the picturesque contrast of Bacon and Shakespeare, between whom he sees as great a difference as

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between an American forest and a London timberyard. In the timber-yard, the materials are sawed, and squared, and set across; in the forest we have the natural form of the tree, all its growth, all its branches, all its leaves, all the mosses that grow about it, all the birds and insects that inhabit it; now deep shadows absorbing the whole wilderness; now bright bursting glade, with exuberant grass and flowers and fruitage; now untroubled skies, now terrific thunder storms; everywhere multiformity, everywhere immensity." Among the delightful passages of the poet's prose, I would name the conversation of Sir Philip Sidney and Lord Brooke, at Penshurst, which breathes the wisest thoughts in a strain of music, winning and serious. How beautiful is the remark of Sidney: "Friendship is a vase which, when it is flawed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious ones, never."

But the author seldom suffers our pleasure to be without a jar. His great deficiency seems to be in taste. He wants, to an extraordinary degree, that bright faculty which colours, subdues, shapes, and

combines all the treasures of imagination. His music requires cadence, his painting, tone. A coarse, satiric humour sometimes breaks out with painful effect. It is a snatch of a political ballad, in the intricate melody of Mozart: it is a sweet face of Murillo, with a border by Cruikshank. Let me not, however, forget the tribute of Southey: "What you have heard me say of his temper is the best and only explanation of his faults. Never did man represent himself in his writings so much less generous, less just, less compassionate than he really is. I certainly never knew anyone of brighter genius, or of kinder heart."

MAY THE SEVENTH.

COLERIDGE says, or sings, very prettily of the nightingale—

-on moonlit bushes,

Whose dewy leaflets are but half disclosed,

You may perhaps behold them in the twigs.

Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full,
Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade
Lights up her love-torch."

In our quiet woods it is not difficult, even in broad daylight, to see and hear the nightingale.

This morning I stood for several minutes under the bough, and watched, not only the flashing of its "bright, bright eyes," but every quick beat and pulsation of what Isaac Walton calls the "little instrumental throat." The exertion, however, is more conspicuous in the blackcap, when in garden or orchard it pours forth its mellow tunes. The throat is then distended with the gush of notes. And this intensity of feeling and effort is sometimes fatal. A thrush has been known to break a blood-vessel in the midst of its music, and drop lifeless from the tree. Nor is the story of the nightingale dying of sorrow, to be considered a mere fiction of the poets. One or two instances of its emulative combats with human musicians are sufficiently attested.

CLARE shall be our guide to the nightingale's nest, up this green woodland drive

-She dwells just here.

Hush! let the wood-gate softly clap, for fear
The noise might drive her from her home of love;
For here I've heard her many a merry year,

At morn, at eve, nay, all the live-long day,
As though she lived on song. This very spot,
Just where that old-man's-beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o'er the road, and stops the way;
And where the child its blue-bell flowers hath got,
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails;
There have I hunted like a very boy,

Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorn,
To find her nest, and see her feed her young.

And where those crumpling fern-leaves ramp* among
The hazel's under boughs, I've nestled down

And watch'd her while she sang.

Let's be hush;

For in this black-thorn clump, if rightly guessed,

Her curious house is hidden. Part aside

Those hazel branches in a gentle way,

And stoop right cautious 'neath the rustling boughs,

For we will have another search to-day,

And hunt this fern-strewn thorn-clump round and round,

And where this reeded wood-grass idly bows,

We'll wade right through.

There, put that bramble by ;

Nay, trample on its branches, and get near.
How curious is the nest! no other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves

Its dwelling in such spots. Dead oaken leaves
Are placed without, and velvet moss within,
And little scraps of grass, and scant and spare,
What hardly seem materials, down and hair;
Snug lie her curious eggs, in number five,

Of deadened green, or rather olive brown,

And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well."

It would be curious to trace the influence of climate upon the song. Addison, inviting young Lord Warwick into the country, speaks of a concert in the neighbouring wood begun by blackbirds and concluded by a nightingale, "with something of the Italian manner in her divisions." The English bird is supposed to possess, in a weaker degree, the continual warble, "the linked sweetness long drawn out," of her southern rival. The Persian

* Grow luxuriantly.

note is affirmed to be the sweetest. The eastern nightingale, or bulbul, is, indeed, of a distinct species, and nearly black; but the same tone is recognised under every change of sun and verdure. The traveller can say—

Display'd her richest blossoms among files
Of orange-trees bedeck'd with golden fruit
Ripe for the hand, or under a thick shade
Of Ilex, or, if better suited to the hour,
The lightsome olive's twinkling canopy,-
Oft have I heard the nightingale and thrush
Blending as in a common English grove

Their love-songs."

It is worth remarking, that three lines of Homer comprise all the facts which later poets have enlarged with regard to the song and disposition of the nightingale. He mentions its custom of hiding itself in the deepest foliage, and marks that manysounding harmony which gives to its repetitions their highest charm. The nightingale's peculiar love of wood-shelter is well expressed by Beaumont and Fletcher, who place it

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Among the thick-leaved Spring."

The nightingale's voice is singularly piercing, and can be heard over the diameter of a mile. Chaucer notices this characteristic

"I heard in the next bush beside,
A nightingale so lustely sing,
That her clere voice she made ring
Through all the greene wood wide."