-the very night, we say, after that spirit-stirring, soulrousing, man-ennobling assemblage of all most patriotic in the land we live in, did we, in our own house, descant with such overwhelming eloquence on the new French Revolution, as to set the whole audience, men, women, and children, asleep over their tumblers—all except one of the aforesaid Whigs, and one of the aforesaid tottering Tories; and they had the very narrowest escape we ever witnessed, from what might have been a most melancholy accident. For, at the close of a most complicated paragraph about Prince Polignac, the one fell backwards, chair and all, with a tremendous crash on the floor, and the other fell away forwards, chair and all, on the table, to the destruction of much crystal, and the imminent danger of the great jug. Never was there such a revolution!But look there! In a small spot of stationary sunshinewhile we have been scribbling in the shade of the sheepfold-lie Hamish, and Surefoot the shelty, O'Bronte, and Ponto, and Piro, and Basta, all sound asleep! Such has been the power of the breath even of our written metaphysics! If ever they be printed, we pity the poor public. Ourselves even are beginning to be comatose. Dogs are troubled dreamers-but these four are like the dreamless dead. Horses, too, seem often to be witch-ridden in their sleep. But at this moment Surefoot is stretched more like a stone than a shelty in the land of Nod. As for Hamish, were he to lie so braxy-like by himself on the hill, he would be awakened by the bill of the raven digging into his sockets. We are Morpheus and Orpheus in one incarnation-the very pink of poppy-the true spirit of opium, and of laudanum the concentrated essence.

THE SEASONS.

(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1830.)

THANK Heaven! Summer and Autumn are both dead and buried at last, and white lie the snow on their graves! Youth is the season of all sorts of insolence, and therefore we can forgive and forget almost any thing in Spring. He has always been a priviledged personage; and we have no doubt that he played his pranks even in Paradise. To-day, he meets you unexpectedly on the hill-side; and was there ever a face in this world so celestialized by smiles? All the features are framed of light. Black eyes are beads-blue eyes are diamonds. Gaze, then, into the blue eyes of Spring, and you feel that in the untroubled lustre, there is something more sublime than in the heights of the cloudless heavens, or in the depths of the waveless seas. More sublime because essentially spiritual. There stands the young Angel, entranced, in the conscious mystery of his own beautiful and blessed being; and the earth which we mortal creatures tread, becomes all at once fit region for the sojourn of the immortal son of the morning. So might some great painter image the first-born of the year, till nations adored the picture. To-morrow you repair, with hermit steps, to the mount of the vision, and,

"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,”

Spring clutches you by the hair, with the fingers of frost; blashes a storm of sleet in your face, and finishes, perhaps, by folding you in a winding-sheet of snow, in which you would infallibly perish but for a pocket-pistol of

Glenlivet. The day after to-morrow, you behold him— Spring-walking along the firmament, sad but not sullen —mournful, but not miserable-disturbed but not despairing now coming out towards you in a burst of light -and now fading away from you in a gathering of gloom -even as one might figure in his imagination, a fallen angel. On Thursday, confound you if you know what the devil to make of his Springship. There he is, stripped to the buff-playing at hide-and-seek, hare-and-hound, with a queer crazy crony of his in a fur-cap, swandown waistcoat, and hairy breeches, Lodbrog or Winter. You turn up the whites of your eyes, and the browns of your hands in amazement, till the two, by way of change of pastime, cease their mutual vagaries, and, like a couple of hawks diverting theirselves with an owl, in conclusion buffet you off the premises. You insert the occurrence, with suitable reflections, in your Meteorological Diary, under the head-Spring. On Friday, nothing is seen of you but the blue tip of your nose, for you are confined to bed by rheumatism, and nobody admitted to your sleepless sanctum but your condoling Mawsey. 'Tis a pity. For never since the flood-greened earth, on her first resurrection-morn, laughed around Ararat, spanned was she by such a rainbow! By all that is various and vanishing, the arch seems many miles broad, and many, many miles high, and all creation to be gladly and gloriously gathered together-without being crowdedplains, woods, villages, towns, hills, and clouds, beneath the pathway of Spring, once more an angel—an unfallen angel! While the tinge that trembles into transcendent hues-fading and fluctuating-deepening and dyingnow gone, as if for ever-and now back again in an instant, as if breathing and alive-is felt, during all that wavering visitation, to be of all sights the most evanescent, and yet inspirative of a beauty-born belief, bright as the sun that flung the image on the cloud,-profound as the gloom it illumines—that it shone and is shining there at the bidding of Him who inhabiteth eternity. The grim noon of Saturday, after a moaning morning, and one silent intermediate lour of gravelike stillness, begins to

gleam fitfully with lightning like a maniac's eye; and list! is not that

"The sound

Of thunder heard remote?"

On earth wind there is none-not so much as a breath. But there is a strong wind in heaven-for see how that huge cloud-city, a night within a day, comes moving on along the hidden mountain-tops, and hangs over the loch all at once black as pitch, except that here and there a sort of sullen purple heaves upon the long slow swell, and here and there along the shores-how caused we know not-are seen, but heard not, the white melancholy breakers! Is no one smitten blind? No! thank God! But here the thanksgiving has been worded, an airquake has split asunder the cloud-city, the night within the day, and all its towers and temples are disordered along the firmament, to a sound than might waken the dead. Where are ye, ye echo-hunters, that grudge not to purchase gunpowder explosions on Lowood bowling-green, at four shillings the blast? See! there are our artillerymen stalking from battery to battery-all hung up aloft facing the west-or "each standing by his gun," with lighted match moving or motionless, shadows-figures, and all clothed in black-blue uniform, with blood-red facings, portentously glancing in the sun, as he strives to struggle into heaven. The generalissimo of all the forces, who is he but-Spring?-Hand in hand with Spring, Sabbath descends from heaven unto earth; and are not their feet beautiful on the mountains? Small as is the voice of that tinkling bell from that humble spire, overtopped by its coeval trees, yet is it heard in the heart of infinitude. So is the bleating of these silly sheep on the braes-and so is that voice of psalms, all at once rising so spirit-like, as if the very kirk were animated, and sang a joyous song in the wilderness to the ear of the Most High. For all things are under his care-those that, as we dream, have no life-the flowers and the herbs, and the trees, those that some dim scripture seems to say, when they die, utterly perish-and those that all bright

scripture, whether written in the book of God, or the book of Nature, declares will live for ever!

If such be the character of Spring, gentle reader, wilt thou not forget and forgive-with us-much occasional conduct on his part that appears not only inexplicable, but incomprehensible? But we cannot extend the same indulgence to Summer and to Autumn. Summer is a season come to the years of discretion, and ought to conduct himself like a staid, sober, sensible, middle-aged man, not past, but passing, his prime. Now, Summer, we are sorry to say it, has lately behaved in a way to make his best friends ashamed of him-in a way absolutely disgraceful to a person of his time of life. Having picked a quarrel with the Sun-his benefactor-nay his father, what else could he expect but that that enlightened Christian would altogether withhold his countenance from so undutiful and ungrateful a child, and leave him to travel along the mire and beneath the clouds? For some weeks Summer was sulky-and sullenly scorned to shed a tear. His eyes were like ice. By and by, like a great schoolboy, he began to whine and whimper—and when he found that that would not do, he blubbered like the booby of the lowest form. Still the Sun would not look on him —or if he did, 'twas with a sudden and short half-smile, half-scowl, that froze the ingrate's blood. At last the Summer grew contrite, and the Sun forgiving; the one burst out into a flood of tears, the other into a flood of light. In simple words, the Summer wept and the Sun smiled and for one broken month there was a perpetual alternation of rain and radiance. How beautiful is penitence! How beautiful forgiveness! For one week the Summer was restored to his pristine peace and old luxuriance, and the desert blossomed like the rose.

Therefore we ask the Summer's pardon for thanking heaven that he is dead. Would that he were alive again, and buried not for ever beneath the yellow forest leaves ! O thou first, faint, fair, fine tinge of dawning light, that streaks the still-sleeping yet just-waking face of the morn, light and no light, a shadowy something that as we gaze is felt to be growing into an emotion that must be either innocence or beauty, or both blending together