GRAY RAY always sketched upon the spot the general features of a landscape, and advised his friends to follow his example. "You have nothing to do, but to transcribe your little red books, if they are not rubbed out; for I conclude you have not trusted B anything to memory, which is ten times worse than a lead pencil." The wish is felt by every reader, that Gray had given to us more of his own diaries; or had composed them on a different principle. His stories of home-travel, communicated to Dr. Wharton, are incomparable. But, for the most part, he hid his sweet and learned thoughts in his own bosom. Golden days in the country were lost in critical inquiries respecting insects and plants; or in talk with fishermen about uncertain fins and scales. Johnson, in his Scottish tour, uses an awful word to express the blending and decay of objects in the mind:-"Many particular features and discriminations are confused and conglobated into one gross and general idea." The landscape of thought is not less shifting and changeable than that of nature; yet each may be fixed, or revived. A few scratches—a word of commentary or abridgment-will often serve to raise a remembrance of the beauty which they represent, and even to recall the colouring and light of the original view or description. An early Hebrew custom appears to be the journal in an allegory. After the destruction of Jerusalem, when a Jew had passed the examination of his teacher, he took a raised seat, and a writing-tablet was put before him, to signify that he ought to record his gains, and not suffer them to fade away unimproved. In the same spirit, Sir Thomas Bodley wrote to Bacon: "Strain your wits and industry soundly, to instruct yourself in all things between heaven and earth, which may tend to virtue, and wisdom, and honour; and let all these riches be treasured up, not only in your memory, where time may ripen your stock, but rather in good writings and books of account, which will keep them safe for your use hereafter." I have not forgotten Swift's satiric lesson to a young author, how, with an empty head and full common-place book, he might boldly start up a giant of erudition and capacity, encyclopædic and unfathomable. A book of thoughts, not extracts, is proposed. And it is pleasant to recognise the practice in scholars of ancient days: "Sometimes I hunt," said Pliny, "but even then I carry with me a pocket-book, that, while my servants are busied in disposing the nets and other matters, I may be employed in something that may be useful to me in my studies; and that, if I miss my game, I may at least bring home some of my thoughts with me, and not undergo the mortification of having caught nothing." Beethoven walked in the streets of Vienna with his tablet in his hand. The sudden gushes of fancy are often the brightest, but the common-places are not to be neglected: they form an important episode in the narrative of intellectual progress. If a book be a garner, the sheaves must have been gathered from many fields. PARADISE LOST and the TRANSFIGURATION grew out of the gleanings of memory. The collections of a morning walk become the memoranda of the painter. Gainsborough formed landscapemodels upon his table; broken stones, herbs, and fragments of glass expanded into rocks, trees, and water. Few men of genius have taken the trouble of recording their feelings or studies; and some precious legacies have perished by accident or design. But when the full light is wanting, an unexpected illumination frequently breaks over a character, from a passage in the published works of the author. A page of the journal is broken up, and melted into the poem or essay. Shakspere's sonnets are a chapter of autobiography, although remaining in cypher till criticism finds the key. Raffaelle's drawings were his diary; the walks and urns and inscriptions of the Leasowes were Shenstone's confessions. The "Task" and the "Excursion" reflect the features of the writers, as face answers to face in water. The notion of a journal implies variety. Gray confessed that his reading ranged from Pausanias to Pindar; mixing Aristotle and Ovid, like bread with cheese. He might have sheltered himself under a noble example. Lord Bacon considered it necessary to contract and dilate the mind's eye-sight; regarding the interchange of splendour and gloom as essential to the health of the organ. The reader may test the rule by trying it on his natural eyes. In a gorgeous summer day, let him come suddenly from a thick screen of branches, turning his face towards the sun, and then to the grass. Every blade will be reddened, as if a fairy procession had gone by. The colour is not in the grass, but in the eye; as that contracts, the glare vanishes. Subject the mental sight to a similar experiment. After wandering in the dim recesses of history or metaphysics, let the inward eye be lifted to the broad, central, glowing orbs of Shakspere, Milton, or Hooker, and then immediately cast down upon the common surface of daily life. Objects become hazy and discoloured; the dilation of the nerve of thought dazzles and bewilders the vision. It is wise, therefore, to familiarize the seeing faculty of the understanding to different degrees of lustre. Sunshine and twilight should temper one another. Despise nothing. After Plato take up Reid; closing Dante, glance at Warton; from Titian walk away to K. du Jardin. The student is like the floating honey-gatherers of Piedmont and France— Careless his course, yet not without design. So through the vales of Loire the bee-hives glide, If a letter be conversation upon paper, a journal is a dialogue between the writer and his memory. Now he grows red with Horace, scolding the innkeeper because the bad water had taken away his appetite; and before the strife of tongues has subsided, BEAUTIFUL FANCIES. 5 he sits down with Shakspere, under a chesnut-tree in Sir Thomas Lucy's park. Thoughts must ever be the swiftest travellers, and sighs are not the only things wafted "from Indus to the Pole" in Most people are conscious sometimes of strange and beautiful fancies swimming before their eyes :-the pen is the wand to arrest, and the journal is the mirror to detain and fix them. The mind is |