CUES FROM ALL QUARTERS. I. Once a Child. I HAD been looking in the morning at Lough's fine recumbent statue of Robert Southey-now laid out in white marble, within Crosthwaite Church. The impression of the old laureate's pinched features, and keen time-tried sorrowworn aspect, gave fresh force and feeling to those lines of his, which I happened to light upon in the evening, while turning over, with random listlessness, his miscellaneous poems,those tenderly retrospective lines, written by him in 1796, and headed, "On My Own Miniature Picture, taken at Two Years of Age." Whatever contrast was suggested to the poet, then in the first flush of earliest manhood, between himself at three or four and twenty, and at tiny two,-how pathetically, to my remembrances, that contrast was now reinforced, by glancing at once from the monument of an over-worked veteran to the miniature of a little child. And I was once like this! that glowing cheek Smooth as the level lake, when not a breeze The look of Infancy and Innocence. I search myself in vain, and find no trace Of what I was: those lightly arching lines Dark and o'erhanging now; and that sweet face The more than forty years that had elapsed between the writing of these lines and the decease that called for that monument, could not but add strength, and new significance, and salience, to every feature in the contrast. There is no end to the illustrations that might be given of a like kind. Look at Watson Gordon's portrait of Sir Walter Scott, taken two years before his death: an old man, leaning on his staff-with dimmed, care-worn eyes, and a sad look as of paralysis about the mouth. Then look at the miniature that had been taken of him at Bath, some fifty-and-five years before, when little Walter counted his five summers of earthly life—a child with long-flowing chesnut hair, in a scarlet dress, with deep open collar-the outline of the face wonderfully like what it was to the last; and yet how different. Some dozen years before he died Mr. Leigh Hunt attained his "grand climacteric," and wrote his Autobiography. In that work we come across the following passage, in its kind a parallel passage to the Southey retrospect. "The other day I found two songs of that period"-he is referring to the penultimate decade of the eighteenth century, 1780-90-" on |