anatomy beneath. But, after all, borrowed garments never keep one warm. A curse goes with them, as with Harry Gill's blankets. Nor can one get smuggled goods safely into kingdom-come. How lank and pitiful does one of these gentry look, after posterity's customs-officers have had the plucking of him! PHILIP. It certainly is odd, that it should be so hard to get a man's natural thought from him. No gift seems to be more rare, than that of conveying simply and distinctly the peculiar impression which any object makes upon the mind of the recipient. Give a man anything to describe, and he forthwith. puzzles himself to talk about it as some other admired person would do; so that we get a thousand worthless books for one good one. And yet the sincere thought which the meanest pebble gives to a human soul is of great price to us. A familiar instance may be taken from Ossian. Macpherson, who has given us some highly original images, spoils half his work by forgetting that his bard was a Gael, and not a Greek, and by endeavouring to make Ossian speak like Homer. JOHN. Like Pope's Homer, you mean. This constant reproduction of old thoughts in a new dress recalls to my mind a tragic reminiscence of my childhood. At a museum, upon which I was in the habit of monthly exhausting my childish income with the spendthrift ambition of being one day large enough to be charged full price for admission, there was a wax representation of Othello and Desdemona. Who these mythological personages were, I knew not; but Othello seemed to me the model of a fairy prince, and I sought always vainly, in the real world without, for anything like Desdemona. The "Boston Beauty," and "Miss McRea," in the glass case of the next room, could never detain my feet, or wile my heart from its fealty to her. Listen to the catastrophe. Just after a famous murder had been perpetrated, my funds had accumulated sufficiently to enable me to visit the shrine of my romance. The proprietor of that museum may have a sweet conscience, but I am persuaded that he put a ninepence in his pocket that day, which made his pillow uneasy. My Desdemona, to glut a depraved public appetite, had been metamorphosed into a Mr Jenkins, and my Othello into his murderer! That divine wax, "That boon prefigured in my earliest wish,” which I had worshipped as never Pygmalion did his image, or the young Roman his statue of Venus, had been violated. Into that room I never ventured again. I could have broken the nose off the "Boston Beauty" for her look of attempted unconcern, through which the ill-concealed triumph sparkled. With that feeling of revenge upon itself, with which the heart consoles itself for any loss by rushing to the other extreme, I thenceforward centred all my adoration upon "the great sea-vampire," an entirely original triangular conception by an ingenious artist in leather, which my mind, early disciplined to the miraculous by Goldsmith's "Animated Nature," readily accepted as authentic. PHILIP. This tragic recollection has, I hope, put your mind in tune for hearing more of Griselda's sorrows. But you must read the rest of her story for yourself. I have many other delicates for you to taste, before we part. Let me read you an exquisite stanza from "Troilus and Creseide." It tells you how Creseide first avowed her love. nothing more tender in Coleridge's "Genevieve." "And, as the early, bashful nightingale Doth hush at first when she begins to sing, There is And then more boldly doth her voice outring; I know not where the nightingale is more sweetly touched upon. Shakspeare has alluded to it once or twice, but not with enthusiasm. Coleridge, in one of his early poems, has given us a high strain of music about it. Milton's sonnet is not so fine as most of his, though the opening is exquisite. JOHN. Keats has written, perhaps, the best ode in the language, upon this bird. Wherever the learned fix the site of Eden, it will never be in America, where we have neither the nightingale or the sky-. lark. Yet we have the bobolink and the mockingbird, in rich compensation. Nor are we wholly without music at night. I have often heard the song-sparrow and the robin at midnight; and what solitude would be quite lonely, wanting the mournful plaint of the whippoorwill? The newspapers now and then have lent their diurnal immortality to foolish punning verses upon this last bird; but the persons who wrote them could never have heard its voice, or they would have wasted their time in some less idle manner. How much dignity does the love of nature give to minds otherwise trivial ! White's Selborne has become a classic. If he had chronicled the migrations of kings and queens and dukes and duchesses, he would have deserved only the trunkmaker's gratitude. But his court-journal of blackbirds and goldfinches has won him an inner nook in our memories. PHILIP. I intend to read you presently another passage from "Troilus and Creseide," which has been excellently modernized by Wordsworth. But first I will show you that Chaucer's love of nature was a passion with him. Listen to his praise of the daisy. It is in the prologue to his "Legend of Good Women," and perhaps I am partial to it from its being a favorite with a very dear friend. If the passage have no other merit, it has at least that of being beloved by one whose love is like a crown to whatever it blesses. "When the month of May To see this flower against the sunshine spread, How like a lover he heaps praise upon praise, and protestation on protestation, as if he were fearful the blossom might wither, ere he had done |