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tion, of the intuitive convictions of the [ employed. If this is not done, it must be mind. All that they affirm is, that those followed by a time of terrible reäction, in principles, which they have seized for the which men revenge themselves for the purpose of meeting the skepticism of deceit which has been practiced on them. Hume, are and must be intuitive. They That reaction has already set in powerfuldo not even pretend to give a full account ly in Germany, where a pretentious idealof these, or to express them in their ulti- ism has been succeeded by an indifference mate form. They vacillate in the account and a tendency to a very low and loose which they give of them, and in the no- style of thinking, (just as rationalism or menclature which they employ to denote intuitionalism has succeeded to Puseyism them. They draw no definite distinction in Oxford,) and where the religious combetween cognitions, beliefs, and judg-munity is at present inclined to turn away ments. They treated of the faculties, and also of the principles of common-sense, but they do not tell us how the two stand related to each other. And here we may be permitted to observe, that we look on these fundamental laws as being the necessary laws of the faculties regulating all their exercises, but not as laws or principles before the consciousness; and they are to be reflexly discovered as general laws only by the induction of their individual acts. Reid and Stewart do not even tell us what are the tests by which their presence may be detected: these we hold to be, first, as Aristotle and Locke have shown, self-evidence; and, second, as Leibnitz and Kant have shown, necessity and universality. Such defects as these they were quite willing to confess in that spirit of modesty which was one of their highest characteristics; and to any one complaining that they had not settled every point, they would, as it were, say, Go on in the path which we have opened: we are sure that there is more truth yet to be discovered, and rejoice we must and will, if you succeed where we have failed, and raise a little higher that fabric of which we have laid the foundation.

from all philosophy, as tending to infidelity, and will not be aroused, we suspect, till they see how fast and how far materialism has progressed, and are then made to feel that they have no sober philosophy to meet it. We fear that the flow in this country, at present at its height, may be followed by a similar ebb, in which all will be left barren as a sandy beach. It is with deep concern that we observe the taste, among metaphysicians proper, to be almost exclusively in favor of an à priori style of speculation, varied only by historical disquisitions in which all systems are arranged into a few artificial compartments, such as subjective and objective, idealism and sensationalism; while the study of inductive mental science is abandoned very much to the mere physiologist, who never comes in sight of the deeper convictions of the mind. We feel that very high interests, moral and religious, as well as philosophic, are involved in the proper conduct of metaphysical investigation at this instant. We confess that we should like to see it carried on in the very manner and spirit of Reid and Stewart. But let us not be misunderstood. We are not advising a retrogression, but an advance; we are not recommending that metaphysicians should stop where Reid and Stewart

Metaphysics, in spite of the prejudice against the name, are at present in a state of revival in this country. A greater num-stopped, or do over again what they have ber of works on speculative philosophy have issued from the press during the last dozen years, than in any similar period of the history of Britain. The mysteries into which even physical science is conducting us, the deep questions casting up in all branches of inquiry, and, above all, the religious struggles which are working in many a mind, all land in metaphysics. We are anxious that this period of respite to mental philosophy should be properly

done, and done so well. What we ask is, that, commencing where they closed, they should do in this age what Reid and Stewart did in their age. Appeal there is enough, in these times, to à priori principles; and the special want of the time now arrived, is a determination of the precise nature of such principles, with the view of settling what intuition can do, and, as no less important, what it can not do.

From Fraser's Magazine.

POEMS FROM EVERSLEY, BY THE RECTOR.*

A SPRING-TIDE STUDY.

tered nook, the sleeping fisher, spread out with ample and lazy limbs in the sunshine, and dimly indicate, by a single masterly touch, "the guardian angel" who hovers over his head and mingles with his dream. Beautiful the spirit is as Murillo's, only her eyes are blue, and the light golden hair is copied from Titian-Titziano Vicelli, as they called him in Venice.

YES! I like the spring-time as I like the | let him introduce, in this its most shelrosy faces and the rosier hearts of children. Spring is the childhood of the world, and it proves how fresh and healthy the old world must be at heart, that in this its six thousandth spring, or thereby, it is still full of gladness-glad as when the morning stars sang together. One might believe that the happy carol of their dawn had ere this been tempered by a somewhat "sad astrology." But the weatherbeaten, blood-stained, sin-stricken earth, as some like to call it, clearly does not despair of itself. Let who will moan and maunder in disconsolate sonnets, the "lifegiving" planet remains hale and hearty and hopeful. The most bitter winter experience can not disenchant it. The lily at my foot is penciled as delicately and tenderly, I believe, on my conscience, as any that bloomed on the banks of the blessed rivers, and were plucked by Eve in Paradise.

And no one of the blessed rivers-not even "Pison which compasseth Havilah where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good, and bdellium and the onyx stone" was more beautiful than this ragged Scotch stream is to day, on this the first morning of our Scottish spring, Is it not a charming picture? Why did not Copley Fielding paint it? Or rather let us hope that Maculloch, "lord of the mountain and the flood," may stumble on it this summer as he marches to his royalty on Loch Corruskin; or that Waller Paton, in search of the sea-breeze, may one day set up his easel on its daisied banks. Yes, it must have a Scotch annalist-no English artist, good man and true though he be amid the Lincoln flats, could truly explain the wild charm of these wind-swept bents. And, if it please him,

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The vision fades, and his eyelids open upon the common day. But the unearthly music yet rings in his ears, and the only mortal words into which it may be woven are those Keats wrote before he died. Do you remember that last sonnet? Let us repeat it solemnly, and let the words wander down with the waters of the river to the sea:

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'Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,

Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still, to hear her tender-taken breath
And so live ever-or else swoon on to death."

How the star-sheen on the tremulous tide, and that white death-like "mask,” haunt the imagination! Had the poet, who felt the grass grow over him ere he was five-and twenty, been crowned with a hundred summers, could he have done any thing more consummate? I doubt it.

It is a pleasant picture indeed, this river estuary, almost as bright and sunny as the picture in the dream. The stream unrolls itself, snake-like, through the center of the oosy plain which the tide has dried for the snipe and the sand-lark; on either

hand arise the snowy drifts of the sand- | richer and wiser lands; but it has not been hills; and midway across the valley which our luck to find them. What are the they form, the blue lustrous sea-line runs rivers and hills of Italy to your mountainstraight as an arrow. For yonder truly torrents? what the Mediterranean to lies that great sea to which men go down your ice-girt sea? The Tiber is a dirty in ships from the haven under the hill; to- puddle: yellow ditch-water best repreday it murmurs, it whispers, it caresses, sents to the Teutonic mind the classic and ever and anon it breaks into a loud and unfamiliar Arno. Did mortal eyes jubilant laugh of joy, which yet has in it ever behold the keen, bracing, glorious something eerie and bodeful, and that green on that sea kindle the tepid milkmoans of shipwreck and storm among the and-water of the Egean? Yet Dian and Hebrides. Half a mile down, a ferry-boat Aphrodite? Tush! look yonder!" is paddling across the stream, with a boisterous crew of children on board, who laugh and shout at the pitch of their shrill voices, and splash the waves over each other with their oars in childish frolic.

And we do look. She is dressed in a bodice and kirtle of shepherd tartan, her feet and arms are bare, and her yellow curls are twined negligently off her face, and fastened with a string of primroses behind. She comes trippingly down the steep pathway that leads from the Black Castle on the windy bents, lilting to herself, as you may hear, one of those sweet ballads whose subtle and pathetic charm to a Scottish ear defies explanation or analysis:

"O Logie o' Buchan! O Logie the Laird!
They hae taen awa Jamie wha delved in the
yard,
Wha played on the flute and the viol sae sma;
They hae taen awa Jamie, the flower o' them a'."

See! a yellow moss bee, stirred from its winter sleep, reaches the gateway of the outer world. Dazed by the unaccustomed glare, it tumbles over and over among the grass, till, recovering its feet, it prudently backs into its byke. With ear to the turf, one hears it droning and murmuring far within-dreaming, it may be, of the "foxgloves on Furness Fell." A brace of sandlarks trip daintily through the loose seaweed at our feet; and the salmon trout are leaping in the pool beyond. Ah! yonder comes the cloud for which all the morning we have watched and prayed; Now she is upon the brink of the river, and the fine gut falls lightly upon the the ferry-boat has fallen down the curled water. A yellow-fin misses the stream with the tide-her errand admits bob-misses it luckily-for, in another of no delay; what can she do in this exmoment, the pool is deeply stirred, and a tremity? She pauses and hesitates for a white finnock strikes the tail-fly on our moment-dips her bare foot coquettishly cast. Away it shoots like a sunbeam-into the water, to try if it be very cold now casting itself madly into the air, then-glances round quickly to detect any rubbing its nose obstinately against the sharp stones at the bottom; yielding and giving ground as the reel cautiously gathers in the line, until it lies panting on the shore in its silver armor-armor like to that in which Aphrodite of Cnidus, and Joan of France, and other valiant maidens, clad their white limbs when they went down to battle with men and gods. "A bonny fish," says Tom Morrice, who hails us from the opposite bank.

But the cloud has passed away, and the fisher is again stretched among his bents, and there is no sound in heaven or in earth save the rich gurgle of the peesweet, (I can not otherwise write down that wail in words,) and at times the clamorous alarm of the innumerous sea-fowl who breed on the rocky headlands outside the bar. "Dear old Scotland!" so runs our noonday soliloquy, "there may be better and

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naughty faun or peeping satyr, and no one being in sight, for Tom is casting at this very moment across the saumon pot" below the linn, and we are deep in a thicket of golden gorse, "kilts her coat" without more ado round her knees, and wades demurely into the channel, shivering no doubt a little as the chill water rises about her. O Diana and Athene, and all chaste maidens and matrons in Pagan and Christian story, why not? The instep is no doubt finely and cleanly cut; we back the curve of that ankle any day against the Medici's-and why not? We trust and believe in our souls that there is nothing morally wrong in loving to show a pretty ankle, nor indeed, for that matter, in loving to look on one. The trim little lassie, turned of seventeen, we take it, has no doubt a very charming figure; something like Greuze's Flower

Girl, you recollect; only whereas in the French girl the skirt is tucked up for no good reason that we can see, here it is kilted because she wades through the water, and very properly desires to keep her petticoat dry. That she is altogether pure and innocent, as well as pretty, no one can for a moment doubt even though she show no very grave embarrasment on finding that her aquatic feat has not been quite unwitnessed. Why should she?

So she trips through the gorse on her errand to the "toun," and we return to our reverie and our neglected volume of the morning-the songs and ballads of the Rector of Eversley. In these days of cheap and nasty publications, of infinitesimal type and transparent paper, a volume like this is "gude for sair een," as we say here. It ought to lie in the royal drawing-room. A ball from an Enfield rifle could not make way through half its pages. It transports us back to the old times when men believed that they had something worth recording to write about, and so wrote it on parchment and papyrus. While these hoary manuscripts are still regarded with awful reverence, the romance, and poetry, and metaphysics, and theology, and gastronomy of the nineteenth century are consigned to the dust-bin, and other "progressive" and sanitary institutions, with appalling rapidity. We wonder how many of the books printed during the present season will be in the body in the year of grace 1958 ?

To speak frankly, we do not believe in criticism. What good has criticism ever done to any particular individual? What benefit to society at large can be laid to its charge?

Tell zeal it lacks devotion,

Tell love it is but lust,
Tell time it is but motion,
Tell flesh it is but dust-

and when you have done so, what advantage have you gained or conferred? The crab is the critic of the vegetable world. He can pick a hole or two, we may be sure, in the coat of the rosy pippin or the swarthy ribston over the way, and we know of old the result. For it was this same unlucky tree that brought the "something in the world amiss" among us the tree of the knowledge of good and evil-the tree of criticism, that is to say-the original Edinburgh Review taken in by Eve at the instance

of the first Whig. Ought we to imitate this bitter, acrid, perverted plant?

Historic criticism is a special nuisance. Why may I not believe in Romulus and Remus, and the gaunt she-wolf of the Tiber, if I like? That grand old poem does not do me a bit of harm. What right has any musty philologist in a German university, or any ex-chancellor out of Downing-street, to break to pieces the cherished traditions of a hundred generations? Nay, when they are about it, why not smash the Apollo, and Uranian Venus, and Minerva the Healer, and the rest of the time-stained divinities of the Vatican? The one is not a shade more false than the other; not a shade less characteristic of the temper of mind of the people who produced them, among whom they grew up, and round whose daily life they twined themselves as the ivy does round the oak. Again, why may I not hold that Mary of Scotland was true as she was beautiful? To a Scottish gentleman it is a point of honor to defend the honor of his queen; why is his soul to be disquieted by historic heresies? Why must he be pestered into the conviction that the most unhappy daughter of an unhappy house was a courtezan and a murderess? Leave us alone with our harmless traditions; they may be false, but they can not do you any injury, and we can not afford to give them up; we learned them long ago, before the age of criticism dawned; they are almost the only poetry the income-tax has not crushed out of our hearts. Besides, how insecure the foundation on which the whole edifice rests! We have reversed the judgments of our fathers; will not the criticism of the next generation reverse ours, and with an equal show of right?

Poetic criticism, to our minds, is quite as fruitless as historic. A critic never manufactured a poet: the poet, from of old, was born, not made. The greatest poems recognize no formal laws-not even the Greek tragedy, which was simply the instinctive expression of a leading Greek idea-and are great in spite of the critics and the critical canons of the day. What did the contemporary censor say to the "license" of William Shakspeare, to the "dreary" epic of Milton, to the "vulgarities of Robert Burns?" I can not therefore conscientiously do Mr. Kingsley the injustice to criticise him. I like his poems: I should not like them better were I able to advance fifty rea

sons for the liking. Let us wander pleas antly through this pleasant volume, thankful that we gain pleasure from the perusal, and not over-anxious to extort "the reason why."

For indeed this critical mania of our day and generation must reach a climax ere long. Even the poet has latterly ceased to be a poet, becoming a critic instead. I have the greatest possible respect for the Oxford Professor of Poetry, but I do not think he has any right to compose an article on the Greek and Gallic stage, and thereafter publish it to the world as a Tragedy. The tragedy which he appends to his charming essay is no doubt a very clever "illustration" of the text, but it is in my opinion little more. It illustrates the "Preface," but the preface is the book, and attests the real power and pith of the writer much more effectually than the poem. A piece avowedly constructed down to particular lines, by the rule and square, can not claim to be considered an authentic work of art. It is nothing more than the "plan" which the traveler makes to verify his description; the model which the man of science exhibits to attest his theory. It was not so that the great poets worked. Homer did not "explain" the Odyssey: Shakspeare did not "explain" Hamlet or Macbeth.

Excepting three words of simple dedication, Mr. Kingsley, we are glad to see, publishes his poems without a single page of introductory or explanatory matter. There they are; we may read them or not, as we see fit; but the poet, having written them, has done his part, and the public may draw its own conclusions, if it can. This, we take it, is simply another manifestation of the virtue which gives a peculiar charm to whatever Mr. Kingsley writes-the perfect healthiness of his mind. These poems are the poems of a good man, and a good sportsman, sound in wind and limb, and not afflicted by any of the ailments to which flesh is heir. Too much poetic stuff in these latter days has been written by men who suffer from jaundice, and other combinations of liver-complaint. We detected, for instance, a prolonged attack of asthma in the very last epic we read; a dreadful book, which by the tenth canto (the last published) had conducted the hero through half the maladies incident to childhood. He had cut his teeth, (a very spirited episode,) and was vigorously prosecuting the measles when we gave in. Disease occasionally, though rarely, is a man's misfortune and not his fault, but it is a thousand pities that our poets should always avail themselves, for literary purposes, of the leisure which illness Why should they, or why should any affords. Now Mr. Kingsley, we are sure, of us? "A thing of beauty is a joy for- has never been ill in his life. He does ever," until we begin to dissect it, and not know what a bad constitution means, expose the ugly bones that wise Nature and the consequence is, that, after Walter has bountifully concealed. Why can not Scott, he is probably the healthiest writer we be content to enjoy? We have the in the English language. I am convinced stars, and the sky, and the clouds, and Sir Walter would have relished this Ode the trees, and the sea, "that bares its to the North-East Wind, however little bosom to the moon," and the children he might relish the wind itself, which who gather shells on its shore-what blows with peculiar malignity in his more do we need? Why cut and carve?" gray metropolis "-as we know to our Why cavil about the dye in Lilian's eyes, cost. How shrill, and sharp, and bracing or the dimples in Lilian's check? Why it is! The keen wind whistles through mar by our crooked formulas the perfect stanza! symmetry of spontaneous life? There is the spring out yonder with its golden daffodils, and here are we who have been born into the midst of it is it not enough? Let us bask in its sunshine, if you please, and so, ere the budding branches yellow, we too will grow ripe and ruddy and mellow-fit for the marriage-feast of the gods.

-

"Oh! rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more."

VOL. XLIV.-NO. IV,

every

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ODE TO THE NORTH-EAST WIND.

"Welcome, wild North-easter!
Shame it is to see
Odes to every zephyr;

Ne'er a verse to thee.
Welcome, black North-easter!
O'er the German foam;
O'er the Danish moorlands,
From thy frozen home.
Tired we are of summer,
Tired of gaudy glare,

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