And would ye, tracking your proud lord the Sun, Of Persian mornings would ye fill, and stand That loads the middle heaven; and clear and bright Down to that hidden gulf from which they rose Power, glory, empire, as the world itself, The lingering world, when time hath ceased to be. Of the wild impulse. From a fount of life And in the bosom of the firmament O'er which they move, wherein they are contained, A type of her capacious self and all Her restless progeny. A humble walk Here is my body doomed to tread, this path, A little hoary line and faintly traced, Work, shall we call it, of the shepherd's foot And type of man's far-darting reason, therefore A blazing intellectual deity— Loves his own glory in their looks, and showers Visions with all but beatific light Enriched-too transient were they not renewed SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF THE BIRD OF PARADISE. In silent rapture, credulous desire 229 Nourish the hope that memory lacks not power For joy and rest, albeit to find them only XLIX. SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF THE BIRD [THIS subject has been treated of in another note. I will here only by way of comment direct attention to the fact that pictures of animals and other productions of nature as seen in conservatories, menageries, museums &c., would do little for the national mind, nay they would be rather injurious to it, if the imagination were excluded by the presence of the object, more or less out of a state of nature. If it were not that we learn to talk and think of the lion and the eagle, the palm-tree and even the cedar, from the impassioned introduction of them so frequently into Holy Scripture and by great poets, and divines who write as poets, the spiritual part of our nature, and therefore the higher part of it, would derive no benefit from such intercourse with such objects.] THE gentlest Poet, with free thoughts endowed, This the Sun's Bird, whom Glendoveers might own Of nether air's rude billows is unknown; Whom Sylphs, if e'er for casual pastime they Is so unearthly, and what shape so fair? So richly decked in variegated down, Green, sable, shining yellow, shadowy brown, Tints softly with each other blended, Hues doubtfully begun and ended; Or intershooting, and to sight Lost and recovered, as the rays of light Glance on the conscious plumes touched here and there? Full surely, when with such proud gifts of life O'erweening Art was caught as in a snare. A sense of seemingly presumptuous wrong That in the living Creature find on earth a place. L. A JEWISH FAMILY. (IN A SMALL VALLEY OPPOSITE ST. GOAR, UPON THE RHINE). [COLERIDGE, my daughter, and I, in 1828, passed a fortnight upon the banks of the Rhine, principally under the hospitable roof of Mr. Aders of Gotesburg, but two days of the time we spent at St. Goar in rambles among the neighbouring valleys. It was at St. Goar that I saw the Jewish family here described. Though exceedingly poor, and in rags, they were not less beautiful than I have endeavoured to make them appear. We had taken a little dinner with us in a basket, and invited them to partake of it, which the mother refused to do, both for herself and children, saying it was with them a fast-day; adding, diffidently, that whether such observances were right or wrong, she felt it her duty to keep them strictly. The Jews, who are numerous on this part of the Rhine, greatly surpass the German peasantry in the beauty of their features and in the intelligence of their countenances. But the lower classes of the German peasantry have, here at least, the air of people grievously opprest. Nursing mothers, at the age of seven or eight and twenty, often look haggard and far more decayed and withered than women of Cumberland and Westmoreland twice their age. This comes from being under-fed and overworked in their vineyards in a hot and glaring sun.] GENIUS of Raphael! if thy wings Thou would'st forego the neighbouring Rhine, A studious forehead to incline O'er this poor family. |