"To the eye and heart of the ambitious, how many subjects of inducement and delight do nountains present! Who would not be proud to climb the summits of the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Andes? Is there a Sicilian, who does not boast of Etna? Is there a Scot, who does not take pride in celebrating Ben Lomond and is there an Italian, that is not vain of the Apennines? Who, that is alive to nature and the muse, would not be delighted to wander up the sides of the Caucasus, the cone of Teneriffe, or those beautiful mountains, situated on the confines of three nations, so often and so justly celebrated by the poets of antient Greece and shall our friend Colonna be censured for confessing, that the proudest moments of his existence have been those in which he has reached the summits of the Wrekin, the Ferywn, and the cone of Langollen? or when he has beheld from the tops of Carnedds David, and Llewellyn, a long chain of mountains, stretching from the north to the south, from Penmaenmawr to Cader Idris Snowdon rising in the centre, his head capt with snow, and towering above the clouds, while his immense sides, black with rugged and impending rocks, stretched in long length below!

discard all grovelling and earthly passions; the thoughts assume a character of sublimity, proportionate to the grandeur of the surrounding objects: and as the body approaches nearer to the ethereal regions, the soul imbibes a portion of their unalterable purity.' In a note to this passage Rousseau expresses his surprise, that a bath of the reviving air of the mountains is not more frequently prescribed by the physician, as well as by the moralist.

"Emotions of religion are always the most predominant in such elevated regions. Mr. Adams, when employed as minister plenipotentiary, from the States of America to the court of Berlin, visited the vast mountains that separate Silesia from Bohemia. Upon the Schneegniten he beheld the celebrated pits, where the snow remains unmelted for the greater part of the year: upon the Risenkoppe, the highest pinnacle in Germany, he beheld all Silesia, all Saxony, and Bohemia, stretched like a nap before him. Here,' says hc, my first thought was turned to the Supreme Creator, who gaver existence to that immensity of objects, expanded before my view. The transition from this idea to that of my own relation, as an immortal soul with the Author of nature, was natural and immediate; from this to the recollection of my country, my parents, and my friends.'

"It is highly interesting to observe, what pride a mountaineer takes in his country. Mr. Coxe, travelling near Munster, was requested by a peasant to inform him what he thought of his country; and pointing to the mountains with rapture, he exclaimed, behold oue walls and bulwarks; even Constan

tinople

tinople is not so strongly fortified." And Colonna never reflects, but with pleasure, on the self-evident satifaction with which a farmer, residing in one of the most inaccessible cliffs, near Ffestiniog, replied to his assertion, that England was the finest and best country in the world,

ah! but you have no mountains, sir; you've got no mountains!'— The Sicilian peasants, in the same manner, have such an affection for Etna, that they believe Sicily would not be habitable without it. It keeps us warm in winter,' say they, and furnishes us with ice in summer.'

If we except mountains, nothing has so imposing an effect upon the imagination, as high, impending and precipitate rocks; those objects, which, in so peculiar a manner, appear to have been formed by some vast convulsion of the earth; and I remember, my Lelius, few scenes, which have given me greater severity of delight, than those vast crags, which rear themselves in a multitude of shapes, near Ogwen's Lake; at the falls of the Conway; at St. Gowen's Chapel in Pembrokeshire, and the singular masses at Worm's Head, in the district of Gower. 'The first of these scenes is the more endeared to my fancy, from the following Ode having been written by La Rochefort, among its fude and sterile precipices.

ODE. I.

To th' Oak, that near my cottage grew,
I gave a lingering, sad adieu;
I left my Zenophelia true

To love's fine power-
I felt the tear my cheek bedew
In that sad hour.-

11.

Upon the mountain's side I stood, Capt with Rothsay's arching wood;

And, as I'view'd the mimic flood,

So smooth and still,

I listen'd-gaz'd in pensive moodThen climb'd the hill.

III. Adieu, thou wood-embosom'd spire, "No longer shall my rustic lyre In tender, simple notes respire

Thy tombs among; No longer will it sooth thy choir, With funeral song.

IV.

The world before me -I must rove Through vice's glittering, vain alcove "Alas! as 'mid the world I move,

• Shall I have time

To tremble at the name of love,
And speak in rhyme ?

V.

Five years are past, since this I sigh'd,
Since to the world without a guide,
My fortunes I oppos'd to pride;-

Oh! time mispent!My pains are lost my talents triedWith punishment!

VI.

Now to my hamlet I'll retire,
Cur'd of every vain desire;
And burning with the sacred fire,

That charm'd my youth;

To love I'll dedicate my lyre,

And heaven-born truth.

"When rocks are scattered among woods, covered with ivy, and peopled with animals, as in the celebrated pass at Undercliff, nothing can be more embellishing to scenery, and nothing fascinates the imagination in a more vivid and Of all the impressive manner. rocks, which this island can boast, few can compare with those that alternately form the sides, the front screens, and the back grounds of the Wye. There,' says Mr. Gilpin, who has described the general character of this unequalled river with the skill and judgment of a painter, and with all the taste and genius of a poet, the rocks are continually starting through the woods, and are generally simple and

grand;

grand; rarely formal or fantastic. Sometimes they project in those beautiful square masses, yet broken and shattered in every line, which is characteristic of the most majestic species of rock. Sometimes they slant obliquely from the eye in shelving diagonal strata; and sometimes they appear in large masses of smooth stone, detached from each other and half buried in the soil. These masses of smooth rock are those objects of nature, which most resemble the architecture of man. Sometimes they rear themselves into vast natural amphitheatres; at other times into rampires, with all the regularity of immense walls; and with no herbage, no hanging masses of shrubs, no ivy adorning their crevices, they surprise, without delighting us. For, as the same elegant writer truly observes, no object receives so much beauty from contrast as the rock. Some objects,' says he, are beautiful in themselves; the eye is pleased with the tuftings of a tree; it is amused

with pursuing the eddying of a stream; or it rests with delight on the broken arches of a gothic ruin. Such objects, independent of coinposition, are beautiful in themselves. But the rock, bleak, naked and unadorned, seems scarcely to deserve a place among them. Tint it with mosses and lichens of various hues, and you give it a degree of beauty; adorn it with shrubs and hanging herbage, and you make it still more picturesque; connect it with wood, water, and broken ground, and you make it in the highest degree interesting. Its colour and its form are so accommo. dating, that it generally blends into one of the most beautiful appendages of landscape."

where high rocks, o'er ocean's dashing floods,

Wave high in air, their panoply of woods,
Admiring taste delights to stray beneath
With eye uplifted, and forgets to breath;
Or, as aloft his daring footsteps climb,
Crests their high summits with his arm
sublime.
Darwin, c. 3. 1. 1223.

'

1813.

therefore, are animated and gay, full of richness, and evidently the result of having studied for himself.-Spencer, the wild, the fascinating Spencer, delineates, with force and simplicity, the romantic and enchanting.-Milton was lover of the beautiful in nature, as he was of the sublime in poetry: and though his Il'Penseroso abounds in those

images, which excite the most sombre reflections, the general character of his delineations are of an animated cast. In his minor poems, which afforded him an opportunity of consulting his natural taste, unconnected with epic gravity, we find him almost universally sketching with a light, an animated and clegant pencil. What can be more cheerful than his Song on May Morning, or his beautiful Latin Poem on the Coming of Spring? And can any thing be more rich and fascinating than the scenery of Comus, or more profusely abounding in all, that renders rural imagery delightful, than his exquisite lyric of L'Allegro? And beyond all this, what shall we compare with his Garden of Eden?-Nothing in the Odyssey; nothing in the descriptions we have received, of the Groves of Antioch, or the Valley of Tempé: neither the Gardens of Armida, or the Hesperides; the Paradise of Ariosto;-Claudian's Garden of Venus; the Elysium of Virgil and Ovid, or the Cyprus of Marino; neither the Enchanted Garden of Boyardo, the Island of Camoëns, or Rousseau's Verger de Clarens, have any thing to compare with it.

"But however well a scene may be described, every landscape, so exhibited, does not necessarily become a subject for the palette of the painter. Some descriptions embrace objects too minute, some are too humble and familiar, others too general, and some there are too faithful to be engaging. This poet delights in describing the familiar, that the beautiful; some in delineating the picturesque, and others in sketching the sublime.-These may be styled the four orders of landscape. In the first we may

class Cowper; in the second, Popes in the third, Thomson; in the fourth, Ossian. The descriptions of Cowper are principally from humble and domestic life, including objects, seen every day and in every country. The gipsey group is almost the only picturesque sketch, he affords. Highly as this has been extolled, how much more interesting had the subject become in the hands of a Dyer, a Thomson, or a Beattie! Pope excels in painting the beautiful, and yet is he so general, that his vales, slopes, plains, and woods, fit before the imagination in graceful abundance, leaving on the memory few traces of existence. Thomson, also, deals considerably in generals, and seems mostly to have viewed nature from the summit of a hill, and to have drawn his images from the vale below. His pictures are principally adapted to the latitude of Richmond. Some, however, are enchantingly picturesque, and others sublime to the last degree: they present themselves to the eye in strong and welldefined characters; the keeping is well preserved, the outlines are boldly marked.

In

Dyer tinted like Ruysdale, and Ossian with all the force and majesty of Salvator Rosa. In describing wild tracks, pathless solitudes, dreary and cragged wildernesses, with all the horrors of savage deserts, partially peopled with a hardy, a virtuous, and not inelegant race of men, Ossian is unequalled. night scenery he is above all imitation for truth, solemnity and pathos;, and no one more contrasts the va ried aspects of nature with the, mingled emotions of the heart.What can be more admirable than his address to the evening star, in the songs of Selma; to the moon

in Darthula; or that fine address to the sun in his poem of Carthon? passages almost worthy the sacred pen of the prophet Isaiah.

The uniformity, that has been observed in the imagery of Ossian, is not the uniformity of dulness. Local description only aids the memory; for a scene must be actually observed by the eye, before the mind can form a just and adequate idea of it. No epicure can judge of a ragout by the palate of another a musician must bear the concert, he presumes to criticise; and the reader will gain but a very imperfect idea of the finest landscape in the universe, by reading or hearing it described; for we can neither taste, nor hear, nor smell, nor feel, nor see by proxy. Thus, when Ossian describes vales, rocks, mountains and glens, the words he uses are the same, and the images, they respectively suggest, would appear to be the same, but the scenes themselves are dressed in an infinite variety of drapery. It is not that nature is poor, but that language is indigent. A superficial reader, possessing no play of fancy, when the sun is represented as going down, and the moon as rising; when a cataract is said to roar, and the ocean to roll, can only figure to himself the actual representations of those objects, without any combinations. A man of an enlarged and elegant mind, however, immediately paints to himself the lovely tints that captivate his fancy in the rising and setting of those glorious luminaries; he already sees the tremendous rock, whence the cataract thunders down, and thrills with agreeable horror at the distant heavings of an angry ocean.

Possessing a mind, that fancy Never taught to soar, the one per

ceives no graces in a tint; a broad and unfinished outline only spreads upon his canvas; while, by the creative impulses of genius, the outline is marked by many a matchless shade, and the foreground occupied by many a bold or interesting group.

Gifted with an elegant and accomplished mind, the poet walks at large, amid the gay creations of the material world, imbibing images, at every step, to form his subjects and illustrate his positions: for there is an analogy between external appearances of nature, and particular affections of the soul, strikingly exemplificative of that general harmony, which subsists in all the universe. From this analogy the heavenly bodies were considered symbols of majesty, and the oak an emblem of strength; the olive, of peace; and the willow, of sorrow One of the Psalms of David, pursuing this analogy, represents the Jews, hanging their harps upon the willows of Babylon, bewailing their exile from their native country. The yellow-green, which is the colour natures assumes at the falling of the leaf, was worn in chivalry, as an emblem of despair.-Red is considered as indicative of anger; green, of tranquillity; and brown, of melancholy. In the same manner, the yew and the cypress have long been acknowledged as emblems of mourning; the violet, of modesty; the lily of the valley, of innocence; the rose, of beauty; the aloe, of constancy; and the palm of laurel, of honour and victory.

"By analogy, we associate good fortune with a fine morning; ignonorance with darkness; youth with spring; manhood with summer; autuinn with that season of life, when, as Milton observes in a R 2

fice