shadowy in sunshine, and seeming restless as seas, where are they?And the cloud-cleaving cliffs that shot up into the blue region where the buzzard sailed? All gone. But mourn not for that loss. Accustom thine eye -and through it thy soul, to that transcendent substitution, and deeply will they be reconciled. Sawest thou ever the bosom of the Lake hushed into profounder rest? No white-winged pinnace glides through the sunshine-no clanking oar is heard leaving or approaching cape, point, or bay-no music of voice, stop, or string wakens the sleeping echoes. How strangely dim and confused on the water the fantastic frost-work imagery, yet more steadfastly hanging there than ever hung the summer banks when all the heavens were still as the breath of a sleeping child! For all one sheet of ice now-clear as the Glass of Glamoury in which that Lord of old beheld his Geraldine-is Windermere, the heavenloving and the heaven-beloved. Not a wavelet murmurs in all her bays, from the silvan Brathay to where the southern straits narrow into a river, now chained, too, on his silvan course, towards that perilous Estuary afar off raging on its wreckstrewn sands. The frost came after the last fall of snow-and not a single flake ever touched that surface; and now, that you are contented to miss -or rather no longer miss-the green twinkling of the large July leaves, does not imagination love those motionless frozen forests, cold but not dead, serene but not sullen, and inspirative in the strangeness of their appareling wild and dreamy thoughts and feelings about the scenery of foreign climes, far, far away among the regions of the North, where Nature works her wonders aloof from human eyes, and that wild architect the Frost, during the absence of the sun, employs his long nights in building and dissolving his ice-palaces, magnificent far beyond the reach of any power set to work at the bidding of earth's crowned and sceptered kings? All at once a hundred houses, high up among the hills, seem on fire. The setting sun has smitten them, and the snowtracts are illuminated by harmless conflagrations. Their windows are

all lighted up by a lurid and ghastly splendour, in its strong suddenness sublime. But look-look, we beseech you, at the sun-the sunset -the sunset region-and all that kindred and corresponding heaven effulgent, where even now lay in its cold glitter the blue bosom of the frozen lake. Who knows the laws of light and the perpetual miracle of their operation? God, not thou. The snow-mountains are white no more, but gorgeous in their colouring as the clouds. Lo! Pavy-Ark -magnificent range of cliffs-seeming to come forward, while you gaze -how it glows with a rosy light, as if a flush of flowers decked the precipice in that ineffably delicate splendour! Langdale-Pikes, methinks, are tinged with faintest, finest purple-and the thought of violets is with us as we gaze on the slight tinted beauty of the bosom of the mountains dearest to the setting sun. But that long broad slip of orangecoloured sky is yellowing with its reflection almost all the rest of our Alps-all but yon stranger-the summit of some mountain base belonging to another region-ay-the Great Gabel-silent now as sleep-when last we clomb his cliffs, thundering in the mists of all his cataracts. In his shroud he stands like a ghostpallid and colourless;-beyond the reach of the setting sun he lowers in his exclusion from the rejoicing light-and imagination, personifying his solitary vastness into forsaken life, pities the doom of the forlorn Giant. Ha! just as the eye of day is about to shut, one smile seems sent afar to that lonesome mountain, and a crown of crimson encompasses his forehead.

On which of the two sunsets art thou now gazing? Thou who art to our old loving eyes so like the "mountain nymph, sweet Liberty?" On the sunset in the heaven-or the sunset in the lake? The divine truth is-O Daughter of our Age-that both sunsets are but visions of our own immortal spirits, creative in their immortality. Lo both are gone from the outward world-and nought remains behind but a forbidding frown of the cold bleak snow! But imperish. able in thy imagination will be the sunset that owed all its beauty to the beauty of thine own soul-and though

it will sometimes fade away into oblivion-say rather retire into the recesses of thy memory, and lie there among the unsuspected treasures of forgotten imagery that have been unconsciously accumulating there since first those gentle eyes of thine had perfect vision given to their depths of blue-yet, mysteriously brought back from vanishment by some one single silent thought, to which power has been yielded over that bright portion of the Past, will that sunset sometimes re-appear to thee in solitude-or haply when in the very heart of life. And then surely a few tears will fall for sake of him by whose side thou stoodest, when first that double sunset, confusing Windermere with heaven, enlarged thy sense of beauty, and capacities of joy, and made thee-in thy father's eyes -the sweetest-best-and brightest poetess-whose whole life is musical inspiration-ode, elegy, and hymn, sung not in words but in lookssigh-breathed, or speechlessly distilled in tears!

So much, though but little, for the beautiful-with, perhaps, a tinge of the sublime. Are the two emotions different and distinct-think ye-or modifications of one and the same? 'Tis a puzzling question-and we, the Sphinx, might wait till doomsday, before you, Edipus, could solve the enigma. Certainly a Rose is one thing and Mount Etna is another—an antelope and an elephant-an insect and a man-of-war, both sailing in the sun-a little lucid well, in which the fairies bathe, and the Greenland Sea, in which Leviathan is "wallowing unwieldy, enormous in his gait"-the jewelled finger of a virgin bride, and grim Saturn with his ring-the upward eye of a kneeling saint, and a comet, "that from his horrid hair shakes pestilence and war." But let the rose bloom on the mouldering ruins of the palace of some great king-among the temples of Balbec or Syrian Tadmor-and in its beauty, methinks, 'twill be also sublime. See the antelope bounding across a raging chasm-up among the region of eternal snows on Mont Blanc-and deny it, if you please for assuredly we think that there is sublimity in the fearless flight of that beautiful creature, to whom nature grudged not wings, but gave, instead, the

power of plumes to her small delicate limbs, unfractured by alighting among the pointed rocks. All alone, by your single solitary self, in some wide, lifeless desert, could you deny sublimity to the unlooked-for hum of the tiniest insect, or to the sudden shiver of the beauty of his gauzewings? Not you, indeed. Stooping down to quench your thirst in that little lucid well where the fairies bathe, what if you saw the image of the evening star shining in some strange subterranean world? We shrewdly suspect that you would hold in your breath, and swear devoutly that it was sublime. Dead on the very evening of her marriage day is that virgin bride whose delicate hands were so beautiful-and as she lies in her white wedding garments that serve for a shroud-that emblem of eternity and of eternal love-the ring upon her finger-with its encased star shining brightly still now that her eyes, once stars, are closed-would, methinks, be sublime to all Christian hearts. In comparison with all these beautiful sublimities, Mount Etna, the elephant, the man-ofwar, Leviathan swimming the oceanstream, Saturn with his ring, and with his horrid hair the cometwould be all less than nothings! Therefore beauty and sublimity are twin-feelings of the soul-one and the same birth of imaginationthroughout all life inseparable-as you or any man may know-if you still doubt it-by becoming a fireworshipper-and singing your morning and evening orisons to the rising and the setting sun.

But we have heard it whispered that we are no metaphysicians-and though we cannot say that

"The wicked whisper came, and made

Our hearts as dry as dust;" yet as the metaphysics of most other men are indeed drier than the baked dust of the Great Desert when driven by sirocco or simoom into the eyes and noses of pilgrims journeying to Mecca, we are off and away out of our Winter Rhapsody-and beg to conclude Fytte IV. (shall there be Fyttes V. and VI. ?-Speak and it shall be done) with some delightful Stanzas, this instant-what a pleasant coincidence!-put into our hands by Beelzebub-Start not-'tis but a

THE numerous matters important to the public interest, submitted to the consideration of Parliament during the last ten days previous to the Christmas Recess, leave us but little room in our review for prefatory comment. These are serious times, in which a plain, straight-forward, practical view of what our legislature is doing, becomes highly important to almost every man of every station; it seems as if the time were not far distant, when our private men may be forced by the extraordinary complexion of affairs, to take a more decisive attitude with regard to politics than they have hitherto done, and nothing can be more useful in such a case than a clear and vigorous comprehension of the things actually said and done at the fountain-head of government. It is a certain truth, that men ignorantly cry out, Reform," without knowing what it is they would reform, and suffer their minds to run riot in theoretical fancies, while the practical business of the country is hastily glanced at as a something for the conversation of the day, and then forgotten. We wish, then, to fasten men's attention upon what the Parliament is about; not by a mere dry chronicle of their proceedings, but by a fair off-hand telling of the story in our fashion, accompanied by such commentaries of our own, as may seem necessary to give further information on the subjects noticed, to expose absurdity and quackery, to maintain sound British principles, and, in short, to make the honest truth apparent, to the best of our ability. We, of course, do not pretend to notice everything that takes place in Parliament; to do this would require a Double Number in every month during the sitting of the Houses; and we would not that the thrilling delight, which the public receives by the occasional duplica tion of Maga's charms, should pall upon the sense by such frequent repetition. Our topics, if not strictly original, will be select, and we shall not cause our light to shine upon

own

the mere dross and chaff of Parlia mentary discussion.

Now to our task. In the last Number we took leave of the House of Lords on the 14th of December, and made our retiring bow to the Bishop of London. We now turn to the House of Commons of the same evening, and find the corruption of the electors of the borough of Evesham under discussion, to the considerable discomfort of our reforming Ministers, whose particular convenience it would have been to let a new writ go forth, and a new election be had for this place, with the usual accompaniment of bribery and corruption. To Lord Chandos the merit is due of stopping this piece of ministerial expediency, and he gave notice of a motion for a supersedeas on the writ, which we shall notice in its proper place. This matter was followed by a conversation respecting the Stamford petition, complaining of the undue interference of the Marquess of Exeter at the last election, which Mr Tennyson had given notice to present that evening. Mr Maberly, whom, were we a Marquess, we should consider rather a strange political godfather to adopt, appeared for the noble lord, and condescended to say, that he, John Maberly, would be "infinitely obliged" to Mr Tennyson to postpone the presentation of the petition. All this matter had of course been arranged beforehand by the parties, and the present was merely a scene got up for the public satisfaction. Mr Tennyson took occasion briefly to compliment himself and the petitioners; to describe the charges in the petition as involving a breach of the privileges of the House, and a violation of the constitutional liberties of the people; yet, "hoping that Mr Maberly's request might, in some degree, have been prompted by a conviction on his part, of a probability that the noble Marquess might, before the period for presenting the petition should arrive, consent to withdraw the discharges served upon his tenants, who did not vote at the last election agreeably to