April. A YEAR OF HONEY-MOONS. BY LEIGH HUNT, ESQ. THE reader will be pleased to bear in mind that, although for reasons given in our last number, it has been thought proper to append a different name to the present series of articles than the one which has hitherto been seen; yet, nevertheless, and anything that may appear to the contrary notwithstanding, I, the young, ingenuous, and most bridal writer, Charles Dalton, am precisely the same Charles Dalton that I was before-the chosen of the heart of Harriet B., and one who will no more give up my identity with him than I would a dozen worlds. Homer speaks of divine shepherds and god-like cowkeepers. Now authors are, in this respect, god-like; that, as the deities of old sometimes had two names, one for earth, and one by which they were known in heaven, ["In heav'n yclept Euphrosyne, so a writer is often called among men by an appellation very different from the one which he bears in his loftier sphere of the unknown; and thus it is, that although I acknowledge to the trivial name under which the Editor of this magazine has thought fit to manifest my terrestrial condition, whereby some might take me to be nothing but a writer of a "certain age," nor worth a lady's eye, nor abounding in felicities, I am, in the heaven of my imagination, a fine young fellow of some six or seven-and-twenty, healthy, handsome, accomplished, swift of spirit and strong of body, and possessed of everything really desirable under the sun. "I hope here be proofs." And so no more of that matter. What does the reader think that Harriet had the face to do to me on the first of April, the moment I sat down to breakfast? Reader. First of April-I see it. Ah, but how? She had too much taste to make a fool of her husband in a really ridiculous manner; she respected both him and herself too much and yet she would forego none of the privileges of playfulness. She even contrived to pay herself a compliment, out of an exquisite instinct of converting a pretended joke upon me into a congratulation—a loss of dignity into a gain. What, therefore, does my lady, as soon as she has taken her chair, but get up with a little hurried air of affected gravity, go to a chiffonier, open and shut it so as to make me hear the sound, and then coming behind me, with a tap on the shoulder, ask me what I thought of this "new honey she had brought me?" I turned round, and received a laugh and a kiss, with the inquiry, if I knew what I was on the first of April? 66 "The wisest man in England," quoth I, as sure as I am the happiest. Nay, Harriet, this, I must say, is a complete failure; I never knew you make a failure before; but when you begin, I suppose you must do every thing completely. You propose to make me a fool, and you bring me the very bond and seal of my charter to the title of wise." I waive the pretty compliments we proceeded to bandy with one another, and also the divers instances in which I had my Aprilday revenge. Our discourse fell upon bees, and then upon April, and then on the bees again; and we never had a breakfast more full of mirth and poetry. Harriet said that people did not do enough honour to the works of the bees, in thanking them for their honey only; for they gave them tapers for their love-letters, and lights to read them by. And hereupon she became poetical upon the subject of wax, describing its beauty and purity, and saying that it was the "fit second manufacture of such fairy creatures. It is proper," continued she, "that the beings who make honey should make wax; it is the only kind of insipidity they could condescend to, and is turned into twenty elegant things. There is the seal as well as the taper. To think that I should forget that! And the bee himself often furnishes a device for the seal. Come now, Charles, I will prove your words, and make you a complete case out of this. I meet with some fine honey in my walks and send you a pot of it with a note. The note, of course, is on the subject of honey, and therefore of the bees; I seal it with a substance made by the bees; the taper that helps to make the seal, is of a substance made by the bees; and the seal is stamped with a bee's likeness. No; my case is not complete after all, for the pen ought to have been connected with bees, and the paper." "It is complete, Harriet,” said I, "though not in the way you designed it. It is a specimen of that complete sincerity, and desire for truth in small matters as well as great, which is one of the things for which I love you, and which makes you sweeter than all the sweets you can describe. But not having seen so much of France and Italy as I have, there is one application of this waxen elegance of yours which has not made so strong an impression upon you, though you have witnessed it in catholic chapels. You see to what I allude-the use of it on catholic altars, where those huge waxen pillars (for such they are rather than candles) lighted with the beautiful mystery of fire, and flaming away in a world of devotion and music and sublime paintings, are understood to typify the seraphical ministrants before the divine throne, burning with love. You remember the Italian poem on bees, out of which we read some pages one day last June, in the little hay-field near the Pines. The catholic poet, be sure, has not forgotten this and similar uses of wax by his fellow worshippers, though he mentions it in a way to startle a protestant's ear, describing the tapers as things made in honour of "God's image " Odorate cere Per onorar l'immagine di Dio. "Ah!" said Harriet, "I remember one word in particular that struck me in that poem, and your saying how modern it was, and how impossible for a pagan to have written it--it was angelette. I remember the whole line; he calls the bees "Vaghe angelette de le erbose rive*." "Say it again," quoth I. She repeated it in one of her pretty saucy styles, between self-derision and display; and I pelted a rose at her lips across the table, because they spoke the Italian so well. If one cannot reward people for charming us, one must punish them. There is no alter native. The feeling must be vented some how. The imagination sometimes has involuntary caprices of association, not unfounded in truth. April, compared with March, always appears to me a female contrasted with one of the rougher sex; and compared with May, she is a female dressed in white and green, instead of white, green, and rose-colour. Her fingers also seem as cold as they are delicate, and she is slender compared with the buxomness of her sister. In other words, she is a personification of her slender stock of green, her blossoms, her chillness, her lilies of the Sweet little angels of the grassy brooks." valley, and her white clouds and rains, She has colours, it is true, in her garden-the jonquil, the stock, the glowing peony, and many others; and there is the rose always. But a lover of nature is accustomed, in his first thoughts of a new season, to paint to himself its appearance in general; its skies, fields, and woods, before its gardens. I confess I think I ought to admit blue and yellow among my April colours, on account, not merely of the skies, but of the charming profusion of primroses and wild hyacinths to be found in the woods; but these do not appear on the face of things; they are in the woods, and you must go there to find them. A mock-heroic poet would call them "April's under-petticoat." What an exquisite carpet these and the other wild flowers of the season make, in a wood at all worthy of the name, with a good mossy ground! Harriet and I, who are not rich enough to have large grounds of our own, are acquainted with all the sylvan places within twenty miles of London; and in this particular April, we went several days in succession to a spot called Combe Wood, near Wimbledon, which was the nearest for our purpose, and there enjoyed the blue and yellow tapestry to our eyes' content, and eat divers pretty little dinners at an inn in the neighbourhood. I shall beg the reader's company to one of these dinners by and by, in the course of the summer, as I take them to be highly sensible things and deserving imitation but at present I must content myself with saying that they are the reverse of everything pretending and public, and can be adapted to the cheapest capacities, provided there be no real spirit of stinginess in the parties. The fortunes of the Daltons are just good enough to afford them a few handsome luxuries, and therefore we order certain of them at the inn, quite as much to gratify the people of the house as ourselves. But I am surer of nothing upon earth than I am of this, that I could have a room to myself in one of these inns, and eat a chop and a potato with Harriet, and be as happy, and make the waiter as satisfied with me to boot, as if I had come in a carriage and four. The reader shall have my secret when time serves. In returning from one of these excursions, we saw, for the first time, the swallow, arting about with that incredible velocity of his, that apparent weight of swiftness (for there seems as much weight in his plunge as speed in his circuit,) which gives the look of him, as he passes, such a remarkable union of substance and evanescence. The idea of a knife is not. more cutting than that of his wings. Spenser must have taken from him his feeling of the sharp-winged shears," which he gives to one of his angels. A tropical-blooded friend of ours, who does not stop to explain his phrases, or to suit them to the colder consideration of our northern criticism, calls the swallow "a pair of scissors grown fat." But a more wonderful bird comes in April than the swallow, the nightingale. How different from the other! He all so public, so restless, and so given up to his body; this all so hidden, so stationary, so full of soul! We hear him to singular advantage where we live. I verily believe that our's is the last house, near the metropolis, to the garden of which he comes. It is an old practice of mine, taught me by my father, who was a studious cultivator of what he called "nature's medicine," to open one of my chamber windows with the dawn of light, and so let in upon my last slumbers the virgin breath of the morning. Never shall I forget the first time I heard the nightingale in company with the dear creature who is the delight of my life. The tears come into my eyes to think of it. Is this from effeminacy? from weakness? Oh, God, no! It is from that secret sense we feel in us of the power of man to perceive and appreciate the wonderful beauty of the universe, mingled with an unconscious regret of our mortality-of the weakness and shortness of our being, compared with the strength of our affections. But far was a tear from my eyes at the time. The fullness of the sweet burthen of beauty was on us, without the weight. Harriet heard the nightingale first. "Hark!" said she. The sound was not to be mistaken. It was one of those passages of his song, not the finest, but still exquisite and peculiar, in which he chucks out a series of his duller notes, as if for the pleasure of showing how rich he is in the common coin of his art, as well as the more precious. I rose and opened the window. The most divine of all sounds rewarded us; that low, long-drawn, internal, liquid line of a note, the deepest and sweetest ever heard, for which it seems as if the bird resorted to the innermost core of his soul, and meditated, as he drew it along, over I know not what celestial darkness of delight. It is the meeting with the extreme of pleasure with the gratitude which melancholy only can express. The sound mingled with our waking dreams, and heaven and earth seemed to enfold us in their blessing. Mr. Coleridge, in one of those sallies of his genius, in which he has so often startled and instructed one's common-places, informed the world some time ago that it was wrong to designate the nightingale by the title "melancholy," there being "in nature nothing melancholy," and the song of the bird being full of quick, hurried, and lively notes, anything but sorrowful; in short, he concluded, we ought to say, not the melancholy but the "merry nightingale." I regret that I have not his beautiful lines by me to quote. The critics, at Mr. Coleridge's direction, inquired into this matter, and pronounced him in the right; and it is now the fashion to say, that the talk of the melancholy of the nightingale is an error, and that he is a very gay, laughing, merry fellow, who happens to be out of doors at night like other merry fellows, and is not a whit more given to pensiveness. Nevertheless, with submission, I think that the new notion is wrong, and that the nightingale of Milton, Most musical, most melancholy, is still the real nightingale, and that the old opinion will prevail. Not that the bird is sorrowful, as the ancient legend supposed, though many of his notes, especially considering the pauses between them, which give them an air of reflection, can never be considered as expressing pleasure by means of gaiety, much less mirth. There is no levity in the nightingale. We know not what complication of feelings may be mixed up in the mystery of his song; but we take it for granted, and allow, that upon the whole it expresses a very great degree of pleasure. I grant that to the full. But the truth is, that this pleasure, being not only mixed up with an extreme of gravity, as I have just been showing, but bringing with it an idea of loneliness, and coming at night-time, when the condition of the whole universe disposes us to meditation, the very pleasure, by the contrast, forces us more strongly upon the greater idea of the two; and hence the effect of the nightingale's song has been justly pronounced to be melancholy. It may be allowed to Mr. Coleridge, that in some very energetic and comprehensive and final sense of the assertion, there is "nothing melancholy in nature," although to our limited faculties there may seem to be enough of it to contend with, as the world goes; but upon the same principle, melancholy itself is not melancholy, and so we come round again to the natural opinion. Shakspeare has made one of his characters in the Merchant of Venice account partly for the reason why music, generally speaking, produces a serious impression. "I'm never merry" (says Jessica to Lorenzo) "when I hear sweet music." "The reason is" (says her lover)" your spirits are attentive. For do but note a wild and wanton herd, Or race of youthful and unhandled colts, And such, no doubt, is partly the case with unconscious feelings to the effect already mentioned. There falls upon them a shadow of the great mystery of the universe. If a party of glee-singers were to become aware of a nightingale singing near them at one o'clock in the morning, and upon a pause in his song were to strike up a jovial catch by way of answer, they would be thought in bad taste, and a parcel of simpletons. The feeling, in any real lover of music, would be serious-voluptuous, if you please, and enchanting, but still full of the gravity of voluptuousness-serious from its very plea sure. SUMMER. THE Spring's fair promise melted into thee, In the blue sky thy voice is rich and clear; The gales that wander from the unbounded west, In such a scene, the sun-illumin'd heart Bounds like a prisoner in his narrow cell, When through its bars the morning glories dart, Thus, gazing on thy void and sapphire sky, I long to cast this cumbrous clay aside, And the impure, unholy thoughts, that cling Philadelphia, 1833. WILLIS GAYLORD CLARK. THE LITERATURE OF THE MONTH. The Puritan's Grave. By the Author Bible are charily introduced, and indeed never of "The Usurer's Daughter." quoted, except when deep affliction hallows the scene, and when it is perfectly natural that those who are described as having religion on their hearts should have it on their lips. Far too much ridicule has been thrown upon that class of Christians, who, whatever may have been the extravagance of some of their notions, combated with a noble courage against the aggressions of tyranny, and were the vanguard of the champions who secured for us the inestimable benefits of civil and religious liberty. We are at this day enjoying advantages derived from their very faults or mistakes. We therefore think our author has performed a meritorious task in mak WE have not the most distant idea as to who is the gifted writer of this tale, but be he who he may, we acknowledge a debt of gratitude to him, for rarely have we met with one that has so pleasantly captivated our attention and awakened our better feelings. From the time we took the tale in hand, we were unable to lay it down. We read the whole of the three volumes through at a sitting. All this enchaining interest is excited by management by no means wonderful-by incidents, not crowded on each other, or conceived for effect, or placed in melodramatic contrasts, but simple, natural, and domestic, the one following some of the Puritans objects of sympathy ing as the direct consequence of the other, and the whole combining to work out a beautiful narrative by precisely such means as we see the agents of events in real life. Nor is the language of that energumenic character, which is supposed by some authors to be the most apt to arouse and keep awake attention-incorrectly supposed to be so-as every thing in nature requires relief, and as we sleep spite of the peals of thunder, if the storm continues long, particularly if the loud rumble be unaccompanied by the brilliancy of lightning. The language, and the style through out, are remarkably unambitious and subdued. They are precisely such as suit the subject and aid the magical illusion of the characters and story. The principal of these characters are the members of the family of a Puritan minister of the time of Cromwell and Charles II.: the story is written, as it were, in the person of a devout man of the same period, and same sect-hence the characters are made to speak in the quaint scriptural style prevalent in that age, and the events are narrated in the simple, touching, and beautiful idiom of our translation of the Bible, in as much as that idiom can be appropriately applied to mundane affairs. We consider the author's skill in this respect as most admirable and rare; for some whom we might name, who have attempted this, have produced what is nothing less than an indecent parody of the scriptures; others have thought they kept true to the costume of language, (if we may venture on such an expression), and made out the character of a Puritan, if they made him continually repeat some chosen scriptural sentence or exclamation; and others, still more offensive, have thickly strewed quotations from holy writ in nearly every chapter of their fictions, without any attention to the unseemliness of such things being placed in juxtaposition with merely earthly doings and passions with the modern wit or modern ribaldry of the novel writer. But here the verses of the instead of derision, and in showing how much moral worth, sincere devotion, and enlightened tolerance, was compatible with the character of a sectarian of that order. We believe the world is pretty generally agreed that one of the most exquisite characters ever drawn or conceived by the imagination of man, is that of poorGoldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, a clergyman of the established church. Now, our author's Puritan preacher approaches it in excellence, and very much resembles it. Though elicited in different ways, there is the same single-mindedness—the same simpli. city under prosperity, in both; and in adversity the sectarian minister is as sublime as the orthodox churchman. This is high praise, but not given without due consideration of the value of the terms we employ. Anne Faithful, the daughter of the Puritan, is another beautiful creation; so full of feeling, so susceptible of tender passion, and yet so amenable to her father's authority or advicealways so ready to sacrifice the idols of her heart on the altar of religion and of moral right! We have not often met with a character we could so appropriately recommend to the study of our young female friends, as this dear Anne Faithful. Henry St. John, her lover, and unfortunately a cavalier, is also a fine fellow-not represented with all the perfections of a romance hero, but partaking of the vices of the times and of his situation in society; all of which vices are gradually corrected by experience and sorrow, until his heart, purified by long suffering, has become a fit offering to his generous and purely-minded mistress. Love scenes are proverbially dull to those who are not actors in them. There are some, however, in these volumes that are deeply interesting. One of them is the parting scene in the churchyard in vol. i., and another in vol. iii., where the gentle, but, in this instance, heroic Anne, gives up all claims to Henry's heart in favour of another, whom she deems he is bound to support |