Nor, advancing a step still higher in the dignity and importance of the suggestions which the almost unbroken silence of the summer's noon-tide hour is calculated to convey to the mind, can we forbear remarking, that even piety and devotion may receive fresh accessions of strength and ardour from the scenes of deep and awful seclusion to which we are wont to fly, at such a season, for shelter and repose.

It is then, amidst the depths of glens and forests, at the foot of some o'erhanging rock, or within the caverned side of some stupendous mountain, where all is vast and lone, and hushed as midnight, that we seem to rise above the confines of mortality, and to commune with another world. Here, indeed, if ever, might we dare to hope for that intercourse which, in days long past, patriarchal record has ascribed to a chosen few among the sons of men preeminently good and wise, and who are said to have

Convers'd with angels, and immortal forms
On gracious errands bent,

a tradition which has furnished our amiable

Thomson with one of the most sublimely awful passages in his Seasons, where describing the noontide retreat of Summer as a favoured haunt of Meditation, and as best found beneath the canopy of embowering woods, he adds, in a strain of hallowed enthusiasm, unequalled, save by the muse of Milton,

Shook sudden from the bosom of the sky,
A thousand shapes or glide athwart the dusk,
Or stalk majestic on. Deep-rous'd, I feel
A sacred terror, a severe delight,

Creep through my mortal frame; and thus, methinks,
A voice, than human more, th' abstracted ear
Of fancy strikes : :- "Be not of us afraid,
Poor kindred man! thy fellow creatures, we
From the same Parent-Power our beings drew,
The same our Lord, and laws, and great pursuit.
Once, some of us, like thee, through stormy life
Toil'd, tempest-beaten, ere we could attain
This holy calm, this harmony of mind,
Where purity and peace immingle charms.
Then fear not us; but with responsive song,
Amid these dim recesses, undisturb'd
By noisy folly, and discordant vice,

Of Nature sing with us, and Nature's God.
Here frequent, at the visionary hour,

When musing midnight reigns, or silent noon,
Angelic harps are in full concert heard,

And voices chaunting from the wood-crown'd hill,
The deepening dale, or inmost sylvan glade.

A privilege bestow'd by us, alone,

On Contemplation, or the hallow'd ear
Of poet, swelling to seraphic strain."

Summer.

Of hours thus dear to the good and wise, to the admirers of nature, the favourites of fancy, and the lovers of contemplation, we have now only to confess, that it has been our wish to avail ourselves, so far at least as may prove, that whilst enjoying the delicious coolness of retreat by fountain, wood, or stream, we have been not altogether uninfluenced by the local spirit of the scene, nor totally unbenefited by what to the shade and silence of a noonday solitude we owe, in prompting through every age and clime, some of the most beautiful and ennobling speculations of human thought and genius.

It is our hope, therefore, and has been, indeed, our aim, that the following pages, whilst they furnish some amusement for the lovers of nature, of poetry, of biography, and of romance,

should, at the same time, include what may, indirectly at least, tend to improve the morals and amend the heart; what may, in short, for those who at the noontide hour of summer

"Are listless laid the velvet grass along."

afford that species of mental food which shall best harmonise with the season and its scenery, and with the feelings and associations which they are calculated to suggest.

No. II.*

Shakspeare unites in his existence the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and the most foreign, and even apparently irreconcileable properties subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet in strength, a demi-god; in profundity of view, a prophet; in all-seeing wisdom, a protecting spirit of a higher order; he lowers himself to mortals as if unconscious of his superiority, and is as open and unassuming as a child.

:

SCHLEGEL, apud Black.

* The principal object of this narrative has been to bring forward a picture of the moral, social, and domestic life of Shakspeare in accordance with the few traits which tradition has preserved of his personal history. No one can be more aware than myself of the danger which must be incurred in venturing to introduce our immortal countryman on the living scene; yet such has ever appeared to me, as well from the study of his writings, as from the features of his scanty biography, to be the extraordinary beauty, and almost sublime simplicity of his private character, that, notwithstanding the manifold risk attending the experiment, I have been induced to make the attempt, with the view of more fully and completely expressing my own conception of his peculiar worth in all the relations of humanity. In doing this, a portion of his literary character will, of necessity, appear, but it is sketched in subserviency to the main design.