ld hearts in young bosoms; yet such premature genius seldom
escapes blight, the very springs of life are troubled, and its possessor
sinks, pines, fades, and dies. So was it with Chatterton and Keats.

It may be, after all, that we have only proved Age to be the strongest
season of Imagination; and if so, we have proved all we wish, for we
seek not to deny, but to vindicate. Knowledge is power to the poet as
it is power to all men--and indeed without Art and Science what is
Poetry? Without cultivation the faculty divine can have but imperfect
vision. The inner eye is dependent on the outward eye long familiar with
material objects--a finer sense, cognisant of spiritualities, but
acquired by the soul from constant communion with shadows--innate the
capacity, but awakened into power by gracious intercourse with Nature.
Thus Milton _saw_--after he became blind.

But know that Age is not made up of a multitude of years--though that be
the vulgar reckoning--but of a multitude of experiences; and that a man
at thirty, if good for much, must be old. How long he may continue in
the prime of Age, God decrees; many men of the most magnificent
minds--for example, Michael Angelo--have been all-glorious in power and
majesty at fourscore and upwards; but one drop of water on the brain can
at any hour make it barren as desert dust. So can great griefs.

Yestreen we had rather a hard bout of it in the Tent--the Glenlivet was
pithy--and our Tail sustained a total overthrow. They are snoring as if
it still were midnight. And is it thus that we sportsmen spend our time
on the Moors? Yet while "so many of our poorest subjects are yet
asleep," let us re-point the nib of our pen, and in the eye of the
sweet-breathed morning--moralise.

Well-nigh quarter a century, we said, is over and gone since by the Linn
of Dee we pitched--on that famous excursion--THE TENT. Then was the
genesis of that white witch Maga--

"Like some tall Palm her noiseless fabric grew!"

Nay, not noiseless--for the deafest wight that ever strove to hear with
his mouth wide open, might have sworn that he heard the sound of ten
thousand hammers. Neither grew she like a Palm--but like a Banyan-tree.
Ever as she threw forth branches from her great unexhausted stem, they
were borne down by the weight of their own beauty to the soil--the deep,
black rich soil in which she grew, originally sown there by a bird of
Paradise, that dropt the seed from her beak as she saile