DEAR FRANK, LETTER XXIII. I FEEL this morning a sort of humorous sadness; a sense of loneliness, and absence, and carelessness, that half amounts to a gentlemanlike melancholy. I believe I could entertain a score or two of blue devils; and be actually sad, if I could only find a tolerable reason to be sorry. Unluckily, I can't find a reasonable occasion to be unhappy; for I have got well of all my complaints, real and imaginary; have a reasonable supply of paper-money for my occasions; have got over my fears of French influence, ever since Napoleon began to grow fat-and am a bachelor! Yet, for all this, could I rail at the firstborn of Egypt, and even find fault with the worthy lady at whose house we now are, detained by a shower, although her face is the picture of good humour, and her house the abode of good cheer. I intended to reason a little this morning, on cause and effect—a new subject! but, I reasoned, as people sometimes get up of a morning, wrong end foremost. I then joked the waiter, but got worsted, which only made me worse than before. This state of mind, under the influence of which the heart falls into a heavy depression, without any particular cause that we know of, is sometimes ascribed to a presentiment of approaching evil, a warning coming from some mysterious source with which we are altogether unacquainted. But this is a superstitious idea, and consequently discarded by philosophers, who, in general, attribute it to an absence of real sources of misery, which leaves a vacuum for imaginary ones to creep in, and make a great bustle. They say the best and most radical cure for this mental disorder, is substantial care and real trouble; and accordingly agree in recommending matrimony as a sovereign remedy; that being the great evil, which renders all others insignificant. But instead of flying to this desperate remedy, I will try what occupation of mind will do in the way of relief. In truth, the little solitary nook into which I am just now thrown, bears an aspect so interesting, that it is calculated to call up the most touchingly pleasing emotions, in the minds of those who love to indulge in the contemplation of beautiful scenes. We are the sons of earth, and the indissoluble kindred between nature and man, is demonstrated by our sense of her beauties. I shall not soon forget last evening, which Oliver and myself spent at this place. It was such as can never be described-I will therefore not attempt it; but it was still as the sleep of innocence -pure as ether, and bright as immortality. Having travelled only fourteen miles that day, I did not feel tired as usual; and after supper strolled out alone along the windings of a little stream about twenty yards wide, that skirts a narrow strip of green meadow, between the brook and the high mountain at a little distance. You will confess my landscapes are well watered, for every one has a river. But such is the case in this region, where all the passes of the mountains are made by little rivers, that in process of time have laboured through, and left a space for a road on their banks. If nature will do these things, I can't help it-not I. In the course of the ramble the moon rose over the mountain to the eastward, which being just by, seemed to bring the planet equally near; and he bright eyes of the stars began to glisten, as if weeping the dews of evening. I knew not the name of one single star. But what of that? It is not aecessary to be an astronomer, to contemplate with sublime emotions the glories of the sky at night, and he countless wonders of the universe. "These earthly godfathers of Heaven's lights, Men may be too wise to wonder at any thing; as they may be too ignorant to see any thing without wondering. There is reason also to believe, that astronomers may be sometimes so taken up with measuring the distances and magnitude of the stars, as to lose, in the intense minuteness of calculation, that noble expansion of feeling and intellect combined, which lifts from nature up to its great first cause. As respects myself, I know no more of the planets, than the man in the moon. I only contemplate them as unapproachable, unextinguishable fires, glittering afar off, in those azure fields whose beauty and splendour have pointed them out as the abode of the Divinity; as such, they form bright links in the chain of thought that leads directly to a contemplation of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Nature is, indeed, the only temple worthy of the Deity. There is a mute eloquence in her smile; a majestic severity in her frown; a divine charm in her harmony; a speechless energy in her silence; a voice in her thunders, that no reflecting being can resist. It is in such scenes and seasons, that the heart is deepest smitten with the power and goodness of Providence, and that the soul demonstrates its capacity for maintaining an existence independent of matter, by abstracting itself from the body, and expatiating alone in the boundless regions of the past and the future. As I continued strolling forward, there gradually came a perfect calm—and even the aspen-tree whispered no more. But it was not the deathlike calm of a winter's night, when the whistling wind grows quiet, and the frosts begin in silence to forge fetters for the running brooks, and the gentle current of life, that flows through the veins of the forest. The voice of man and beast was indeed unheard; but the river murmured, and the insects chirped in the mild summer evening. There is something VOL. II-B sepulchral in the repose of a winter night; but in the genial seasons of the year, though the night is the emblem of repose, it is the repose of the couch, not of the tomb. Nature still breathes in the buzz of insects, the whisperings of the forest, and the murmurs of the running brooks. We know she will awake in the morning, with her smiles, her bloom, her zephyrs, and warbling birds. “In such a night as this," if a man loves any human being in this wide world, he will find it out, for there will his thoughts first centre. If he has in store any sweet, or bitter, or bitter-sweet recollections, which are lost in the bustle of the world, they will come without being called. If, in his boyish days, he wrestled, and wrangled, and rambled with, yet loved, some chubby boy, he will remember the days of his childhood, its companions, cares, and pleasures. If, in his days of romance, he used to walk of evenings, with some blue-eyed, musing, melancholy maid, whom the everrolling wave of life dashed away from him for ever -he will recall her voice, her eye, and her form. If any heavy and severe disaster has fallen on his riper manhood, and turned the future into a gloomy and unpromising wilderness; he will feel it bitterly at such a time. Or if it chance that he is grown an old man, and lived to see all that owned his blood, or shared his affections, struck down to the earth like dead leaves in autumn; in such a night, he will call their dear shades around, and wish himself a shadow. |