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an old observer upon men and things often remark, that of all mortals who partook in any of its forms of the dangerous habit of thinking, natural philosophers were the most cheerful and contented. He used to add that they were a trifle more conceited than the rest; but then, if this sometimes moves the spleen of others who persist in drawing a steady line of distinction between a philosopher and a philosophical apparatus, it only increases the stock of their own felicity. He placed the naturalist at the head of his scale; the poet he was accustomed to represent as the most miserable, and the most to be pitied of all intellectual operatives.

But these out-of-door people, whom we have described as having so simple and uniform a notion of library life, are still more in fault in another particular. They mostly look at reading and meditating as without doubt and at all times the most quiet and peaceable employment a mortal could be engaged in. For themselves, they defer it till their chair-days, or till the rheumatism shall keep them at home. They have associated books and spec tacles together, and do not intend to read much till they can have the assistance of those sagacious appendages, which appear so especially constructed for the reception of wisdom. They would be surprised to hear that a man may sow his "wild oats" in this region, which they are accustomed to regard as a perfect specimen of still life-may sow them as plentifully, and reap from them as abundant a crop of turmoil, and penitence, and regret, as in any other field imaginable where the same sort of culture proceeds that culture where to sow is pleasant, but no man willingly tarries for the harvest. In order to show this, and to give, at the same time, a specimen of one class of the intellectual character, we shall briefly sketch out the early progress of a friend of ours; one of those who, though they never have an adventure in their lives, or a reverse of fortune, or could extract from their whole outward and visible history materials for a single story, searce for an anecdote, do yet contrive, by the incessant whirling and agitation of their own thoughts, to make a very troubled passage out of a most unnoticeable existence.

This race of men has doubtless been

found here and there in the world, as long as there has been a world; yet, nevertheless, it is so much more rife in these modern times, that it may be considered as characteristic of them. It may be described as a race of speculative men, in whom a habit of reflection grows up accompanied by no active pursuit, and applied to no practical purpose. How the philosopher, whose business it is, as Adam Smith tells us, to explain every thing, will account for the vicious excess of a speculative habit which marks our age, when contrasted with the times of classic antiquity, we do not know. Whether it is that our mode of education leads the studious youth to a more complete abstinence from physical and robust exercises, and thus consigns him to a life of thought and a merely intellectual existence; or whether the crowded state of all professions has rendered the entrance into a steady path of profitable head-work more and more difficult, and therefore driven back many an aspirant after professional honours into those always open fields of cogitation, where no crowds jostle, and where no precursor can bar the way; or whether we must look to a still graver cause, and trace this effect to the change which has taken place, through the advent of the Christian religion, in the very material of thought, in the very character of philosophy, which is now brought into contact with a religion of so much higher claims and profounder character-one that cannot even be deserted but in gravest mood, and with sense of perilous responsibility; whether it is owing to any or all of these causes, it is certainly an indisputable fact that such a malady has appeared, or rather spread amongst us. And though the mortal on whom it has seized may be quite useless to himself, he may afford matter of description very useful to others. Perhaps the sketch we are about to give may not be altogether undeserving the attention of those who are curious as well as zealous in the cause of education. If there are certain limits beyond which the exercise of severe thought degenerates into the vain toil of an overwearied spirit, it is well those limits should be foreseen; and if, furthermore, it be true (as we suspect to be the case) that reflection, pursued apart from the social passions and the active energies of life, is inadequate to attain for us sure and steady principles of conduct, this also is a truth which it is still more important should be recognised.

We knew Howard, the subject of the following sketch-we knew him intimately. He was indeed of a peculiarly open and candid disposition, and at once revealed to you whatever was passing in the innermost recesses of his mind. Yet he was not social in the same degree that he was frank and confiding. When in your company he would let you see, without the least distrust or reserve, the very working of his mind, in all its strength and weakness, and in all that inconsistency of purpose and conclusion which invariably attends upon men of over quick feelings, and which, for their own credit's sake, they may learn to conceal, but seldom in reality to overmaster or prevent he would do this naturally without egotism, and seemingly without designing it; but, though he was thus genial and open in your com pany, he was not apt to seek your society. He would forget you if you suffered him. Our friendship was therefore warm, but it was intermittent. We always met with ardour, but long intervals would occur between the periods of our intimacy. We knew Howard, we say, well, and could, on the strength of our reminiscence, have ventured on the following narrative; but being able, as we shall show, to use his own language, we of course prefer to do so. We had lost sight of our friend for a long time. Going into the Court of Chancery one day, not by chance, (would it were!) but in the woeful character of suitor, a voice caught our ear which seemed familiar. Yes, there was our friend, under wig and gown, droning away before the Vice-Chancellor, with all the complacency in the world, as if dulness and he had shaken hands, and were on the best possible terms. We waited till he chose to conclude, (two mortal hours!) and then, as the court rose at the moment that he was good enough to sit down, we presented ourselves to his disengaged optics. A most friendly shake of the hand testified his recognition, and this was immediately followed by a cordial, nay, a most peremptory invitation to go home and dine with him that day. He should be quite alone-it would give him so great, so rare a pleasure

- he must not be refused. Accordingly, so it was. His carriage took us to a house in -- Square, and after an excellent dinner was concluded, and as we sat each in his arm-chair, drawn three-quarters round towards the fire, Howard thus referred to old times, and revived the period of his youth. We do not mean that he poured forth his reminiscences in exactly the continuous style we here present them: we were not ourselves quite such docile listeners as this would imply; but with the exception of our own part in the conversation, which is here entirely suppressed, and some few interruptions and digressions, the following is a very fair report of the retrospect our friend took of his early career.

"I cannot tell you," he said, " how strange an effect your presence has upon me. It seems to change the whole current of my ideas; it carries me back so completely to past times, that not only can I talk of nothing else, but I seem to talk of these in a different language and spirit than are now habitual to me. Bear with me if I am garrulous. Forgive it! forgive! Be assured that you are bestowing an exquisite pleasure-a pleasure that I know not the second person on earth who could have given me. How often have you encountered me when I was labouring under some fever of the spirit! - how often have you administered sage counsel!-nay, was there not one occasion on which you administered help when the season of counsel was passed, and dashing the fatal instrument from my hand, saved me from the desperate and irrevocable act? How can I refrain, meeting you thus suddenly, and after so long an interval, from conversing upon past times, and that devious track which my youth pursued? The wildest rake never spent his energies more wastefully than I have mine; but if the rake, when reformed, will sometimes congratulate himself in that knowledge of the world which his wildness procured for him, I think that I, with somewhat better reason, may console myself for wasted years and miserable hours, by recalling that knowledge of the intellectual life which my own intellectual wanderings have purchased.

" I think when you first knew me, I was the poet of imagination all compact. It was not quite clear to me whether I should rise to great celebrity in my lifetime; but that I should secure a name with posterityeven now I blush at the recollectionI had no doubt whatever. There was nothing in the world worth a thought but authorship, and no authorship to be compared with poetry. The youth given over to the fascination of verse, and the delusion of fame, has been a subject of frequent description, whether compassionate or sarcastic, and the portrait has generally borne a strong resemblance to the original; for it has been drawn for the most part by those who might themselves, at one period of their lives, have sat for the picture. Sometimes a bitter self-derision, that seeks to resent itself on early follies, sometimes a lurking tenderness for past hopes and asp aspirations, will guide the pencil; and a subjectcontradictory in itself, is not unfairly treated in this contradictious humour. The young poet, amidst all his high and generous emotions and he is always generous to a folly-is in many respects ob. noxious to ridicule; and, what is worse, his quick sensibility makes him feel that he is so. An extreme sensitiveness, incompatible with a free and open intercourse with society, and which shrinks from that rude but wholesome rivalry which in the arena of life every where encounters us ;this, and an intense anxiety after a species of renown the most precarious and most disputable, present to us a character which, whatever points of interest it may reveal, is surely the most uneasy and discomfortable that ever mortal was called upon to sustain. Conscious of his own superiority, but uncertain what rank so ciety will award him, the youthful aspirant for the honours of the laurel is at once the proudest and the most timid, the loftiest and most dependent of the race. He tells us no truth, which, whether received or not, may be a truth nevertheless; he puts forth no lessons of practical wisdom, which, though neglected, may still be confessedly good and needful; his fate hangs on the sensibility of his readers. If we smile when he sighs, or sigh with weariness when we ought to smile, he is lost for ever-he has trod on air-he sinks and vanishes. It is his aim and his nature to cultivate

a delicacy of feeling, and a curious refinement of expression, which, though pleasing infinitely to himself, and in certain moods, and in less measure, to others also; yet oftentimes will sound very simple, strange, or extravagant when uttered aloud, man to man, in the broad light, and amidst the stir of this busy and hard-working world. He finds as one of the tribe has told us he finds his muse to be ' in crowds his shame, in solitude his boast.' From crowds he therefore recoils, to solitude he flies. There he nourishes, yet sometimes with fear and trembling, that passion for fame which thrives but too well under the shelter of secresy. He shrinks blushingly even from the gaze of the passing stranger whom he meets in his solitary walk; he was dreaming that very moment of the plaudits of an admiring society, which were already ringing in his ears. Amidst the ordinary transactions of life, in all that men call business, he feels himself an utter stranger-nerveless, helplesswith a painful repugnance to take his share in any thing that bears the appearance of struggle or collision, which is quite inexplicable to persons of robust and vigorous understandings. Lulled by the music of his verse, he loses, he foregoes all active energetic purpose. He can only think, and feel, and write. What is he, and of what use, if men will not listen and applaud? It has come to this pass with him, that the admiration of mankind -so hard to win, so hazardous to seek-can alone justify his else idle and unnecessary existence.

"Such a one was I. How vivid to my memory at this moment are those moody walks along green lanes which I used daily to take, courting as much of solitude as a residence in the neighbourhood of London could afford. With eyes directed to the ground, I paced slowly along, or else stopping before the hedge or the green bank, to observe some insect or the leaves of a plant, my thoughts would become implicated in the poetic theme on which I was engaged, and there I would stand, forgetful of all else, till I had fitted together to my satisfaction the words of some intractable verse. This done, I would start off with sudden alacrity; at such moments I would snap my fingers at the world as one who had found a trea

sure. Did a labouring man pass me in these rambles I could look him in the face with perfect freedom, or continue my meditations undisturbed; perchance he could even be made use of, and brought into my verse; but the annoyance it gave me to meet 1 any well-dressed persons, persons of the intelligent order of society, is what ↑ I suspect I could never make intelli. gible to you, who have been always a rational being. Conscious that I was : to them a subject of ridicule, yet feeling for all this that I was the giant and they the dwarfs, I was agitated by a mixture of pride, and resentment, 1 and shamefacedness, as I hurried ras pidly past them. I would go out of my way, change my course, dodge behind trees, to avoid the mere transit of a harmless stranger, who assuredly was quite unconscious of the disturbance he was creating. However, I used to say to myself, when my poem shall be published all will be made clear; my position in society will be understood; and I shall move on, not only in peace, but enjoying the profound respect of all men. That de portment which now provokes a smile, will be deemed quite appropriate in the author of. It will be scen that not for nothing have I walked apart, lost in thought.

"The fulness of time came, and my poem was published-well thou knowest with what startling effect ✓ upon the world. Not a single copy sold! It was duly advertised, and editors were favoured with its perusal gratuitously. Not a single word was written on it, good or bad! One does not quite suddenly give up the idea that one is a poet and has a genius; but this experiment was so very satisfactory, that at the end of a few months I had resigned for ever this very glorious and most lamentable delusion. I took a solemn farewell to poetry. Looking over my remaining manuscripts, I selected a few fragments, which still retained some merit in the eyes of their author; these, which consisted of mere scraps of loose paper, I placed within the leaves of a copy of the printed poem; the rest I consumed. The volume, thus additionally enriched for oblivion, I folded up in parchment, sealed, and deposited in an iron chest, where our family papers were kept. The whole of the impression besides, amounting to be

tween two and three hundred volumes, I ordered home from the publisher. Going out into the garden, I dug with my own hands a profound pit, and there I laid the new uncut volumes, arranging them in even piles just as regularly as they would have stood on a bookseller's counter. Then, with most vigorous handling of the spade, I

shovelled in the damp earth, and pressed it hard upon them. Thus I buried my poetic offspring, and turned again towards the world to seek what new it had to offer me.

"Nor did any one ever turn from a grave in sadder or more desolate con. dition than I from this mock burial. The passion even for poetic authorship, the wish to address one's-self to the world, or rather to that scattered audience of kindred minds that lie here and there commingled with the world, admits of a representation which would place it far on this side of the ridicu lous. Who is there of reflective mind, who, finding himself agitated by many thoughts and passions, does not grow desirous of giving them expression?

Yet it is not in the circle of friends and relatives that he finds an audience, nor is it to them that his sentiments have any peculiar reference: it is to man to all whom it may concernthat he wishes to speak, and amongst the multitude without must he find his listeners. Moreover, it is through the medium of books that such a one has been himself informed and prompted to thought, and therefore these present themselves to him as the natural channel for the transmission of ideas which are the response, as it were, that books have called forth from him. He runs to the press as his only fit organ of communication; and although the passion for fame or distinction can never be far distant from him who touches pen, and ventures upon authorship; yet he may, in the first instance, reach forward to that fatal instru

ment' with spontaneous eagerness, merely as his appropriate mode of intercourse with the world. Every reflective man may be set down as at heart an author, whether he has yielded or not to the seductive impulsewhether he has ever seen his name stare at him from a title-page, or has only recognised his anonymous offspring as it passed, unnoticed by any other eye, along the full tide of periodical literature. Some intention, though it may be most vague and remote, to write, mingles itself with the efforts of every man who from reading has been taught to think. For my own part, I found that in resigning all aim of authorship, I had resigned half the luxury of thought. I found, to my cost, how intimately the pleasure or purpose of literary enterprise had combined with my most solitary cogitations. I could still enjoy, I said to myself, those sentiments of which I wrote, without telling them to the world. Alas! when I reverted to them again, I was returning to a country which had been laid waste in my absence. The fleeting thought, why should I arrest or retain it? I had no longer to make it permanent in my verse. Every mood of my mind, every feeling, seemed now indeed smit with transciency, and to rush past into sudden oblivion-the record of my life was no longer to be kept the light and shifting sand would not bear my footmark-henceforth I should be, at each moment of my existence, as if I had never been till then. I re. member that even that love of nature, which seemed so distinct and independent a source of pleasure, proved to have been greatly enhanced, to have been partly constituted, by the habit or the effort of developing the varied senti ment in felicitous language. As I now took my solitary ramble along the river-side, those little points of observation as the shadow of the cloud or the motion of the bird-which once interested me keenly, were now valueless. There was no description to be written; they were no longer to be registered in my memory; nor was I concerned to find for what I saw or felt that apt expression, thatvery word, the seeking after and the dwelling upon which unconsciously re-acts upon our feelings, prolonging and deepening them. The fresh air was good, and the green bank was refreshing to the eye, and the shade of the tree was grateful, and the river by its motion and its brightness was a pleasant thing to look upon; but as to that vague and charming sentiment which used to hover over all-this was gone. And why should I make an effort to recall it? Its peculiarity and refinement were nothing now. I had no verse to make. What were these shadowy ecstasies of thought to me more than to any other man? Or why

should I prefer them now to any other the most homely elements of pleasur able existence ?

"At this time I do not think we were in the habit of frequently seeing each other. Indeed, I suspect thatat this utter failure, this complete bankruptcy in my literary adventure, I avoided very studiously all old acquaintances. You came upon me again about two years after, and you found me immersed in the profundities of philosophy. From poetry to metaphysics seems a great stride. But in reality it is not so. We are led into metaphysical lucubrations by those problems of thought which are most exciting of all, and most likely to attract the poetic temperament-the mysterious questions of free-will and fate, of immortality and the Divine nature. These directly conduct us unto what, without this connexion, would indeed be a scene of mere weariness and vexation. For myself, I seemed to have left the shore, and all sight of shore, and in some little cock-boat to be rising and falling amidst swelling waves, which hid all prospect except their own changeful and yet monotonous forms. Instead of labouring within a definite circle of thoughts, where not only some intelligible ideas can be mastered, but where knowledge is felt to be a sort of wealth, a possession for which men respect you, I had launched forth, regardless of every personal consideration of whatever description, and thrown my spirit loose and self-abandoned on a vast sea of subject, which I had no visual power to embrace or to overlook. Nor was this sort of philo. sophy enough, it seemed, to perplex and confound; but theories of society, and Utopian projects for the reconstruction of the world on an altogether better plan, were added to my labours. If I turned to survey the affairs of nations and of commonwealths, my thoughts were not of what men call politics: I cared for no party struggles, whether at home or abroad; my spirit rose far above those questions which concern our own times, or the government of our own country, or indeed any known government whatever: I was occupied with ideal forms of society was enquiring incessantly why the race of man, a race gifted with reason, should not carry into effect some scheme for its own happiness far different from

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