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THE LION'S HEAD.

MR. LION,

Quem non ille ducem potuit terrere tumultus !
Fata sed in præceps solitus committere CÆSAR,
Fortunamque suam per summa pericula gaudens
Exercere, venit.

Let me have just one "push and parry "with the Consuls Julius and Cæsar, if you love me. Julius asks, "what does he mean by quoting Sappho's is εraipav to prove her power of imagination?" and he adds, "it proves not this at all; but her intensity of feeling." Again he says, that "The Simple Story is, even by Surrey's own account of it, rather the product of intense feeling than of fine imagination." He says also, "intense feeling is not always a source of the sublime;" and that "feeling never takes this direction, unless when prompted by a totally different agent-towering genius." Now here he admits that intense feeling is sometimes the source of sublimity: the admission being included in the phrase not always: it may be so then in the instance of Sappho's ode: if he affirm that this is not an instance of feeling" prompted by towering genius," he merely begs the question. It is still sub lite.

Will Julius permit me to answer his question by asking him one in turn? "How can things or characters be represented, brought into bold relief, or, as we say, created, by intense feeling only, apart from the imaginative power or shaping faculty?" As I think they cannot, I hold myself free to consider Sappho's pathological rhapsody as sublime, and The Simple Story as a work of imagination. Not, of course, in the vulgar or popular sense affixed to the word; of something of diablerie or fairyism. Not having the fear of Pope before my eyes, I must own it to be my opinion, that men and women, and not sylphs, are the subjects which task a writer's imagination. He thinks the epithet masculine, applied in common parlance to such productions of women as partake of extraordinary energy, concedes the point in dispute. I think just the contrary. Namely, that it proves that for which alone I contended: that there have been and are such productions: works of masculine genius and power by female pens.

With regard to the sublimity of Sappho's fragment, the proposition belongs to Longinus, and to Longinus I refer him. Παντα μεν τοιαυτα γίνεται περι τους έρωντας· ἡ ληψις δ', ὡς ἔφην, των ακρων, και ή εις ταυτο συναίρεσις απειργασατο ΤΗΝ ΕΞΟΧΗΝ. SURREY.

* These symptoms severally occur in persons under the influence of love: it is, as I have before said, the seizure of the most prominent and the condensation of them, that has STRUCK OUT THE SUBLIME.

MR. LION,-An Horatian sop for your kingly maw.

PERSICOS ODI.-i. 38.

Boy! your Persian courses like me not:

Away with the linden-tied coronet :
Spare the search for that only spot

Where the late rose of summer lingers yet.

Prank not, prithee, the myrtle bough

Busily sorting flower with flower;

Base myrtle, boy! shall not shame our brow,

As thou fill'st and I quaff in the vine-tree bower.

BOB SHORT,
Impransus.

We have much pleasure in finding room for the following Sonnet, which ought to have been inserted some time ago.

SONNET.

The cold rude blast of winter hath past by,
And earth will wake again in loveliness;
She will be young again-again will bless
The sight, when glowing in the summer sky:
Winter again will scathe her, and the eye

Of man may mark her desolate distress-
But let him weep himself, whose hope is less,
And for his own past seasons breathe the sigh.
Earth will arise in light when he is sleeping!
When worms are feasting in his midnight tomb,
Her vines will blush, her harvests will be reaping:
For him, one season only is his doom;

One youth-one spring-but one-one summer's glow;
One fatal winter-two he ne'er shall know.

J. BOUNDEN.

We cannot give Tantalus a favourable answer to his question, and shall therefore be silent on that score, and spare at once his poetry and his feelings.

The answer which was given last month to N. G. S. must, we are sorry to say, suffice likewise for the present,

There is so much that is really clever in Q.'s communication, that we give it up with regret, but we really cannot find room for so long a paper, on such a subject.

We are under the necessity of refusing R. L. D.-Sonnets to Ingratitude and Miss M.'s Sonnet,-A. 2.-Hero and Leander.

THE

London Magazine.

SEPTEMBER, 1824.

BLAKESMOOR IN HSHIRE.

I Do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy; and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In

the latter it is chance but some present human frailty-an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory-or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory, on that of the preacher - puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonising the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness?-go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church-think of the piety that has kneeled there-the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there-the meek pastor-the docile parishioner-with no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons-drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionSEPT. 1824.

less as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road, to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprized that the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it.

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to an antiquity.

I was astonished at the indistinction of every thing. Where had stood the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious.

Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion.

Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to

Q

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