apparent. The erudition of the " Paradise Lost" and "Regained," is perfectly overwhelming. Every line he wrote shows how much and how well he had conversed with the master minds of Greece and Rome; how deeply he had drank the spirit of their proudest philosophers, the genius of their divinest song. What can be more pitiful than the comment of Johnson: "Among the flocks, and copses, and flowers, appear the heathen deities, Jove and Erebus, Neptune and Æolus, with a long train of mythological imagery, such as a college easily supplies. Nothing can less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of skill in piping; and how one god asks of another god what has become of Lycidas, and how neither god can tell." To say the least, the appeal of Cowley to the Lidæan stars was open to the same censure Johnson has pronounced on Milton; the stars would know as much about Harvey as the gods about Lycidas. Johnson makes one more objection, but as that is more religious than critical, and more sectarian than either, we shall pass it by. We now come to "L'Allegro," and "Il Penseroso." Johnson here agrees with the many, and in such matters the voice of the multitude, if it be not the voice of God, is that of truth. Of the sonnets-those true tests of poetic feeling-Johnson observes, "they deserve not any particular criticism, for of the best it can only be said, they are not bad." Five of these are Italian; these elsewhere he confesses he could not understand, so that his censure is inapplicable to them. He continues, "Perhaps only the eighth and twenty-first are entitled to the simple, slender commendation, of not being bad." Thus writes Dr. Johnson. A man of more poetic feeling, and less intolerant frame of mind, would have returned a very different verdict. The sonnets are gems. What poet ever addressed woman in a higher strain than did Milton in the following?

TO A VIRTUOUS YOUNG LADY.

"Lady, that in the prime of earliest youth

Wisely hath shunned the broadway and the green,
And with those few are eminently seen,
That labour up the hill of heavenly truth,
The better part with Mary and with Ruth
Chosen thou hast; and they that overween,
And at thy growing virtues fret their spleen,
No anger find in thee, but pity and ruth.
Thy care is fixed, and zealously attends

To fill thy odorous lamp with deeds of light,

And hope that reaps not shame. Therefore be sure
Thou, when the bridegroom with his feastful friends
Passes to bliss at the mid hour of night,

Hast gained thy entrance, virgin wise and pure.”

And if he had been the cold-hearted man Johnson endeavoured to make him appear, he would never have written as he did,

ON HIS DECEASED WIFE.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint

Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint,
Purification in the old law did save,

And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;

Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.

But, O! as to embrace me she inclined,

I wak'd she fled; and day brought back my night."

These sonnets have been much misunderstood, and amongst those who misunderstood them may be numbered Dr. Johnson. He, indeed, has been the chief cause of much of the misunderstanding. What are they but the workings of a great and mighty heart, involuntarily venting themselves in the form of poetry, and that poetry of a high order, to which but a few of the most gifted of earth's sons only could attain. Such had existed in the days of Elizabeth, but it had made way for the cold correctness and prosad rhyme Johnson and his contemporaries could appreciate so well. It was not to be expected that their simple majesty, their artless elegance, and, above all, their generous and fervid tone of thought, should be acceptable in an age when art was everything, and nature but a little better than a dream of the past. Deep in Milton's heart there was a well-spring of living poetry, which the winter's blast could never turn to ice; which the heat of passion could never dry; living poetry, which a thought, a word, could cause to flow; a sweet memory of the past; a glowing hope of the future; a note of music-a melody of love; a dream of the night; and it gushed forth in immortal verse, and poured forth its priceless waters, like a river, rich with gold and precious stones. Replete with the force of feeling, with the majesty of truth, with the charm of genius, they have come down to us as the creations of a leisure hour-creations such as a master mind could call forth at will-creations that would endow with a fair fame and an undying existence, many a less gifted man.

THOUGHTS ON DYING.

SOME friends met together, thus expressed themselves :

Whispered another, with tremulous sigh-
"Thus-thus-oh! not thus-dare I wish to die.
I would linger and love as earth's own child,
Ever in prayer to the Saviour mild;
No smile may gladden my pallid face,
At the awful close of our earthly race-
For the dread approach I hope to meet
A suppliant-lying at Jesus' feet :
The hours of pain I pray may
be
Few-and short in intensity;

For I would patiently fade-and know
My days were numbered-calm and slow.
Oh! that my thoughts and dreams may be
Soothed with celestial harmony—

And fondly clasped to the best loved breast-
May I wake to an endless-glorious rest!"

C. A. M. W.

THE DOUBLE ROMANCE;

A TALE OF THE "OVERLAND."*

GATHERED FROM MSS. IN THE PORTFOLIOS AND PORTMANTEAUS

OF PASSENGERS.

BY TIPPOO KHAN THE YOUNGER.

CHAPTER VIII.

The Cousins: an unexpected arrival.

WONDERFUL are the workings of beauty! And we are not speaking of that abstract, ideal, invisible German thing which she found, and still continues to find its numerous train of unhappy worshippers-but of that active, living, personified beauty of all climes, which attracts the unimaginative as well as the soaring and dreamers. From the courtly aristocrat, who, cold in the midst of triumph over the region of the female heart, indifferent amid a mine of jewels,-the least of which would dazzle into madness the less worldly-gifted and worldly-fortunate-will crouch beneath the glance of a stray, unsophisticated virtue, which has fixed and thwarted him, acknowledging himself to be a vanquished, helpless adorer-down to the lowly apprentice, who endeavours to obtain a peep at some charming atom of life, which he knows to exist under the soiled pink bonnet at his side in the omnibus; and to ravish a look from that significant flesh and blood which insensibly and irresistibly attracted him to that to-and-fro travelling bench, on which he has found himself; to be caught, in fine, by that insinuating man-trap which he shuns not, while he distinctly sees-from

• Continued from page 148, vol. 1.

this gorgeous, to that simple-minded one, we say, beauty exerts her sway and influence; and what a gap have we left to be filled up by the various degrees marked out by education and position in society!

Julia Westwood knew that she had achieved a victory; she felt sensible that there was, at least, one heart which she had thoroughly enchained, and which, at any time, she was at liberty to claim and call her own. But the more she conjectured to whom that heart belonged, the more she became confused and bewildered on the subject. Nor had she as yet dared to make a confidence of the real truth of the case; for, although she had often broached the matter of her unknown admirer's tender looks and ill-concealed blushes to her cousin Ellen, there was a certain pride which forbade her to bestow any open serious attention to a circumstance of so casual and common-place a nature. Besides, others might take a different view of the question; even were admiration admitted, it might easily be argued that such admiration from an innocent, easily wounded youth, meant nothing. Indeed, we know some people who are always looking up at other people's window's and while No. 6, in the Square, imagines that she is the only attraction of the broad-brimmed hat, and long-tailed horse, which go regularly past at the same early afternoon hour of the day, while her brougham is waiting at the door, the identical cavalier is playing the same interesting game with No. 16, in the Street, No. 26, in the Crescent, and No. 60, in the Terrace, all in the parish and immediate vicinity of the first house aforesaid: again, the moustachios, which have curled into the affections of the widow at Almack's, have also, on either side, twisted round a captive from the Etablissement at Dieppe, and rooms at Harrowgate, respectively; nor are we at all prepared to state, that even the "imperial," into which a certain elderly maiden lady once consented to pack up all her sentiment and sympathy, is not at this moment being wilfully locketed in the heart of another certain lady, far younger, and far more engaging to the owner of the destroying tegument. Ellen might secretly imagine that the looks were intended for her; nay, Miss Hemstitch, the lady's-maid, mightand the case has many parallels-suppose that she was the real source of attraction, and that the eyes which actually turned to her young mistresses, at the window, darted, ideally, over the ornamented table, out of the door, and down the staircase, through an appropriate statue of Venus, into the snug sitting-room below, where she sat marking the Colonel's pocket-handkerchiefs; and sighing as she reflected that one who had erst sworn her constant fidelity, had left her to have his name written on the worthless texture of his heart in the indelible ink of another. It was altogether a puzzling, difficult question-moreover, it was absurd; and fifty times did Julia Westwood determine to think of it no more, December, 1847.

VOL. L.NO. CC.

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