of affliction, from the tying down of the spirit to one melancholy idea.

It is the nature of tears of this kind, however strongly they may gush forth, to run into quiet waters at last. We cannot easily, for the whole course of our lives, think with pain of any good and kind person whom we have lost. It is the divine nature of their qualities to conquer pain and death itself; to turn the memory of them into pleasure; to survive with a placid aspect in our imaginations. We are writing, at this moment, just opposite a spot which contains the grave of one inexpressibly dear to us. We see from our window the trees about it, and the church-spire. The green fields lie around. The clouds are travelling over head, alternately taking away the sunshine and restoring it. The vernal winds, piping of the flowery summer-time, are nevertheless calling to mind the far distant and dangerous ocean, which the heart that lies in that grave had many reasons to think of. And yet the sight of this spot does not give us pain. So far from it, it is the existence of that grave which doubles every charm of the spot; which links the pleasures of our childhood and manhood together; which puts a hushing tenderness in the winds, and a patient joy upon the landscape; which seems to unite heaven and earth, mortality and immortality, the grass of the tomb and the grass of the green field, and gives a more maternal aspect to the whole kindness of nature. It does not hinder gaiety itself. Happiness was what it's tenant, through all her troubles, would have diffused. To diffuse happiness, and to enjoy it, is not only carrying on her wishes, but realizing her hopes; and gaiety, freed from it's only pollutions, malignity and want of sympathy, is but a child playing about the knees of it's mother.

The remembered innocence and endearments of a child stand us instead of virtues that have died older. Children have not exercised the voluntary offices of friendship; they have not chosen to be kind and good to us; nor stood by us, from conscious will, in the hour of adversity. But they have shared their pleasures and pains with us as well as they could: the interchange of good offices between us has, of necessity, been less mingled with the troubles of the world; the sorrow arising from their death is the only one, which we can associate with their memories. These are happy thoughts that cannot die. Our loss may always render them pensive; but they will not always be painful. It is a part of the benignity of Nature, that pain does not survive like pleasure, at any time; much less where the cause of it is an innocent one. The smile will remain reflected by memory; as the moon reflects the light upon us, when the sun has gone into heaven.

When writers like ourselves quarrel with earthly pain, (we mean writers of the same intentions, without implying, of course, any thing about abilities or otherwise) they are misunderstood if they are supposed to quarrel with pains of every sort. This would be idle and effeminate. They do not pretend indeed, that humanity might not wish, if it could, to be entirely free from pain; for it endeavours at all

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times to turn pain into pleasure, or at least to set off the one with the other; to make the former a zest, and the latter a refreshment. The most unaffected dignity of suffering does this; and if wise, acknowledges it. The greatest benevolence towards others, the most unselfish relish of their pleasures, even at it's own expense, does but look to encreasing the general stock of happiness, though content, if it could, to have it's identity swallowed up in that splendid contemplation, We are far from meaning that this is to be called selfishness. We are far indeed from thinking so, or of so confounding words. But neither is it to be called pain, when most unselfish; if disinterestedness be truly understood. The pain that is in it softens into pleasure, as the darker hue of the rainbow melts into the brighter. Yet even if a harsher line is to be drawn between the pain and pleasure of the most unselfish mind, (and ill health, for instance, may draw it), we should not quarrel with it, if it contributed to the general mass of comfort, and were of a nature which general kindliness could not avoid. Made as we are, there are certain pains, without which it would be difficult to conceive certain great and overbalancing pleasures. We may conceive it possible for beings to be made entirely happy; but in our composition, something of pain seems to be a necessary ingredient, in order that the materials may turn to as fine account as possible; though our clay, in the course of ages and experience, may be refined more and more. We may get rid of the worst earth, though not of earth itself.

Now the liability to the loss of children,-or rather what renders us sensible of it, the occasional loss itself,- -seems to be one of these necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. We do not mean that every body must lose one of his children, in order to enjoy the rest; or that every individual loss afflicts us in the same proportion. We allude to the deaths of infants in general. These might be as few as we could render them. But if none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or woman secured; and it will easily be conceived, what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose it's continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant, are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons, who, in one sense, retain it always; and they furnish their neighbours with the same idea. The other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.

"I sighed," says old Captain Bolton, "when I envied you the two-bonnie children, but I sigh, not now to call either the monk or the soldier mine own."Monastery, Vol. III. p. 341.

Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and our hopes. They are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination. Lastly, "of these are the kingdom of heaven." Wherever there is a province of that benevolent and all-accessible empire, whether on earth or elsewhere, such are the gentle spirits that must inhabit it. To such simplicity, or the resemblance of it, must they come. Such must be the ready confidence of their hearts, and creativeness of their fancy, And so ignorant must they be of the "knowledge of good and evil," losing their discernment of that self-created trouble, by enjoying the garden before them, and not being ashamed of what is kindly and innocent.

ANOMALIES OF SHAPE. THE STORY OF CYLLARUS AND HYLONOME.

ours.

It is not one of the least instances of the force of habit, to see how poetry and mythology can reconcile us to shapes, or rather combinations of shape, unlike any thing in nature. The dog-headed deities of the Egyptians were doubtless not so monstrous in their eyes, as in The Centaurs of the Greeks, as we shall see presently, could be imagined possessing beauty enough for a sort of human love-story: and our imaginations find nothing at all monstrous in the idea of an angel, though it partakes of the nature of the bird. The angel, it is true, is the least departure from humanity. It's wings are not an alteration of the human shape, but an addition to it. Yet, leaving a more awful wonder out of the question, we should be startled to find pinions growing out of the shoulder-blades of a child; and we should wait with anxiety to see of what nature the pinions were, till we became reconciled to them. If they turned out to be ribbed and webbed like those of the imaginary dragon, conceive the horror. If, on the other hand, they became feathers, and tapered off like those of a gigantic bird, comprising also grace and splendour as well as the power of flight, we can easily fancy ourselves reconciled to them. And yet again, on the other hand, the Flying Women, described in the Adventures of Peter Wilkins, do not shock us, though their wings partake of the ribbed and webbed nature, and not at all of the feathered. We admire Peter's gentle and beautiful bride, notwithstanding the phonomenon of the Graundee, it's light whalebone-like intersections, and it's power of dropping about her like drapery. It even becomes a matter of pleasant curiosity. We find it not at all in the way. We can readily apprehend the delight he felt at possessing a creature so kind and sensitive; and can sympathize with him in the happiness of that bridal evening, equally removed from prudery and grossness, which he describes with a mixture of sentiment and yoluptuousness beyond all the bridals we ever read.

To imagine any thing like a sympathy of this kind, it is of course necessary that the difference of form should consist in addition, and not in alteration. But the un-angel-like texture of the flying apparatus of fair Youwarkee (such, if we remember, is her name) helps to shew us the main reason why we are able to receive pleasure from the histories of creatures only half-human. The habit of reading prevents the first shock; but we are reconciled in proportion to their possession of what we are pleased to call human qualities. Kindness is the great elevator. The Centaurs may have killed all the Lapithæ, and shewn considerable generalship to boot, without reconciling us to the brute part of them; but the brutality melts away before the story of their two lovers in Ovid. Drunkenness and rapine make beasts of them ;-sentiment makes human beings. Polyphemus in Homer is a shocking monster, not because he has only one eye, but because he murders and eats our fellow-creatures. But in Theocritus, where he is Galatea's lover, and sits hopelessly lamenting his passion, we only pity him. His deformity even increases our pity. We blink the question of beauty, and become one-eyed for his sake. Nature seems to do him an injustice in gifting him with sympathies so human, and at the same time preventing them from being answered: and we feel impatient with the all-beautiful Galatea, if we think she ever shewed him scorn as well as unwillingness. We insist upon her avoiding him with the greatest possible respect:

These fictions of the poets therefore, besides the mere excitement which they give the imagination, assist remotely to break the averseness and uncharitableness of human pride. And they may blunt the point of some fancies that are apt to come upon melancholy minds. When Sir Thomas Brown, in the infinite range of his metaphysical optics, turned his glass, as he no doubt often did, towards the inhabitants of other worlds, the stories of angels and Centaurs would help his imaginative good nature to a more willing conception of creatures in other planets unlike those on earth; to other "lords of creation ;" and other, and perhaps nobler humanities, nobler in spirit, though differing in form. If indeed there can be any thing in the starry endlessness of existence, nobler than what we can conceive of love and generosity.

But to our story. Ovid, in one of the finest parts of his Metamorphoses, has recounted the famous battle of the Centaurs and Lapitha. Our countrymen have the happiness of possessing, in another shape, another fine poem on the same subject; we mean the divine sculptures of Phidias. * But Ovid is as powerful in his way, as the

* We never observed till the other day, that in these Marbles the Centaurs are no taller than the Lapitha. Upon thinking of the matter, we believe it is also the same in most engravings, where Centaurs are introduced; certainly in some old ones. We are to imagine of course, not that the Centaurs were of the same height as men of "this degenerate age," and ran about with Welch ponies behind them, but that they and the Lapitha were of gigantic stature, and the horse-part as large as the finest of our moderu steeds. An awkward difficulty seems still to remain; since the horse, however large, must be comparatively small to a horse fit for a

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English reader may see in the versions of Dryden and Sandys. Phidias has relieved the ferocity of his story with some exquisite figures of women. One in particular, who seems fainting, is the very gentle essence of womanhood personified. Ovid, more exuberant, though not more touching in his imagination, has carried the refinement farther; and contradicting, or rather varying, with a solitary and striking exception, the general character given of Centaurs, has introduced two of them as lovers, remarkable for their gentleness and beauty, and dying side by side. The story is, that Pirithous having invited "the half-horsie people" to his wedding-feast, when he married Hippodamia, one of them was so inflamed with the beauty of the bride, that he started up in the midst of the drinking and carousing, and attempted to carry her off. Theseus, the friend of Pirithous, seized a great antique goblet, craggy with sculpture, and dashed his face to shatters with it, so that he died. The other Centaurs, seeing their brother killed, grew frantic with revenge; and a tremendous battle / ensued. The whole account fills the ear and the imagination, like an enormous uproar. It is a gigantic hubbub, full of huge fists, hoofs, weapons, and flying furniture, chandeliers torn down, and tables snatched up, shrieks of females, and roarings and tramplings of men and half-men. One of the Lapithæ makes nothing of rending away a door-post that would load a waggon: and a Centaur tears up an altar with fire upon it, and sends it blazing among the enemy. The different modes in which the deaths are inflicted are as various any in Homer; and the poet, with admirable propriety, has given his battle all the additional interest, which the novelty of the figures engaged in it could suggest.

The episode of the two lovers comes out of all this hideous turbulence, like the dropping of rain from the eaves after a thunder-storm. If we are asked why we translate it after Dryden and Sandys, it will be sufficient to answer that it gave us some pleasant moments to do so; and that we would rather, on these occasions, furnish something original to the reader than translated. But our readers and we are not quarrelsome parties. With regard to the measure, we have chosen it as the most capable of expressing the alternate laxity and compression, for which Ovid's style is remarkable. We found the heroic couplet hamper us, tending either to too great length or the reverse of it. With the old ballad measure before us, one may do as one pleases; and there is something in it that suits the simplicity of the affections.

Nor could thy beauty, Cyllarus,
Protect thee in the fray;

If we may speak of shapes like thine
After a human way.

Lapithite to ride. But the reader is to suppose, that there were no horses in those days to provoke the comparison. The notion of the "half-horsie" people (as Spenser, in a true spirit of poetical composition, ventures to call them), originated in the wonder with which men on horse-back were first regarded. When the Mexicans first beheld Cortes and his cavalry, they were struck with the same idea.