visited with certain seasons of brightness; remote events and faded images are recovered with startling distinctness, in sudden flashes and irradiations of memory; just, to borrow a very striking illustration, as the sombre features and minute objects of a distant ridge of hills become visible in the strong gleams of sun, which fall on them for an instant, and then vanish into darkness. My own journal affords a faint impression of the advantages and charms of which that form of writing is susceptible. But the instrument itself is not affected by the faults of the exhibitor. We are not to deny the transparency of a glass, because the face which it reflects is plain or uninteresting. Let the reader make the attempt, and he may be able to apply to himself and his friends the graceful recollection of Pope in his epistle to Jervas:

How oft in pleasing tasks we wear the day,
While summer suns roll unperceived away.

MAY 1ST.

AT length, the "fair enjewell'd May" is "blown out of April;" there is something of "a vernal tone" in the wind among the fir-trees, and the delicious line of Chatterton may be

read in

King-cups bursting with the morning dew.

The time of green leaves is come again; every moment the day grows lovelier-warm, cool, sunshiny, cloudy. The year's contraries melt into each other, with a spirit of beauty shedding bloom over all, and subduing everything to itself. Thomson chose such sweet airs and purple lights to bathe his Castle of Indolence,—

a season atween June and May,

Half prankt with spring, with summer half imbrown'd.

It is delicious now to creep through the green trees, and along the scented hedges,

Where blows the woodbine faintly streaked with red,

until you steal on the leafy haunt of the woodlark. Good Mrs. Barbauld expresses my wish in her pretty ode to Spring;

Now let me sit beneath the whitening thorn,

And mark thy spreading tints steal o'er the dale;
And watch with patient eye

Thy fair unfolding charms.

There is love in this idleness. I know that formal John Wesley put a brand on it: "never be unemployed, never be triflingly employed, never while away time." Such an admonition might be expected from one of whom Johnson left this character: "John Wesley's conversation is good, but he is never at leisure; he is always obliged to go at a certain hour." When Lord Collingwood said, that a young person should not be allowed to have two books at the same time, he fell into a similar error of judgment. Variety is the bloom of life; even animals feel it, and sheep soon loathe the sweetest grass in the same field. The blackbird, that pipes in the warm leaves before my window, is a witness against the preacher and the admiral. He tired of the limeshade, and is finishing his song on an apple-branch, that swings him further into the sun. He wanted a change.

Then what is whiling away time? When Watt sat in the chimney-corner, observing the water force up the cover of the saucepan, he aroused the anger of his relations; but he was discovering the steam-engine. Sir Walter Scott, walking one day by the banks of the Yarrow, found Mungo Park, the traveller, earnestly employed in casting stones into the stream, and watching the bubbles that followed their descent. "Park, what is it that engages your attention?" asked Sir Walter. "I was thinking how often I had thus tried to sound the rivers in Africa, by

IDLENESS OF GENIUS.

9

calculating the time that elapsed before the bubbles rose to the surface." "Then," said Scott, "I know that you think of returning to Africa." "I do, indeed," was the reply; "but it is yet a secret." Such is the idleness of genius.

The uncle of Pliny reproved him for walking, which he called losing time. How much truer was the confession of Warburton to his friend Hurd: "It would have been the greatest pleasure to have dropped upon you at Newark. I could have led you through delicious walks, and picked off for your amusement in our rambles a thousand notions which I hung upon every thorn as I passed, thirty years ago." They, whom the world calls idle, often do the most. In villages and by-lanes, open eyes are always learning. A garden, a wood, even a pool of water, encloses a whole library of knowledge, waiting only to be read— precious types, which Nature, in her great printing-press, never breaks up. And surely he is happy who is thus taught; for no man can afford to be really unemployed. The tree, it has been said, may lose its verdure; the sun need not count its rays; because the sap will strike out new foliage, and another night refills the treasury of day. But the thinking faculty does not suffer waste. The most saving and thrifty use of it will only make it sufficient for our absolute necessities.

Pascal remarks, that if a man examines his thoughts, he finds them to be occupied with what is, or is to be. The past and the present are paths to the future. Ainsi, nous ne vivons jamais; mais nous espérons de vivre. A thought embodying the famous line of Pope :

Man never is, but always to be blest.

This disposition is admirable when its aim is improvement; when we look to coming days with a hope of growing better in

C

them. The remembrance of the succession of one thing to another, i. e. of what went before, what followed, and what accompanied it, is called an experiment. Many experiments make up experience; which is nothing else but a recollection of what antecedents were followed by what consequents. The definition belongs to Hobbes. Now the experiments of life, which we call our experience, are only valuable as they enable us to shape what we have to do, by success or failure in what we have done. Unproductive husbandry teaches us to look about for a wiser system of cultivation. There must be more weeding, sowing, and watching in our fields. When the husbandman goes out to sow, we hear the shrill cry of the village boys scaring the birds from the furrows. The good seed of the mind is to be guarded from vain thoughts descending with fiercer hunger. Nor will our best instruction be drawn from books. If he who wishes to be pathetic and eloquent is to look in his heart and write; in like manner the scholar of time, completing his education for eternity, will read some of his noblest lessons in the same volume, invisible to other eyes, ever open to his own. And even among the fields and woodlands, he will still be at school.

MAY 3RD.

Oft on the dappled turf at ease,

I sit and play with similes,

Loose types of things through all degrees.

THIS is Wordsworth's plan and mine. I have been thinking of a new series of parallels more entertaining and profitable than Hurd's-Genius, Life, and Shadows. Did you ever spend a summer hour in making notes of shadows, with a view to their history? You would be astonished to find how the spreading, lengthening, and vanishing of a shadow represent the growth,