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surely no man has drunk so deeply of the old river of joy as this English priest of the seventeenth century.

Yet when under the glow of his sacred intoxication and self-abandonment, he sends out the most original coruscations of insight in other directions, as we have seen. His pages teem with the most novel conceits, and the most aboriginal images on the one hand; and, on the other, from what book or Bible did he draw those subtle and far-reaching intuitions in the above-quoted piece upon Man, to signalise only one example? Above all, perhaps, there is high and unhelped imagination in the very preconception, and in the name of the poem— The Temple! Now that we emerge from its rapturous shades, we cannot escape from the feeling of the unity of the arts; music and architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry are here; at least for the present happy evening of our existence. Nor does this dissolving night not run into easy rhyme with another that melted around us long ago. At the instance of this association of identical though distant sentiments, we remember, with a feeling as vivid as the new-born joy itself, how our hearts leapt up when we were gravely told, and that by one of the most rectangular of men of science, that an ingenious person had found out such a deep and real analogy between the proper beauty of the eye and the beauty of the ear, that architecture might be literally dissolved away into music, and music literally crystallised into architecture, by the initiated hand of skill. He played off cottages, colonnades, temples; he sketched down airs, ballads, oratorios. It was a budding and melodious May morning, some nine years ago, in the spring of life; as we walked away from our venerable teacher, we said, This is a wonder which few of us can hope to un

derstand, but we will believe it notwithstanding; for we had not then learned the momentous fact, that what is true for the imagination is not necessarily true for the understanding or the senses. But the pure idea haunted us all day long, and filled our swarming brain with the most delightful hallucinations. The streets of the city where we were gave way, like billows, beneath our buoyant feet; the people passed us as summer breezes pass over the abandoned strings of an Eolian; crescents and public buildings, monuments and church-spires, all expired around us in the euthanasia of sound and numbers. We were at once beside ourselves, and nearer our very selves than we had ever been before. In the evening we went to a town in the country, where we were born; and there the fluted face of the old familiar house melted before our eye, and hummed in our ear the hymn of childhood. Sighing for solitude and night, we walked into the fields as soon as the stars were out to give us welcome home. O how divine a thing did this new revealing of the mystery of material existence then appear to be! Think the same of each and all of the sensible phenomena of the universe; of the far-booming hosts of heaven, and the humming multitudes of ever-wheeling atoms; and what an oratorio is creation! It is a temple, stately, stupendous, and spirit-quelling; and a spiritual song, struck at the birth of time, swelling through immensity, and capable of flowing through all eternity, unless the voluntary God of its sustaining shall withdraw the breath of life that animates the solid-seeming frame.

The constellation of the Lyre, and the birthplace reminiscences of an early life, under the roof of godly parents, combined to draw our thoughts into high Bible tracks. Yielding to the soft, and almost paternal guid

ance of the place and of the hour, we flew aloft on the imaginative wing of faith to those argent fields of industrious peace, where the 'spirits of just men made perfect' shall 'summer high in bliss' for ever. There was David the royal singer, sitting apart upon a pleasant height before our willing eye. Bending over his harp in wonder and in love, and sweeping his prophetic fingers over the wakeful and awaiting chords, he interpreted the hieroglyphics of nature, as they rose on his view, and rolled away 'in silent magnanimity' before him; he interpreted them into the living voice of song: and the nations of heaven gave ear. 'Hark,' we whispered to the listening night, 'how he thunders out the glories of our own magnificent firmament in full diapason: a worthy overture to all that is to follow. Listen again: he comes to the system of the sun, a majestic interlude, but also big with a tenderer meaning to the sovereign lyrist himself; for what a soft, melancholy, home-toned bar is floating from about him now! It is his own dear old world, where he struggled, and fell, and rose again a thousand times and more. Notice how his eye glistens, and his hand trembles, and his voice falters and wails, while he utters in intelligible strains the other meaning of the pale reflective moon, and the cool just sky, and the heaving true-hearted sea, and the bountiful green earth; ay, and Kedar's monotonous wilderness afar, and the skipping hills of Judah, and the muttering brook of Kedron, and the holy city of Jerusalem, and the everfragrant Temple of Solomon his son !' But he might not tarry. There lay an outspread universe before him, and away he sped, climbing a thousand times ten thousand Milky Ways with his regal eye, and pouring forth an unending flood of music, meaning more than the ear can understand.

VOL. II.

Alas! we are now many years older than then, and find such rapturous apprehensions or deliriums only in the house of memory, when some voice like Herbert's approves itself a spell, and opens the chambers that are haunted by those ghosts of the past.

DAVID SCOTT, R. S. A.

(NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.-No. XXI.)

ANOTHER potent and beautiful spirit has passed away. David Scott has completed the high-aiming curve of his brief career. The sudden-seeming decease of a man so young and vivid, a painter so aspiring and energetic, and a man of genius so characteristic, has not only overwhelmed his friends and lovers with dismay, but it has also saddened the heart of his native city. It is not to be denied that Edinburgh demeaned herself towards this, one of the noblest of her sons, with more of the severity of a stepmother than the tenderness of maternal solicitude; but now that he has been withdrawn from her embrace for ever, she appreciates her loss. She did not understand him living, but bewails him dead.

In the course of the last fifteen or twenty years, Scott had steadily become one of the most noteworthy of native artists. Without fortune, without office, without professional success commensurate with his undisputed superiority, and living in a state of seclusion if not alienation from society, he exhibited a wonderful series of pictures from year to year; recognised, by all but the most frivolous spectators, to be the manifestations of a powerful and exalted soul. The superficial observer was frequently so much startled as to find no suit

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