of the Lodge to keep up with the age-nay, Ben, to jog along a little in the rear: but say, O Watchman set in alabaster! what of the night? Benjamin replies, and makes his exit; and the Elder changes his key: Within those stolid and impassive outworks there beats a brave heart and warm; and if Benjamin were taken from me, then indeed should I be bereaved. If there are two living creatures who understand each other better than do Ben and I, it would gratify my curiosity to see them.-My pleasantry passes by him, as you observe, like an idle wind; and though it may secretly affright his staid propriety, it never disturbs his serenity. Once only did he ever dubiously regard me; it was when, in gardening operations, I declared myself almost a proselyte to the Wordsworthian theory of a sentient principle in plants: at what he thought and called the monstrous "faith, "that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes; infidelity, graven as in adamant, was so perspicuously the expression of his physiognomy, that, rather than endanger the issue of a writ De lunatico, at the suit of my servants, I suffer Benjamin to remain in un molested herbal heathenism. But we are deserting our Idol of the evening, without one praiseful or valedictory farewell. Be thine, O honored WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE! a lofty throne where all are kings!— anon of thee, Monarch of the Muses' Sons! And bless thee, darling Child, Mary avourneen! Look now, the sky is one wide smile, but chastened, for the glittering orbs are in adoration, could we but hear them. Or rather, is it not the Boundary of the Blest we see above us? and what we count as shining stars, are they not angels' eyes-bright, but full of pity as they gaze on a scene which the presence of their God does not gladden? Ay, therein lies the secret of the pensiveness of Night! Surely at this moment is God beautifying and hallowing the world with his blessing; and living things are breathing— scarcely breathing is the silent Earth-as conscious of the effluence of Heaven. A fond farewell, sweet Mary!- "Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered!" COLLOQUY IV. TWENTY MINUTES TALK ABOUT MILTON. "I am become A NAME: I am a part of all that I have met: Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades Ir would be a mode of procedure quite un-English, to enter upon several consecutive colloquies without commenting on the state of the weather. Moreover when, without violating Truth to gratify Patriotism, a compliment can be paid to the climate of his country, it is a Briton's duty to do so; for foreign calumnies upon our native skies are permitted to provoke undue contumely also from a people incontinently prone to grumble among themselves at much that invigorates their individual constitution and national. Touching that basely-traduced atmospherical production, called English weather, we owe an im |