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ing slowly fell upon it; to look upon it every day, and wake up in the night, and hear its ceaseless voice, — this was enough.

"I think in every quiet season now, still do those waters roll and leap and roar and tumble all day long; still are the rainbows spanning them a hundred feet below; still, when the sun is on them, do they shine and glow like molten gold; still, when the day is gloomy, do they fall like snow, or seem to crumble away like the front of a great chalk-cliff, or roll down the rock like dense white smoke: but always does the mighty stream appear to die as it comes down; and always from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, which has haunted this place with the same dread solemnity since darkness brooded on the deep, and that first flood before the Deluge — light-came rushing on creation at the word of God.

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Martin Chuzzlewit.-Pictures from Italy.-First Carol.-Tiny Tim. -The Chimes. -Cricket on the Hearth.

"O lovely voices of the sky,

Which hymned the Saviour's birth!
Are ye not singing still on high,

Ye that sang, 'Peace on earth'?

To us yet speak the strains

Wherewith, in times gone by,
Ye blessed the Syrian swains,

O voices of the sky!"

MRS. HEMANS.

"Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good-will toward men."-LUKE ii. 14.

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OLLOWING his "Notes," on his return from America, Mr. Dickens wrote a novel called "Martin Chuzzlewit," which, like "The Notes," created great excitement

on this side of the water; and they who had been fulsome in their adulation of the novelist were extremely indignant that he should repay, as they felt, their kind welcome with abuse and sarcasm. This book appeared in numbers during 1844. A writer in "The Illustrated London News" thinks that Mr. Dickens's

"method of composing and publishing his tales in monthly parts, or sometimes in weekly parts, aided the experience of this immediate personal companionship between the writer and the reader. It was just as if we received a letter or a visit, at regular intervals, from a kindly observant gossip, who was in the habit of watching the domestic life of the Nicklebys or the Chuzzlewits, and who would let us know from time to time how they were going on. There was no assumption, in general, of having a complete and finished history to deliver: he came at fixed periods, merely to report what he had perceived since his last budget was opened for us. The course of his narrative seemed to run on, somehow, almost simultaneously with the real progress of events, only keeping a little behind, so that he might have time to write down whatever happened, and to tell us. This periodical and piece-meal form of publication, being attended by a fragmentary manner of composition, was not at all favorable to the artistic harmony of his work as a whole. But few persons ever read any of Dickens's stories as a whole for the first time, because every one was eager to enjoy the parts as they were printed; going on a twelve-month or twenty months in due succession, and growing in popularity as the pile of them increased. The obvious effect was to inspire all his constant readers-say a million or two-with a sense of habitual dependence on their contemporary, the man Charles Dickens, for a continued supply of the entertainment which he alone

could furnish.

He was personally indispensable to

them, as a favorite actor might be to the inveterate playgoers of a former age, who lived upon their Garrick or their Kemble. If each of his stories had appeared complete in three octavo volumes, with the lapse of a couple of years between one work and another, the feeling of continual dependence on the living author. would have been less prevalent among us.

"But it was not by dint of this mechanical contrivance of publishing, and the corresponding talent of quick and manifold invention, presenting novel scenes and incidents, with a crowd of new figures, in each section of a story, that Charles Dickens obtained his immense command over the minds of the English people. Other novelists have shown the same power of inventing a multiplicity of incidents to strike the fancy, and filling every corner with countless persons or personal names, intended to represent the diversities of human life and character. The result is bewildering and fatiguing, if we should attempt to read any of those second-rate serial novels as, a connected story. They found acceptance in monthly morsels; there was some vitality in their scattered limbs: but, when the body is put together, we find it is dead, so that it lies shut between the boards of the bound volume, as though enclosed in a coffin, extinct to the end of time. Such would have been the fate, likewise, of these stories of Dickens's, if he had been merely a writer of extraordinary talent and

skill; but he was also a man of genius, let us say, a prose poet. The genius of the poet, in which term we beg leave to include that of the genuine humorist, who is equally the man of imagination, cannot die, and be shut up in a coffin, and so buried and forgotten. Try to dispose of your Shakspeare in that manner! The forms of poetry may pass out of fashion; they may change or perish; they may have been imperfect at their best, for they were borrowed from the custom of the day but the spirit of poetry is immortal. And we reckon true humor as a peculiar exhibition of this spirit; and we esteem Dickens, next after Shakspeare, as the greatest of English humorists, that is to say, with reference to literary history, the greatest of all humorists; for none of the foreigners, ancient or modern,- Aristophanes, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, or Jean Paul,

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have come near Shakspeare in this faculty, though possessing it in a large measure. That none of the English humorists of the eighteenth century' - not even Swift or Fielding, much less Smollett or Sterne — is to be compared with Dickens in this respect, we believe Thackeray himself would have been ready to admit. Hogarth, if the two arts of painting and novelwriting allow their comparison, may be deemed a precursor of Dickens. Many of our poets, from Chaucer onwards, we cannot, indeed, name Milton or Wordsworth, but Robert Burns and Walter Scott on the north side of the Tweed, - have been richly endowed with

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