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sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape, and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision: to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into day-light a struggling and half-vanishing night-mare; to handle and examine the terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid, or so careless as that Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns: or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world, whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourself of it. Why should we get up? we have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing here to expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed grey before our hairs. The mighty

changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already, how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given the hand of halfway approach to incorporeal being. We once thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?—The last Essays of Elia.

6. On the Death of Coleridge.

WHEN I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world, that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But, since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear

spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations. He was a Grecian (or in the first form) at Christ's Hospital, where I was Deputy-Grecian; and the same subordination and deference to him I have preserved through a life-long acquaintance. Great in his writings, he was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from morn to 'dewy eve,' nor cease till far midnight; yet who ever would interrupt him? who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from Helicon or Zion? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many who read the abstruser parts of his Friend' would complain that his works did not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in oral delivery which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise imperfect recipients. He was my fiftyyears-old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably can the world see it again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful Gilmans more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel.-Eliana.

LV.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

1775-1864.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR was born at Warwick in 1775. His family, though hardly so distinguished as he imagined it to be, was of considerable antiquity. Few men of letters have ever had greater advantages of position and circumstances. But to Landor they were little else than drawbacks. At Rugby he gained his first classical laurels, but his defiant refusal to ask pardon for a boyish offence caused his dismissal. At Trinity College, Oxford, he fired a fowling-piece into the window of a resident Fellow. For this he was rusticated, and though he might have returned after a temporary exile, he left Oxford for ever. After some years spent to but little purpose as a young man of fashion, he became, by the death of his father, the owner of a considerable estate in Monmouthshire. When the Spaniards rose to arms in 1808, he devoted time and money to their cause, receiving in return a colonel's commission. In 1814, on the restoration of Ferdinand VII, he quitted Spain. The experiment of residence on his property was unsuccessful; in 1815 he left England, and after various changes settled at Florence. In 1835, however, he left his wife and family at Florence, and returned to Bath, where his head-quarters were fixed until 1858. In consequence of a miserable libel issued by him in his old age he had to quit England, and his last years were spent at Florence, where he died in 1864.

The reputation of Landor rests chiefly on his Imaginary Conversations. The first series was published in 1824, and the opinion

of Archdeacon Hare that the book 'would live as long as English literature lived,' was re-echoed by Southey and Wordsworth, and other competent judges. The intense energy of the author's mind, his wide range of reading, and, it must be added, his extreme and passionate view of all political questions, are evident in every page of these dialogues. A second series showed no falling off in his powers, and Pericles and Aspasia, a more matured but less popular work, exhibits him as perhaps the most successful modern delineator of the manners and thought of ancient Greece.

The style of Landor in poetry and prose is, at times, unequalled. He chiefly excels in manly expression of thought, and in passages of pure pathos. Mr. Emerson has well said of him, 'whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with ulterior ends, belongs to a sacred class, among whom there are few men of the present age who have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor.'

1. Dialogue between William Penn and
Lord Peterborough.

Peterborough. The worst objection I myself could ever find against the theatre is, that I lose in it my original idea of such men as Caesar and Coriolanus, and, where the loss affects me more deeply, of Juliet and Desdemona. Alexander was a fool to wish for a second world to conquer: but no man is a fool who wishes for the enjoyment of two; the real and the ideal: nor is it anything short of a misfortune, I had almost said of a calamity, to confound them. This is done by the stage: it is likewise done by engravings in books, which have a great effect in weakening the imagination, and are serviceable only to those who have none, and who read negligently and idly. I should be sorry if the most ingenious print in the world were to cover the first impresD d

VOL. II.

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