the same, and yet must be; that what is, is but what we see, and as we see it; and yet that all which we see, is. Thou shalt prove it finally; and this is the last trial but one. Vision, come forth." A noise here took place, as of the entrance of something exceedingly hurried and agonised, but which remained fixed with equal stillness. A brief pause took place, at the end of which the listeners heard their son speak, but in a voice of exceeding toil and loathing, and as if he had turned away his head: "It is," said he, gasping for breath, "utmost deformity,""Only to thine habitual eyes, and when alone," said the goddess in a soothing manner; "look again." "O my heart!" said the same voice, gasping, as if with transport, "they are perfect beauty and humanity." "There are only two of the same,' said the goddess, "each going out of itself. Deformity to the eyes of habit is nothing but analysis; in essence it is nothing but one-ness, if such a thing there be. The touch and the result is everything. See what a goddess knows, and see nevertheless what she feels; in this only greater than mortals, that she lives for ever to do good. Now comes the last and greatest trial; now shalt thou see the real worlds as they are; now shalt thou behold them lapsing in reflected splendor about the blackness of space; now shalt thou dip thine ears into the mighty ocean of their harmonies, and be able to be touched with the concentrated love of the universe. Roar heavier, fire; endure, endure, thou immortalising frame." "Yes, now, now," said the other voice, in a superhuman tone, which the listeners knew not whether to think joy or anguish; but they were seized with such alarm and curiosity, that they opened a place from which the priestess used to speak at the lintel, and looked in. The mother beheld her son, stretched with a face of bright agony, upon burning coals. She shrieked, and pitch darkness fell upon temple. "A little while," said the mournful voice of the goddess, "and heaven had had another life. O Fear! what dost thou not do! O! my all but divine boy!" continued she, "now plunged again into physical darkness, thou canst not do good so long as thou wouldst have done; but thou shalt have a life almost as long as the commonest sons of men, and a thousand times more useful and glorious. Thou must change away the the rest of thy particles, as others do; and in the process of time they may meet again under some nature worthy of thee, and give thee another chance for yearning into immortality; but at present the pain is done, the pleasure must not arrive." The fright they had undergone slew the weak parents. Triptolemus, strong in body, cheerful to all in show, cheerful to himself in many things, retained, nevertheless, a certain melancholy from his recollections, but it did not hinder him from sowing joy wherever he went. It incited him but the more to do so. The success of others stood him instead of his own. Ceres gave him the first seeds of the corn that makes bread, and sent him in her chariot round the world, to teach men how to use it. "I am not immortal myself," said he, "but let the good I do be so, and I shall yet die happy." CHAPTER LIV. On Commendatory Verses. IF the faculties of the writer of these papers are anything at all, they are social; and we have always been most pleased when we have received the approbation of those friends, whom we are most in the habit of thinking of when we write. There are multitudes of readers whose society we can fancy ourselves enjoying, though we have never seen them; but we are more particularly apt to imagine ourselves in such and such company, according to the nature of our articles. We are accustomed to say to ourselves, if we happen to strike off anything that pleases us,-K. will like that:-There's something for M. or R. :-C. will snap his finger and slap his knee at this:-Here's a crow to pick for H.-Here N. will shake his shoulders :-There B., his head :-Here S. will shriek with satisfaction:-L. will see the philosophy of this joke, if nobody else does.-As to our fair friends, we find it difficult to think of them and our subject together. We fancy their countenances looking so frank and kind over our disquisitions, that we long to have them turned towards ourselves instead of the paper. Every pleasure we could experience in a friend's approbation, we have felt in receiving the following verses. They are from a writer, who, of all other men, knows how to extricate a common thing from commonness, and to give it an underlook of pleasant consciousness and wisdom. We knew him directly, in spite of his stars. His hand as well as heart betrayed him. TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR. Your easy Essays indicate a flow, Dear Friend, of brain, which we may elsewhere seek; And to their pages I, and hundreds, owe, That Wednesday is the sweetest of the week. Such observation, wit, and sense, are shown, We think the days of Bickerstaff return'd; The receipt of these verses has set us upon thinking of the good-natured countenance which men of genius, in all ages, have for the most part shown to contemporary writers; and thence by a natural transition, of the generous friendship they have manifested for each other. Authors, like other men, may praise as well as blame for various reasons; for interest, for vanity, for fear and for the same reasons they may be silent. But generosity is natural to the humanity and the strength of genius. Where it is obscured, it is usually from something that has rendered it misanthropical. Where it is glaringly deficient, the genius is deficient in proportion. And the defaulter feels as much, though he does not know it. He feels, that the least addition to another's fame threatens to block up the view of his own. At the same time, praise by no means implies a sense of superiority. It may imply that we think it worth having; but this may arise from a consciousness of our sincerity, and from a certain instinct we have, that to relish anything exceedingly gives us a certain ability to judge, as well as a right to express our admiration, of it. On all these accounts, we were startled to hear the other day that Shakspeare had never praised a contemporary author. We had mechanically given him credit for the manifestation of every generosity under the sun; and we found the surprise affect us, not as authors (which would have been a vanity not even warranted by our having the title in common with him), but as men. What baulked us in Shakspeare seemed to baulk our faith in humanity. But we recovered as speedily. Shakspeare had none of the ordinary inducements, which make men niggardly of their commendation. He had no reason either to be jealous or afraid. He was the reverse of unpopular. His own claims were allowed. He was neither one who need be silent about a friend, lest he should be hurt by his enemy; nor one who nursed a style or a theory by himself, and so was obliged to take upon him a monopoly of admiration in self-defence; nor was he one who should gaze himself blind to everything else, in the complacency of his shallowness. If it should be argued, that he who saw through human nature was not likely to praise it, we answer, that he who saw through it as Shakspeare did was the likeliest man in the world to be kind to it. Even Swift refreshed the bitterness of his misanthropy in his love for Tom, Dick, and Harry; and what Swift did from impatience at not finding men better, Shakspeare would do out of patience in finding them so good. We instanced the sonnet in the collection called the Passionate Pilgrim, beginning If music and sweet poetry agree, in which Spenser is praised so highly. It was replied, that minute inquiries considered that collection as apocryphal. This set us upon looking again at the biographers who have criticised it; and we see no reason, for the present, to doubt its authenticity. For some parts of it we would answer upon internal evidence, especially, for instance, the Lover's Complaint. There are two lines in this poem which would alone announce him. They have the very trick of his eye: O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies But inquirers would have to do much more than disprove the authenticity of these poems, before they made out Shakspeare to be a grudging author. They would have to undo the modesty and kindliness of his other writings. They would have to undo his universal character for "gentleness," at a time when gentle meant all that was noble as well as mild. They would have to deform and to untune all that round, harmonious mind, which a great contemporary described as the very "sphere of humanity;" |