to be the Lord's. And how much better off are we than the chosen people; their pillars were on earth, divine in their essence but subject doubtless to earthly perturbations and interferences; but our guiding light is in the heavens, towards which may we take earnest heed that we are journeying. 'Once on the raging seas I rode, The storm was loud, the night was dark; Deep horror then my vitals froze, Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem, It was the Star of Bethlehem ! It was my guide, my light, my all, Now safely moored, my perils o'er, The Star, the Star of Bethlehem !' SIR E. LANDSEER'S PICTURE 'THERE'S LIFE IN THE OLD DOG YET.' WE 1851. E have had several of Landseer's best pictures lately, but we are not likely soon to cry, 'Hold, enough!' The natural eye and heart is not easily wearied by nature and her true interpreters, be they poets, philosophers, or painters; the great point is to get nature, and then render her aright. It is, by the way, a new element in the fine arts, this setting famous pictures on their travels, and is on the whole a good one. We cheerfully adopt the peripatetic or to-and-fro doctrine thus far. A brisk circulation is the great thing in the body, natural, social, and commercial, keep things going, large and quick returns; and it is one proof of a higher organisation, or, to use the cant phrase, 'development' of the body politic, as it is of the individual animal, when there is a heart, and when it sends its life-giving stream swiftly round. Caterpillars, and dead, degraded, and somnolent nations have a local half-and-half sort of circulation, they want the one grand central organ; but lest our readers should mistake us, we don't think this organ in our body politic is London, though Wordsworth |