behind him not to be extinguished but with the whole world; which, as i. is now too little for his praises, so might have been, too, for his conquests, if the short line of his human life could have been stretched out to the extent of his immortal designs?

Ir was a very proper answer to him who asked, Why any man should be delighted with beauty? that it was a question that none but a blind man could ask; since any beautiful object doth so much attract the sight of all men, that it is in no man's power not to be pleased with it. Nor can any aversion or malignity towards the object irreconcile the eyes from looking upon it; as a man who hath an envenomed and mortal hatred towards another who hath a graceful and beautiful person, cannot hinder his eye from being delighted to behold that person, though that delight is far from going to the heart; as no man's malice towards an excellent musician can keep his ear from being pleased with his music. No man can ask how or why men came to be delighted with peace, but he who is without natural bowels; who is deprived of all those affections, which can only make life pleasant to him. Peace is that harmony in the state, that health is in the body. No honour, no profit, no plenty, can make him happy who is sick with a fever in his blood, and with defluxions and aches in his joints and bones; but health restored gives a relish to the other blessings, and is very merry without them. No kingdom can flourish or be at ease in which there is no peace; which only makes men dwell at home, and enjoy the labour of their own hands, and improve all the advantages which the air, the climate, and the soil administers to them; and all which yield no comfort where there is no peace. God himself reckons health the greatest blessing he can bestow upon mankind, and peace the greatest comfort and ornament he can confer upon states; which are a multitude of men gathered together. They who delight most. in war are so ashamed of it, that they pretend to desire nothing but peace-that their heart is set upon nothing else. When Cæsar was engaging all the world in war, he wrote to Tully, "There was nothing worthier of an honest man than to have contention with nobody." It was the highest aggravation that the prophet could find out in the description of the greatest wickedness, that "The way of peace they knew not;" and the greatest punishment of all their crookedness and perverseness was, that "They should not know peace." A greater curse cannot befall the most wicked nation than to be deprived of peace. There is nothing of real and substantial comfort in this world but what is the product of peace; and whatsoever we may lawfully and innocently take delight in, is the fruit and effect of peace. The solemn service of God, and performing our duty to him in the service of regular devotion, which is the greatest business of our life, and in which we ought to take most delight, is the issue of peace. War breaks all that order, interrupts all that devotion, and even extinguishes all that zeal, which peace had kindled in us; lays waste the dwelling-place of God as well as of man; and introduces and propagates opinions and practice as much against heaven as against earth, and erects a deity that delights in nothing but cruelty and blood. Are we pleased with the enlarged commerce and society of large and opulent cities, or with the retired pleasures of the country? Do we love stately palaces, and noble houses, or take delight in pleasant groves and woods, or fruitful gardens, which teach and instruct nature to produce and bring forth more fruits, and flowers, and plants, than her own store can supply her with? All this we owe to peace, and the dissolution of this peace disfigures all this beauty, and in a short time covers and buries all this order and delight in ruin and rubbish. Finally, have we any con

ON PEACE.

31

tent, satisfaction, and joy, in the conversation of each other, in the knowledge and understanding of those arts and sciences, which more adorn mankind, than all those buildings and plantations do the fields and grounds on which they stand? Even this is the blessed effect and legacy of peace; and war lays our natures and manners as waste as our gardens and our habitations; and we can as easily preserve the beauty of the one, as the integrity of the other, under the cursed jurisdiction of drums and trumpets.

"If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men," was one of the primitive injunctions of Christianity, Rom. xii. 18; and comprehends not only particular and private men, (though no doubt all gentle and peaceable nations are most capable of Christian precepts, and most affected with them,) but kings and princes themselves. St. Paul knew well, that the peaceable inclinations and dispositions of subjects could do little good, if the sovereign princes were disposed to war; but if they desire to live peaceably with their neighbours, their subjects cannot but be happy. And the pleasure that God himself takes in that temper needs no other manifestation, than the promise our Saviour makes to those who contribute towards it, in his Sermon upon the Mount, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God," Matt. v. 9. Peace must needs be very acceptable to him, when the instruments towards it are crowned with such a full measure of blessing; and it is no hard matter to guess whose children they are, who take all the pains they can to deprive the world of peace, and to subject it to the rage and fury and desolation of war. of so many hundred years, we should hardly think it possible that If we had not the woful experience tend to embrace the gospel of peace, should be so unconcerned in the obligation and effects of it; and when God looks upon it as the greatest blessing he can pour men, who predown upon the heads of those who please him best and observe his commands, "I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid," Lev. xxvi. 6, that men study nothing more than how to throw off and deprive themselves and others of this his precious bounty; as if we were void of all natural reason, as well as without the elements of religion; for nature itself disposes us to a love of society, which cannot be preserved without peace. tacle full of horror, but a whole kingdom on fire must be a prospect much more terrible; and such is every kingdom in war, where nothing flourishes but rapine, A whole city on fire is a specblood, and murder, and the faces of all men are pale and ghastly, out of the sense of what they have done, or of what they have suffered, or are to endure. The reverse of all this is peace, which in a moment extinguishes all that fire, binds up all the wounds, and restores to all faces their natural vivacity and beauty. We cannot make a more lively representation and emblem to ourselves of hell, than by the view of a kingdom in war; where there is nothing to be seen but destruction and fire, and the discord itself is a great part of the torment; nor a more sensible reflection upon the joys of heaven, than as it is all quiet and peace, and where nothing is to be discerned but consent and harmony, and what is amiable in all the circumstances of it. And, as far as we may warrantably judge of the inhabitants of either climate, they who love and cherish discord among men, and take delight in war, have large mansions provided for them in that region of faction and disagreement; so we may presume, that they who set their hearts upon peace in this world, and labour to promote it in their several stations amongst all men, and who are instruments to prevent the breach of it amongst princes and states, or to renew it when it is broken, have infallible title to a place and mansion in heaven; where there is only peace in that perfection that all other blessings are comprehended in it, and a part of it.

193.-AUTUMN.

SPENSER, the great master of personification, thus paints the genius of the season:--
Then came the Autumn all in yellow clad,

As though he joyed in his plenteous store,

Laden with fruits that made him laugh, full glad
That he had banish'd hunger, which to-fore

Had by the belly oft him pinched sore:

Upon his head a wreath, that was enroll'd
With ears of corn of every sort he bore;

And in his hand a sickle he did hold,

To reap the ripen'd fruits the which the earth had yold.

One who had a rare talent for imitation has caught the quaint phraseology of the elder poets with something like accuracy;—but the modern antique is palpable:—

When Autumn bleak and sun-burnt do appear,

With his gold hand gilting the falling leaf,

Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year,

Bearing upon his back the riped sheaf;

When all the hills with woody seed is white,

When levin fires and lemes do meet from far the sight:

When the fair apple, rudde as even sky,

Do bend the tree unto the fructile ground,
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye,

Do dance in air and call the eyne around;

Then, be the even foul, or even fair,

Methinks my hearte's joy is stained with some care.

CHATTERTON.

Rich and golden as the fruits of Autumn, are the following stanzas of one of the true poets of times not long past:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness !

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

find

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad
Thee sitting careless on a granary-floor,

may

Thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by à cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue ;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

KEATS.

After this beautiful imagery, the blank verse of another poet of the same period sounds somewhat prosaic;-but it has its charms:

VOL. II.

Nay, William, nay, not so! the changeful year

In all its due successions to my sight

Presents but varied beauties, transient all,

All in their season good. These fading leaves,
That with their rich variety of hues

Make yonder forest in the slanting sun

So beautiful, in you awake the thought

Of winter-cold, drear winter, when these trees,

Each like a fleshless skeleton shall stretch

Its bare brown boughs; when not a flower shall spread
Its colours to the day, and not a bird

Carol its joyaunce,—but all nature wear
One sullen aspect, bleak and desolate,
To eye, ear, feeling, comfortless alike.
To me their many-coloured beauties speak
Of times of merriment and festival,
The year's best holiday: I call to mind
The school-boy days, when in the falling leaves
I saw with eager hope the pleasant sign
Of coming Christmas; when at morn I took
My wooden kalendar, and counting up
Once more its often-told account, smooth'd off
Each day with more delight the daily notch.
To you the beauties of the autumnal year
Make mournful emblems, and you think of man
Doom'd to the grave's long winter, spirit-broken,
Bending beneath the burthen of his years,
Sense-dull'd and fretful, “full of aches and pains,"
Yet clinging still to life. To me they show
The calm decay of nature, when the mind
Retains its strength, and in the languid eye
Religion's holy hope kindles a joy

That makes old age look lovely. All to you
Is dark and cheerless; you in this fair world
See some destroying principle abroad,
Air, earth, and water, full of living things,
Each on the other preying; and the ways
Of man, a strange, perplexing labyrinth,

D

Where crimes and miseries, each producing each,
Render life loathsome, and destroy the hope
That should in death bring comfort. Oh, my friend,
That thy faith were as mine! that thou couldst see
Death still producing life, and evil still

Working its own destruction; couldst behold

The strifes and troubles of this troubled world

With the strong eye that sees the promised day

Dawn through this night of tempest! All things then

Would minister to joy; then should thine heart

Be heal'd and harmonized, and thou wouldst feel
God always, every where, and all in all.

SOUTHEY.

SHELLEY, the great master of harmony, has one of his finest lyrics for Autumn:-
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

And the year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,

For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling ;

Come, months, come away,

Put on white, black, and grey,

Let your light sisters play

Ye follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

Who has not felt that Autumn is a mournful type of human life? Who ever expressed the feeling more tenderly than SHAKSPERE?

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.