"But pamper not a hasty time, "Nor toil for title, place, or touch j 295 What poet has his mission to perform as well as why should life all labor be?" and the the more prosy portion of his brother men; prophet, inspired by the Infinite, did not he has duties devolving on him, and he is answer them with contemptuous hopeless responsible for the performance or intro- moralizings, such as mission of those duties. If the impulse of the world is forward, he is the first to feel and know so; for that impulse was born at some former time of a poet, and the living one intuitively recognises his departed brother's voice. He has no excuse, He sympathized with his people, and, leavtherefore, for expending his precious hours, ing the land of his exile and seclusion, he his glowing thoughts, and his sweet-toned came and wept with and encouraged them. voice, in painting the hues of the peacock's Why does not Alfred Tennyson leave the tail, or in contemplating the variations of Midian of his retirement to point the peothose hues, while the poor bird suffers and ple's way to the coming Canaan? does he mean when he says, cries to him, the man of thought, for sympathy and aid. We have had enough of the past; we have had enough of description, and passion, and cold reflection; we now want sympathy, and hope, and direc- We wish he had been more literal and less tion. Alfred Tennyson was born and lives abstract; we wish he had toiled for his kind at a time when men are shouting in the with the same success with which he has wilderness of the world, "Oh, for a better dug up the shapeless ores of poetry and time!" He might have been the herald of fashioned them into a diadem of exceeding a new era; the prophet-preacher of a beauty. Long may he live, however, and "good time coming." He has a right ap- wider may his fame spread! We are not preciation of human nature; knows man to singular in believing him to be one of the be what nature says he is. Conventional greatest of living poets. titles are not so high in his estimation as that of man. But he wanted courage to become a teacher, and left to far less capaWHAT MAKES MARRIAGES UNHAPPY.-Let it ble men the direction of the mind of the be remembered that marriage is the metempsychoHe rests upon the downy couch of sis of women; that it turns them into different his study, with a pension of two hundred creatures from what they were before. Liveliness pounds per annum, to assist in preserving in the girl may have been mistaken for good temhis dream-languor; and the images of an per-the little pervicacity which at first is attracelegant but too ethereal fancy flit round his tively provoking, at last provokes without its attractiveness; negligence of order and propriety, brow. He is content to be styled "Ten- of duties and civilities, long endured, often deprenyson, the star of the new poetic era;" we cated, ceases to be tolerable, when children grow had rather that he had chosen, with his fine up and are in danger of following the example. It often happens, that if a man unhappy in the genius and magic song, to have been "Ten-married state were to disclose the manifold causes nyson, the poet of a new and better moral of his uneasiness, they would be found, by those era. He has capacities for such a position, and he knows that he has; "but, sickening of a vague disease," he is too tremulous to attempt to preach. He tells us that masses. "Meet is it changes should control Our being, lest we rust in ease: We know this; this is true. Tell us, Alfred Tennyson, if thou knowest, or ask thy master, Thomas Carlyle, to tell us our destiny. The Hebrew prophet led the children of Israel from a Goshen of slavery and toil to a better land; the children of Jacob cried, like thy "Lotos-Eaters," who were beyond their influence, to be of such a nature as rather to excite derision than sympathy. The waters of bitterness do not fall on his head in a cataract, but through a cullander; one, however, like the vases of the Danaides, perforated only for replenishment. We know scarcely the vestibule of a house of which we fancy we have penetrated into all the corners. We know not how grievously a man may have suffered, long before the calumnies of the world befell him as he reluctantly left his house-door There are women from whom incessant tears of anger swell forth at imaginary wrongs; but of contrition for their own delinquencies not one.- -Walter Savage Landor. VERY TRUE.-We should not preach so much to people; we should give them an interest in lifesomething to love, something to live for; we should, if possible, make them happy, or put them on the way to happiness-then they would unques"Ah!tionably become good. is a pity that Alfred Tennyson had not infused more of the didactic element into his strains: "Clara, Clara Vere de Vere, If time be heavy on your hands, And let the foolish yeoman go!" recalling from disuse words wh Tennyson's morbid, changing unsatisfied spirit, which he so fi. rizes in his "Palace of Art," w sionate love of the "good and its fine capacities for a Joshua-li in the van of progressive man, ha "Locksley Hall" is one of those combi- tent to take refuge from its own nations of the mystical, the beautiful, the pochondriac sorrows in the past true, and the passionately ironical, which, fers and he is dissatisfied; he ci from its internal contrasts, becomes a better gion in which his own soul may remembered whole. M. Michelet could he keeps himself from contact w write a volume of philosophy upon the fol- order that he may live and su lowing propositions: 2 "As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down." . egotistical ideal world of his. of all men, do not live for th they rule the world whether they They may see far beyond the p of other men, and may speak so gibly that they will for a time be How true! This is poetry; for it sug- and neglected; but, if they have gests a long train of thoughts-of the fall one phase more of truth, they of a superior nature to the condition of one operate upon the living mind; fo which is brutal, but which will be dominant ity requires all forms of truth and because it is man's. Woman, if she asso- and the original poet must, alth ciates much with a man, assimilates to him; body has gone away, reign over it is her nature to be moulded in conform- time the intellectual and conseque ity with what, by a moral necessity, be- bodily world. comes her ideal of strength. "To wish Tennyson's young, fresh muse wa and think as man does, to act and suffer in a time of fierce human actio with him," is marriage; and Amy, as cer- world had reached one of its clim tainly as Tennyson has said it, will become The people were aweary, awear as gross as the clown whose love vibrates instead of wishing that they wer between a horse, a hound, and woman. they panted for more light, and It were almost supererogatory to say that spiritual life, when he appeared u Tennyson is an original poet. This fact stage of thought. His poems, h has been often repeated, yet we think that hardly allude to the era of their bir we can trace resemblances in his poems to they certainly are not colored w many of his predecessors. In his ballad of light of that era. He suffers, and he "Oriana," and it is a powerful one, there that we suffer; but he only develor. is much of the distinct, sonorous echo of self in the spasmodic throes of his Campbell's "Hohenlinden." The imagery or in the mnemonical glory of his is as palpable, the verse, if it wanted the cence; he does not speak to us 1 second last repeat of "Oriana," as free. language of sympathy, and of hope There are touches of Keats, Coleridge, and is indeed what George Gilfillan calls Wordsworth in his pictures, but so slight an "artist, but no prophet." that you see they are half tints which have Genius is a rare gift, and it is giv been acquired from reading and not from man for a high and holy purpose; study. Tennyson's style is English; in- shine of its own native lustre, and i deed his language is as much so as Cob- illumine all who recognise it; but i bett's; but it is almost unpardonable of pends upon its possessor whether it w the poet, when commentators and modern expended in phantasmagoric displays editors are translating the obsolete words merely minister to the senses and the and phrases of Shakspeare, that he should cated imagination, or whether it will dim the light of his meaning, or break the before man like the pillar of fire, le even tenor of our sympathy with him, by him on towards a new region of life. BOLDT. From the Edinburgh Review. HUMBOLDT'S KOSMOS. *Kosmos. Entwurf einer Physischen Weltbeschreibung. Von ALEXANDER VON HUMErsten Band. Stuttgart und Tübingen. J G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1845. Cosmos. Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. By ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. Vol. I. Translated under the superintendence of Lieut. Colonel EDWARD SABINE, R. A., For. Sec. R. S., London. Printed for Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, Paternoster Row, and John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1846. KOSMOS, the adornment, the orderly ar-1 It is true that to grasp, as by a single rangement, the ideal beauty, harmony, and mental effort to embody and realize to grace, of the universe! Is there or is there our conceptions the UNITY OF NATURE-to not in the mind of a man a conception soar so high as to perceive its completeness, answering to these magnificent, these magi- and enjoy the fulness of its harmony, is cal words? Is their sound an empty clang, given neither to Man nor to Angel. The a hollow ringing in our ears, or does it stir feebleness and limitation of our faculties up in the depths of our inward being a repress such longings as presumptuous, and sentiment of something interwoven in our forbid such flights as impracticable. Yet nature of which we cannot divest ourselves, to spring a little way aloft-to carol for a and which thrills within us as in answer to while in bright and sunny regions-to open a spell whispering more than words can in- out around us, at all events, views commenterpret ? Is this wondrous world of matter surate with our extent of vision-to rise to and of thought, of object and of subject, of the level of our strength, and, if we must blind force and of moral relation, a one sink again, to sink, not exhausted but exerindivisible and complete whole, or a mere cised-not dulled in spirit but cheered in fragmentary assemblage of parts, having to heart,-such may be the contented and each other no inherent primordial relations? happy lot of him who can repose with equal If the former, contradiction and ultimate confidence on the bosom of earth, though discordance can have no place. All that is for a time obscured by mists, or rise above to us enigmatical must have its solution, them into empyrean day. however hidden for a while the word which resolves the riddle. All that shocks us as irreconcilable, must admit of satisfactory interpretation could we read the character of the writing with ease and flueney. If the latter, Chaos is a reality, Polytheism a truth; since arbitrary, self-existent, and independent Powers must, on that view of the subject, agitate, without end and without hope of final prevalence, the field of Being. It is something to have put the question in this form, uncomplicated with the idea of responsibility for its answer to any tribunal but that of the pure reason and the inborn feeling. So put, we might well leave it to be decided by the acclamation of the human race, were it not for the healthful and invigorating exercise of our faculties, and the rich enjoyment it affords to pass before us in review those grand features in the constitution of the frame of Nature which render the conclusion irresistible, and invest it with the character of a demonstrated truth rather than that of an admitted opinion. To some it is given to soar with steadier wing and more sustained energy; to sweep over ampler circles and treasure up the impressions of more varied imagery. To such the ambitious but sublime idea may occur of attempting to throw off, in broad and burning outline, a picture of THE WHOLE as it has presented itself to their aspiring conceptions. Far be it from us to reprove such aspirations. Their failures may yet be immeasurably grander than our best successes; and, as we contemplate them, a glimpse, a shadow, may impress itself which may aid us to remodel our own conceptions according to a higher ideal than any we could have formed from our more limited opportunities. Such outlines, struck with a bold hand and true to nature, though confessedly imperfect and partial, suggest in their turn, to imaginative intellects, groupings and combinations of a more recondite and deep-seated order. Transplanted onward, thus, in progressive development from observer to observer, and from mind to mind, with a constant reference to nature and experience as their pro The difficulties to be encountered in such an attempt are of two opposite kinds; on the one hand that of embracing with distinctness and truth a sufficiently extensive view, on the other that of duly suppressing detail. Such a view of nature, to be in any way successful, ought to be, in the highest possible sense of the word, picturesque, nothing standing in relation to itself alone, but all to the general effect. In such a picture every object is suggestive. How ever beautiful in itself, it is less for the sake of its intrinsic beauty than for that of the associations it calls up, and the lights which it reflects from afar, that it holds a place as an element of the work. And, as in art, intense and elaborated beauty in any particular defeats picturesqueness by binding down the thought to a sensible object, annulling association, and saturating, as it were, the whole being in its single perception; so, in throwing off such a picture of nature as the mind can take in at a view, no one portion can be suffered to appear in single completeness and ideal rotundity. Nature, indeed, offers all in her profusion, and complete in all its details; and the contemplative mind finds among them paths for all its wanderings, harmonies for all its moods. But such exuberance is neither attainable nor to be aimed at in a descriptive outline, where leading features only have to be seized, which imagination is stimulated to fill up by the grandeur of the forms, and the intelligible order of their grouping. and not merely ready at a call, but present The author of the remarkable book before us is assuredly the person in all Europe best fitted to undertake and accomplish such a work. Science has produced no man of more rich and varied attainments, more versatile in genius, more indefatigable in application to all kinds of learning, more energetic in action, or more ardent in inquiry; and, we may add, more entirely devoted to her cause in every period of a long life. At every epoch of that life, from a comparatively early age, he has been constantly before the public, realizing the ideal conception of a perfect traveller; a character which calls for almost as great a variety of excellences as those which go to realize Cicero's idea of a perfect orator. To such an one science in all its branches must be familiar, since questions of science and its applications occur at every step, and often in their most delicate and recondite forms. The habit of close attention to passing facts, which seizes their specific features, and detects their hidden analogies, must join with the broad coup d'ail which generalizes all it sees, and stereotypes it in memory in its simplest and most impressive forms. To these must be added a knowledge of man and of his history in all its phases, social and political; The origin and fount of all good writing, a ready insight into human character and however, is sound and abundant knowledge. feelings, and a quick apprehension of local To the successful execution of such a work, and national peculiarities. Above all things a thoroughly scientific acquaintance with is necessary a genial and kindly temperaeach component feature; a mind saturated ment, which excites no enmities, but on the with information, and at home in every de- contrary finds or makes friends everywhere; partment, is above all things requisite. in presence of which hearts open, informaThe classification of the naturalist, the tion is volunteered, and aid spontaneously surveys of the geologist, the catalogues and offered. No man in the ranks of science is descriptions of the astronomer, the theories more distinguished for this last characterisof the geometer, and the inductions of the tic than Baron Von Humboldt. We beexperimentalist, must all be alike familiar,lieve that he has not an enemy. His jus |