of their genial and noble shapes which come thronging on our memory. His ludicrous characters are dear to us, because they are seldom merely quaint or strange, the dry oddities of fancy, but have as genuine a kindred with humanity as the most gifted and enthusiastic of their fellows. The laughter which they excite is full of social sympathy, and we love them and our nature the better while we indulge it. Whose heart does not claim kindred with Baillie Nichol Jarvie, while the Glasgow weaver, without losing one of his nice peculiarities, kindles into honest warmth with his ledger in hand, and in spite of broad-cloth grows almost romantic? In whom does a perception of the ludicrous for a moment injure the veneration which the brave, stout-hearted and chivalrous Baron of Bradwardine inspires? Who shares not in the fond enthusiasm of Oldbuck for black letter, in his eager and tremulous joy at grasping rare books at low prices, and in his discoveries of Roman camps and monuments which we can hardly forgive Edie Ochiltree for disproving? Compared with these genial persons, the portraits of mere singularity-however inimitably finished-are harsh and cold; of these, indeed, the works of our author afford scarcely more than one signal example-Captain Dalgettywho is a mere piece of ingenious mechanism, like the automaton chess-player, and with all his cleverness, gives us little pleasure, for he excites as little sympathy. Almost all the persons of these novels, diversified as they are, are really endowed with some deep and elevating enthusiasm, which, whether breaking through eccentricities of manner, perverted by error, or mingled with crime, ever asserts the majesty of our nature, its deep affections, and undying powers. This is true, not only of the divine enthusiasm of Flora Mac Ivor of the sweet heroism of Jeannie Deans-of the angelic tenderness and fortitude of Rebecca, but of the puritanic severities and awful zeal of Balfour of Burley, and the yet more frightful energy of Macbriar, equally ready to sacrifice a blame

the most part, of a far deeper cast;-flowing from his intense consciousness of the mysteries of our nature, and constantly impressing on our minds the high sanctities and the mortal

so impressive a use of the solemnities of life and death-of the awfulness which rests over the dying, and renders all their words and actions sacred-or of the fond retrospection, and the intense present enjoyment, snatched fearfully as if to secure it from fate, which are the peculiar blessings of a short and uncertain existence. Was ever the robustness of life-the mantling of the strong current of joyous blood

less youth, and to bear without shrinking the keenest of mortal agonies. In the fierce and hunted child of the mist-in the daring and reckless libertine Staunton-in the fearful Elspeth in the vengeful wife of M'Gregor-destiny of our being. No one has ever made are traits of wild and irregular greatness, fragments of might and grandeur, which show how noble and sacred a thing the heart of man is, in spite of its strangest debasements and perversions. How does the inimitable portrait of Claverhouse at first excite our hatred for that carelessness of human misery, that contempt for the life of his fellows, that cold hauteur and finished indifference which are so vividly depicted;-and yet how does his mere-the high animation of health, spirits, and a soldierly enthusiasm redeem him at last, and almost persuade us that the honour and fame of such a man were cheaply purchased by a thousand lives! We can scarcely class Rob Roy among these mingled characters. He has nothing but the name and the fortune of an outlaw and a robber. He is, in truth, one of the noblest of heroes-a Prince of the hether and the rock-whose very thirst for vengeance is tempered and harmonized by his fondness for the wild and lovely scenes of his home. Indeed the influences of majestic scenery are to be perceived tinging the rudest minds which the author has made to expatiate amidst its solitudes. The passions even of Burley and of Macbriar borrow a grace from the steep crags, the deep masses of shade, and the silent caves, among which they were nurtured, as the most rapid and perturbed stream which rushes through a wild and romantic region bears some reflection of noble imagery on its impetuous surface. To some of his less stern but unlettered personages, nature seems to have been a kindly instructor, nurturing high thoughts within them, and well supplying to them all the lack of written wisdom. The wild sublimity of Meg Merrilies is derived from her long converse with the glories of creation; the floating clouds have lent to her something of their grace; she has contemplated the rocks till her soul is firm as they, and gazed intently on the face of nature until she has become half acquainted with its mysteries. The old king's beadman has not journeyed for years in vain among the hills and woods; their beauty has sunk into his soul; and his days seem bound each to each by "natural piety," which he has learned among them.

stout heart, more vividly brought before the mind than in the description of Frank Kennedy's demeanour as he rides lustily forth, never to return?-or the fearful change from this hearty enjoyment of life to the chillness of mortality, more deeply impressed on the imagination than in all the minute examinations of the scene of his murder, the traces of the deadly contest, the last marks of the struggling footsteps, and the description of the corpse at the foot of the crag? Can a scene of mortality be conceived more fearful than that where Bertram, in the glen of Dernclugh, witnesses the last agonies of one over whom Meg Merrilies is chanting her wild ditties to soothe the passage of the spirit? What a stupendous scene is that of the young fisher's funeral-the wretched father writhing in the contortions of agony-the mother silent in tender sorrow-the motley crowd assembled to partake of strange festivity-and the old grandmother fearfully linking the living to the dead, now turning her wheel in apathy and unconsciousness, now drinking with frightful mirth to many "such merry meetings," now, to the astonishment of the beholders, rising to comfort her son, and intimating with horrid solemnity that there was more reason to mourn for her than for the departed! Equal in terrific power, is the view given us of the last confession and death of that "awful woman"-her intense perception of her long past guilt, with her deadness to all else her yet quenchless hate to the object of her youthful vengeance, animating her frame with unearthly fire-her dying fancies that she is about to follow her mistress, and the broken images of old grandeur which fit before her as she perishes. That we think there is much of true poeti- These things are conceived in the highest cal genius-much of that which softens, re- spirit of tragedy, which makes life and death fines, and elevates humanity in the works of meet together, which exhibits humanity stripthis author-may be inferred from our remarks ped of its accidents in all its depth and height, on his power of imbodying human character. which impresses us at once with the victory The gleams of a soft and delicate fancy are of death, and of the eternity of those energies tenderly cast over many of their scenes which it appears to subdue. There are also heightening that which is already lovely, re- in these works, situations of human interest lieving the gloomy, and making even the thin as strong as ever were invented-attended too blades of barren regions shine refreshingly on with all that high apparel of the imagination, the eyes. We occasionally meet with a pure which renders the images of fear and anguish and pensive beauty, as in Pattieson's descrip- majestical. Such is that scene in the lone tion of his sensations in his evening walks house after the defeat of the Covenanters, after the feverish drudgery of his school-where Morton finds himself in the midst of a with wild yet graceful fantasies, as in the songs of Davie Gellatly-or with visionary and aerial shapes, like the spirit of the House of Avenel. But the poetry of this author is, for

band of zealots, who regard him as given by God into their hands as a victim-where he is placed before the clock to gaze on the advances of the hand to the hour when he is to be slain,

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