much justified in such a mode of speech, as when we speak of the " deep and unfathomable powers of the universe," as the ultimate basis of our poetical emotions.

But though all things, when metaphysically analysed, must be admitted to be involved in mystery, the human mind, in its ordinary moods, is little addicted to this subtle and fruitless process of investigation. In the practical details of our existence, the mystery that overhangs them, never occurs to our imaginations. Whether it be from instinct, or from a long familiarity that supplies its place, we take appearances upon trust, and act and feel in regard to them under the impression of a popular belief, amounting to a most perfect assurance, that they are, in fact and essence, precisely such as our senses represent them. When we gaze upon a rich landscape, or a human form of surpassing beauty; or when we witness an admirable action, the emotions which any of these objects excite, derive none of their power from their mysterious origin. This is a subtle topic to which our minds never think of adverting. To us, there is no mystery in the impressions made upon us. The sentiment of admiration or of moral approbation is clear, distinct, and to every practical intent and purpose, perfectly intelligible. The case is precisely the same, when objects come before us in the form of poetical representation. The purpose of poetry is not (as the sticklers for mystery would persuade us,) to throw the mind into new and undefinable states of being; and if it had the wish, it wants the power: all that it can do is, to call up our familiar emotions in a state of higher excitement than the ordinary details of life produce. This it accomplishes by presenting us with fictitious objects, which our imagination adopts as realities; and so far is any thing like mystery from being a necessary ingredient in these fanciful creations, that all their excellence and power (whether they aim at representation of external nature, or the developement of human passions) consist in exciting images and feelings so defined and distinct, that we become, as it were, actual spectators and actors in the scenes to which they refer. The business of the poet is to delight and interest the mind, not to bewilder it; and it may be laid down as an undeviating rule, that all his pictures will produce their destined effects, precisely in the inverse ratio of their vagueness.

We have dwelt at some length upon this topic, because we really consider it of some importance to direct the attention of our readers to the empirical pretensions of the professors and disciples of this school, to exclusive taste and genius, and to the degradation, which must befal our literature, if their flimsy ravings should be permanently incorporated with it. In the observations above offered, we by no means intend to assert that in no case can poetical effect be heightened and dignified by

mysterious associations. There are majestic appearances in eternal nature, which at once direct our minds to the contemplation of "the great unknown," of whose power they are the symbols. There are trains of meditative abstraction, leading to sublime conjectures and appalling doubts upon our final destinies, in which the poet's visions catch a glorious awe from the darkness that surrounds them. In these and similar instances, we fully admit the sacred influence of mystery, in the most extensive meaning of the word :-what we protest against is, the perverse doctrine, that, because it is a powerful poetical agent, it must be the fundamental and only one; and that such is the constitution of our nature, that we can never be truly delighted, except by what we cannot comprehend.

We are aware that these opinions may give offence to some, but our respect for our native literature, and our anxiety that it should long retain its old masculine character of energy and nature, and rational enthusiasm, compel us to exclaim against the modern efforts to enfeeble and debase it. The effects are already visible in the published reveries of a notorious fraternity of inland versifiers, and not less so in the apologetic effusions of their misguided disciples. The latter appear, on the whole, to be much farther gone; and when we listen to their ravings, we scarcely know whether most to pity or to envy them. They are decidedly wild upon the subject of their favourite theories; but then their delirium, by their own account, is attended by so many redeeming ecstasies, that a return to reason would, we fear, only prove to them an irretrievable calamity. We can collect from them, that their gentle souls are endowed with innumerable mystical instincts, for which they find provided around them as many visionary sources of gratification. The lowliest objects in nature teem with "sanctities" and "consecrations," and " venerablenesses" and "unearthly reminiscences." To them a pigsty is holy ground. They can prostrate themselves in soulexalting adoration before an inscrutable deity, and discover volumes of eternal truth in the sublime provincialisms of pedlars and leech-catchers. Their sympathy with idiots is extraordinary and unbounded. A ragged coat importuning for a penny, is the beau ideal of created beings-a lounge in the precincts of a parish workhouse suggests trains of as lofty musing as a walk in the groves of Academus. They go forth with their souls so attuned to poetic rapture, that the most vulgar touch can awaken the sweetest strains. Just like this barrel-organ beneath our window, which, while we write, is discoursing a most sentimental ditty, in despite of the coarse and awkward hand of the weatherbeaten old tar that grinds it. Surely they must be happy, if to be rich in resources can make them so; for while Old England can supply them with a vagrant, or a stump of

rotten thorn, or a pool of ditch-water, to administer to their mys→ tical necessities, they can never want subjects of profound and ecstatic contemplation.

This is what comes from imitating the German habit of holding "conversations with the air." When we commenced, we proposed to have said a good deal more upon these matters, particularly upon Schlegel's discoveries in Shakspeare, and his critical theory of the "seminal idea" of every work of art; but (the periodical writer's old excuse) the want of present limits obliges us to defer our remarks to some future occasion.

ENGLISH GENEALOGY.-SUNDAY.

"I am no herald to enquire of men's pedigrees; it sufficeth me if I know their virtues." SIDNEY. "Sunday must needs be an excellent institution, since the very breaking of it is the support of half the villages round town." BONNEL THORNTON.

If it were possible to trace back the current of an Englishman's blood to its early fountains, what a strange compound would the mass present! What a confusion and intermingling of subsidiary streams from the Britons, Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans; amalgamating with minor contributions from undiscoverable sources, mocking the chemist's power to analyse, and almost bewildering imagination to conceive! Being myself "no tenth transmitter of a foolish face," I have sometimes maliciously wished that a bona fide, genuine, scrupulously-accurate family tree, shooting its branches up into the darkness of antiquity, could be displayed before some of our boasters of high descent and genealogical honours. Heavens! how would it vary from their own emblazoned parchment and vellum records! What confusion of succession— what scandal thrown upon Lady Barbaras and Lady Bridgets, all immaculate in their time-what heraldic bars in noble scutcheons, ancient and modern, from the now first-detected intrigues of chaplains, captains, pages, and serving-men, with their frail mistresses, whose long stomachers, stuck up in the picturegallery of the old Gothic hall, look like so many insurance-plates against the fire of Cupid's unlawful torch! Strange that there should be a limit to this pride of ancestry! If it be glorious to trace our family up to Edward the First, it should be still more so to ascend to Edward the Confessor; yet pride seldom mounts higher than the first illustrious name, the first titled or celebrated progenitor, whom it chooses to call the founder of the family. The haughtiest vaunter of high pedigree and the honours of unbroken descent, from the time of William the Conqueror, would probably weep with shame at being enabled to follow his name three hundred years farther back, through a succession of ploughmen, mechanics, or malefactors. As it cannot be denied that all families

are, in point of fact, equally ancient, the distinction consists in possessing records to prove a certain succession; and even this, it appears, ceases to be a boast beyond a certain point. Fantastical vanity! which, while it cannot deny to the beggar at the gate the privilege of being equally descended from Adam and Eve, rests its own claim to superiority upon being enabled to prove a fiftieth part of the same antiquity, struts, like the jay in the fable, in others' finery, and piques itself upon the actions of ancestors, instead of its own. Give me the man, who is an honour to his titles; not him whose titles are his honour!

But, if an Englishman be such an heterogeneous compound as to his personal composition, he has the consolation of knowing, that his language is, at least, equally confused and intermingled with Teutonic, Celtic, and classical derivations. Let us consider, for instance, the hebdomadary (as Dr. Johnson would call it,) or the days of the week, named after the Sun, the Moon, Tuisco, Woden or Odin, Thor, Freya, and Saturn; four Scandinavian or northern deities, three Pagan gods worshipped in the south, and not one Christian sponsor! Let the reader lift up the curtain of time, and taking a hasty glimpse of the last ten or twenty centuries, suffer his imagination to wander amid the scenes and associations suggested by the enumeration we have just made. Perched on the crags of rocks and mountains, and frowning at the rolling clouds and snow-storms that lour beneath, he will mark the gigantic heroes of the north; the warriors of Ossian will stalk gloomily before him; he will roam through the five hundred and forty halls of Thor's palace, till he find him seated on his throne with his terrific wife Freya by his side, and in his hand the gigantic hammer of which he has read in the Runic poetry; and finally, he will ascend into the Scandinavian elysium, or palace of Valhalla, where he will behold the beatified warriors drinking mead out of the skulls of their enemies, administered by the fair hands of the Valkyrie, those virgin Houris of the north, blessed with perpetual youth and never-fading beauty. Turning from the appalling sublimity of these cold, desolate, and warlike regions, let his fancy revel in the rich and sunny luxuriance of Grecian landscape, awakening from their long sleep all the beautiful realities and classical fictions connected with the glorious god of the Sun, the Apollo of the poets, the patron deity of Delphi and of Delos. How beautiful is the morning! Slowly rising above the mountains of Argos, the sun shoots a golden bloom over the undimpled waters of the Egean and the sea of Myrtos, gilding every height of the Cycladean Islands, as if the very hills had caught fire to do honour to the quinquennial festival of Apollo, now celebrating at Delos. See! in every direction the green ocean is studded with the white sails of barks (like daisies in the grass) hastening to the ceremony from Attica, Boeotia, and Thessaly; from Lesbos and Crete;

from Ionia and the coasts of Agiatic Greece. As they approach, their crews are seen doing reverence to the sun, and the faint dulcet sound of flutes and hautboys melts along the wave. But what stately vessel is that hurrying from the east, whose numerous rowers make the waters sparkle with their gilded oars? It is the Paralos, or sacred bark of Athens. Hark! what a high and swelling symphony pours from the numerous band on board;she approaches the shore of Delos, whose inhabitants flock to the beach, and as the band, and dancers, and choristers, debark, they are compelled, by immemorial usage, to rehearse their lessons, and chaunt their new hymn to Apollo. Other boats have now landed their crews in various parts of the island, and as they advance towards the temple with music, dancing, and singing, behold! the priests of Apollo, and a long procession of choristers, descending from Mount Cynthus, wind along the banks of the Inopus, chaunting the ancient hymns composed by Homer and Hesiod when they visited the island. As, with their right hands pointed to the sun, the whole population celebrate the praises of Apollo, every face is lighted up with enthusiasm and joy; and while the air is loaded with the melody of pipes, timbrels, and lutes, and the nobler harmony of human voices, the god of day, slowly ascending in cloudless magnificence, seems, with his lidless eye of fire, to smile with complacency upon the homage of his worshippers.

Let me stop while I can, Mr. Editor, for I have got astride upon my favourite hobby-horse, and if I am suffered to proceed, I shall gallop to every province of Greece, and visit every scene of jubilee, from the great Olympic Games to the Feast of Adonis, which the Syracusan gossips of Theocritus were so anxious to witness. Suffice it that a slight sketch has been attempted of a Sun-day among the people of Delos. Let us see how it has been celebrated by other nations. In Hebrew, the word Sabbath signifies rest; and the Jews fixed it on the Saturday, the last day of the week, to commemorate the completion of the work of creation, and the reposing of the Lord. It was not distinguished by a mere cessation from labour, but was enlivened by every species of rejoicing, they who took the most pleasure deeming themselves the most devout; and, amid a variety of puerile and superstitious ceremonies, they were particularly enjoined to lie longer in bed on that morning. If it were allowable to reverse the profane jest of the pork-lover, who wished to be a Jew, that he might have the pleasure of eating pork and sinning at the same time, I should be tempted to express a similar desire for the contemporaneous comfort of lying in bed and performing a religious duty. The Sunday, or Christian Sabbath, was appropriated to the first day of the week, in eternal remembrance of the resurrection of Christ; but was not strictly solemnized as a period of cessation from all business until about the year 321, when Constantine ordered its