throws off branches on either side, which like those of our great railway companies, for the most part lead ultimately to nowhere in particular. Here during the snowy Christmas nights, and when the light of the blazing logs shines keenly on the red faces of the men, and the gay dresses of the children, old neighbours meet together-for prelacy with its lusty enjoyment of life has never been, and is not yet, rooted out in these parts—and drink to the good old times, when there were no poor rates and no prison boards, no high farming, and no financial reform, no Manchester school of peace, and no Peelite school of politics. Opposite the ample hearth is an oaken door, covered with. green baize and gilt tacks, which, revolving silently on its hinges as well-ordered doors oughtadmits the favoured visitor to a large and cheerful room, whose sashed windows open upon a terraced flower-garden, and look out over the blue sea. This forms the sanctum, the inner temple, into which no profane foot of woman-kind is permitted to enter, and to do fitting justice to whose motley contents would require the harlequin genius of Hudibras.

There is lava from Vesuvius and quartz from San Francisco; silver trinkets from Genoa, and glass beads from Venice; skins of seals, and bears, and Bengal tigers; dried sea-weeds and stuffed sea-fish; eggs of divers from Labrador, and of parrots from the Bahamas; shells gathered in the lagoons, and pearls fished out of the Scamander. Then, upon the tables, or the shelves which occupy its difficult and profound recesses, books of every description are to be found. Those wonderful

dramas, into which a man who lived the best of his days in the tavern and the theatre, has condensed all the wisdom and experience of this mortal life; those quaint fragments through which our forefathers told us, with devout and loyal simplicity, of the heroic life which they tried at least to lead; those generous idyls of the laureate, who, since Shakspeare, is the most complete man and the most catholic poet that our Old England has produced! Ah! those sweet idyls, wherein is the strength of man, the tenderness of woman, the brightness and bloom of childhood! Then there is a batch of the novelists of the last century-the utterly pitiless because utterly selfish Sterne, whose forced tears are yet so dewy and natural that we cannot but weep with him, even while both of us are conscious of the exquisite artifice; Fielding, with his intense human truthfulness, and wise careless common sense, and that direct infallible insight which is never at fault, either upon philosophy or life; and of course where Fielding is, Thackeray cannot well be absent. There is no lack, either, of volumes more strictly professional. Aristotle and Pliny present us with their notions of the antique cosmos; there are queer mediæval worthies, whose faces are blackened with the dust of the dark ages and the smoke of their crucibles: Sir Thomas Browne enlarges on the Norfolk marshes and the great bustards of the Downs, whose aon, in England, at least has expired; from the diocese of Bergen in Norway, "where the north light takes its rise," comes old Pontoppidan, credulous of many things, as mermen, and swallows sound asleep all the winter within the

mere, and the great sea-snake, whereof the portrait given by the worthy bishop bears a curious resemblance to that by Richard Doyle in the immortal pages of Punch* but who is yet of a cautious, not to say sceptical, disposition, and will not believe in ducks "growing on trees," and "a bottomless abyss in the Moskoestrom, penetrating quite through the globe," and many other matters currently credited in that latitude. German books of prints there are also, where birds, and beasts, and little Dutch children, and other productions of natural history, are treated with charming quaintness and shrewd simplicity: the whole being steadied by the precise and scientific observations of our own time, Montagu, and Bewick, and Audubon, and Yarrell, and MacGillivray, and St. John, and, last not least, Waterton, of pleasant and pugnacious memory, who holds to Charles the Martyr, and right divine, and the Pretender, and "the Milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged," and many other little heresies, for which, however, there is no tolerance in an age which talks of toleration.

Some ignorant people suppose that the lite

* So far as personal acquaintance with the monster, the good bishop was much in the same condition with Peter Dass, whose verses he quotes:

The great sea-snake's the subject of my song,
For though my eyes have never yet beheld him,
Nor ever shall desire the hideous sight,

Yet many accounts of men of truth unstained,
Whose ev'ry word I firmly do believe,
Show it to be a very frightful monster.

Nat. Hist. of Norway, vol. ii.

rature of ornithology is not very extensive; whereas every one ought to know that it is the poets, and not the men of science, who have given us the most felicitous description of the feathered race; and that there is hardly a poet who deserves the name who has not been a practical naturalist. Homer, Jeremiah, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton, Burns, Keats! And it is the best sign of some of the younger men, that they have thought fit to follow in this respect the example of our great living poet: who, for his ornithological culture, has been chiefly indebted, I fancy, to "the purple woods of Sussex," haunted by the rook and the merlin, and the great western estuaries, along whose yellow sands the white sea-gulls

Bear up from where the bright Atlantic gleams,
Swooping to landward.

Among these gentlemen, Mr. Longfellow* shews-especially in Hiawatha-the most per

* How rich and vigorous is the humour of the passage which describes the capture of “Kahgagee, the King of Ravens :' Only Kahgagee the leader,

Kahgagee the King of Ravens,

He alone was spared among them

As a hostage for his people.

With his prisoner-string he bound him,
Led him captive to his wigwam,

Tied him fast with chords of elm-bark
To the ridge-pole of his wigwam.

'Kahgagee, my raven,' said he,
'You, the leader of the robbers,
You, the plotter of this mischief,
The contriver of this outrage,
I will keep you, I will hold you
As a hostage for your people-
As a pledge of good behaviour!'

fect appreciation of the bird character; and it would have been curious indeed had the American poet been able to escape the fascination which the strange cries and fantastic forms of the American birds communicate to the still forest-life. Take the Heron,

So they wrestled there together
In the glory of the sunset,

Till the darkness fell around them;
And the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
From her haunts among the fen-lands,
Gave a cry of lamentation,
Gave a cry of pain and famine.

Or the Wild Goose:

To a lake with many islands,
Where among the water-lilies
Pishnekuh, the brant, were sailing;
Through the tufts of rushes floating,
Steering through the reedy islands.
Now their broad black beaks they lifted;
Now they plunged beneath the water;
Now they darkened in the shadow;
Now they brightened in the sunshine.

Or the Eagle:

And the noble Hiawatha

Sang his war-song wild and woful,

And above him the war-eagle,

The keneu, the great war-eagle,

Master of all fowls with feathers,

Screamed and hurtled through the heavens.

And he left him, grim and sulky,
Sitting in the morning sunshine,
On the summit of the wigwam,
Croaking fiercely his displeasure,
Flapping his great sable pinions,
Vainly struggling for his freedom,
Vainly calling on his people!