nd held all men his equal who earned
by honest industry the scanty fare which they never ate without those
holy words of supplication and thanksgiving, "Give us this day our daily
bread!"

Our memory is a treasure-house of written and unwritten poetry--the
ingots, the gifts of the great bards, and the bars of bullion--much of
the coin our own--some of it borrowed mayhap, but always on good
security, and repaid with interest--a legal transaction, of which even a
not unwealthy man has no need to be ashamed--none of it stolen, nor yet
found where the Highlandman found the tongs. But our riches are like
those that encumbered the floor of the Sanctum of the Dey of Algiers,
not very tidily arranged; and we are frequently foiled in our efforts to
lay our hand, for immediate use or ornament, on a ducat or a diamond, a
pistole or a pearl, a sovereign, or only his crown. We feel ourselves at
this moment in that predicament, when trying to recollect the genders of
Thomson's "Seasons"--

"Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come,
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend!"

That picture is indistinctly and obscurely beautiful to the imagination,
and there is not a syllable about sex--though "ethereal mildness," which
is an Impersonation, and hardly an Impersonation, must be, it is felt, a
Virgin Goddess, whom all the divinities that dwell between heaven and
earth must love. Never to our taste--but our taste is inferior to our
feeling and our genius--though you will seldom go far wrong even in
trusting it--never had a poem a more beautiful beginning. It is not
simple--nor ought it to be--it is rich, and even gorgeous--for the Bard
came to his subject full of inspiration; and as it was the inspiration,
here, not of profound thought, but of passionate emotion, it was right
that music at the very first moment should overflow the page, and that
it should be literally strewed with roses. An imperfect Impersonation is
often proof positive of the highest state of poetical enthusiasm. The
forms of nature undergo a half humanising process under the intensity of
our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus
affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion
that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings
as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because