; left to themselves
they are not happy till they have evolved into words--winged words that
sometimes settle on the ground, like moths on flowers--sometimes seek
the sky, like eagles above the clouds.

No such soliloquies in written poetry as these of ours--the act of
composition is fatal as frost to their flow; yet composition there is at
such solitary times going on among the moods of the mind, as among the
clouds on a still but not airless sky, perpetual but imperceptible
transformations of the beautiful, obedient to the bidding of the spirit
of beauty.

Who but Him who made it knoweth aught of the Laws of Spirit? All of us
may know much of what is "wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best," in
obedience to them; but leaving the open day, we enter at once into
thickest night. Why at this moment do we see a spot once only visited by
us--unremembered for ever so many flights of black or bright winged
years--see it in fancy as it then was in nature, with the same dewdrops
on that wondrous myrtle beheld but on that morning--such a myrtle as no
other eyes beheld ever on this earth but ours, and the eyes of one now
in heaven?

Another year is about to die--and how wags the world? "What great events
are on the gale?" Go ask our statesmen. But their rule--their guidance
is but over the outer world, and almost powerless their folly or their
wisdom over the inner region in which we mortals live, and move, and
have our being, where the fall of a throne makes no more noise than that
of a leaf!

Thank Heaven! Summer and Autumn are both dead and buried at last, and
white lie the snow on their graves! Youth is the season of all sorts of
insolence, and therefore we can forgive and forget almost anything in
SPRING. He has always been a privileged personage; and we have no doubt
that he played his pranks even in Paradise. To-day, he meets you
unexpectedly on the hill-side; and was there ever a face in this world
so celestialised by smiles! All the features are framed of light. Gaze
into his eyes, and you feel that in the untroubled lustre there is
something more sublime than in the heights of the cloudless heavens, or
in the depths of the waveless seas. More sublime, because essentially
spiritual. There stands the young Angel, entranced in the conscious
mystery of his own beautiful and blessed being; and the earth becomes
all at once fit region for the sojourn of the Son of the Morning. So
might some great painter image the First-