great proficiency in the pursuit. With what "What sweet delight a quiet life affords, cords, Sweet, flow'ry place, I first did learn of thee. After his father's death he gave up the study of the law, and returned to Hawthorn den when time softened the affliction oc casioned by his loss, his native scenery resumed its influence over his feelings, and to a mind so naturally reflective, the retirement in which he indulged was the highest enjoyment; he thus contrasts its calm repose with the hollow pleasures of the Court: "Thrice happy he, who, by some shady grove, Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own, Though solitary; who is not alone, But doth converse with that eternal love- Than those smooth whisp'rings near a prince's throne, Which good make doubtful, do the evil approve! breath, And sighs embalm'd with new-born flow'rs That that applause, vain honor doth bequeath! He was soon to experience feelings more "Ah me, and am I now the man whose muse In happier time was wont to laugh at love, And those who suffer'd that blind boy abuse My mind into a better course to move : away, The lover's imagination had not played him false in the estimate of the gifts and graces with which it had adorned the fair girl; her tastes and feelings were in such accordance with his own, that on a nearer acquaintance their intercourse. Passionately in love, he the most perfect sympathy lent its charms to sang her praises through the woods and glens. His noble sentiments and varied accomplishments; his exquisite skill in music, and his passionate devotion, soon found their way to her heart, and won its tenderest affection. Then what happy days were theirs, in the full enjoyment of present felicity, and in forming plans for future happiness. The wedding day was fixed, but ere it came she fell ill of a fever, and on its very eve she died. An attempt to describe the grief of one of so much sensibility would have been a vain task; but we learn that as soon as the stunning ef fects of the blow had in some measure passed necessary. The scenes, so much loved, rehe felt that some effort was absolutely called but the visions of departed happiness, mournfully contrasted with blighted hopes and unavailing regret; so he resolved to leave Hawthornden, and to seek in foreign travel to give a new turn to his distracted thoughts. Poetry had been so long the natural outlet for his feelings, that they again found vent in effusions of great pathos, effusions which must have constantly opened the deep springs of sorrow, but which we may hope soothed them, at the same time, into a gentler current. He travelled through Germany, France, and Italy, visiting, as he went, their most celebrated universities. Years passed on in these wanderings, before he could bring himself to return to Hawthornden. The emotion with which he found himself there again may be conceived but not described: that his early love was cherished most passionately in his remembrance is evinced by his constantly recurring to her in the most affecting passages of his poetry. The wild burst of agony with which he conjures her to look from heaven, to which abode he believes her translated, and to have The noble gifts were given them from above--pity on his tears, is the true language of What metamorphose strange is this I prove? And all the tales are told of changed Jove. grief few lines have ever fallen in our way more touching than his "Address to Spring;" and the "Apostrophe to his Lute," with which it concludes, awakens the sympathy "Sweet spring, thou com'st, but ah! my pleasant hours And happy days with thee come not again; sours; Thou art the same which still thou wert before, of all who know the powerful associations | weeks. Seated on the rocks in the midst of which are linked with music. The airs which the romantic scenery, these gifted men would we remember to have heard in company with converse for hours together. Notes of their one we loved, those which were the especial conversation are found in Drummond's works, favorites, or which may have responded to and are sufficiently curious; in his confidentheir touch, or been accompanied by their tial intercourse, Jonson must have been voice, need not be recalled by sound, for they sensibly touched by the sympathy of the ever float upon the memory in all their pa- poet, for he talked to him on the very subthetic sweetness. Part of the poem runs ject which interested him the most-the thus: early death of his eldest son, a child of great promise, and inexpressibly dear to him. He detailed the remarkable circumstances which had occurred at the time of his loss; as the plague had broken out. in London, and he fever, it is not strange that uneasy dreams had left the boy exposed to the contagion of and vivid imaginations should represent what he most dreaded. But he was strongly impressed with the belief that what he described had been no idle phantasy; he went on to tell," that when the king came to England, about the time that the plague was in London, he, being in the country, at Sir Robert Cotton's house, with old Cambden, saw in a vision his eldest son, then a young child, and at London, appear unto him with the mark of blood upon his forehead, as if it had been with a sword, at which, amazed, he prayed unto God; and in the morning he came unto Mr. Cambden's chamber to tell him, who persuaded him it was but an apprehension, at which, he should not be dejected. In the meantime, there came letters from his wife of the death of that boy in the plague; he appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape, and of that growth, he thinks, he shall be at the resurrection." But she, whose breath embalm'd thy wholesome air, Is gone: nor gold, nor gems can her restore." The first production of Drummond's, which brought him into notice, was his elegy on the death of Prince Henry, eldest son of King James the First; it has often been said, that nobody could read it without being reminded of "Lycidas," and it has been observed too, that Milton's sonnets are remarkable for a similarity in their flow and spirit to those of the poet of Hawthornden. It is supposed that Milton greatly admired Drummond's writings, and his sympathies may have been so strongly excited, as to have given unconsciously, to some of his minor compositions, a resemblance at which he had never aimed. His nephew and pupil, Philips, expressed himself in the highest terms with regard to Drummond's writings, and it has been thought that the estimation in which he held them was but a reflection of his uncle's opinion; "his poems," says Philips, "are the efforts of a genius, the most polite and verdant that ever the Scotch nations produced." His prose writings were much valued, and it is thus Philips speaks of his history of the seven Jameses. "Had there been nothing else extant of his writings, consider but the language, how florid and ornate it is,-consider the order and the prudent conduct of the story, and you will rank him in the number of the best writers." The elegy on the death of Prince Henry impressed Ben Jonson so strongly with an idea of the author's genius, that he made his way to Hawthornden to see him; it has been stated that he accomplished the journey on foot; that he was not disappointed, may be inferred from his having remained with Drummond for three VOL. XXV. NO. IV. Many years had passed away, since the one he had so much loved had been laid in her grave, and Drummond was now in his forty-fifth year, when he chanced to see Margaret Logan, (the granddaughter of Sir Robert Logan.) Struck by her resemblance to his early love, his feelings became deeply interested, and he wooed and won her :-there is every reason to think that he soon loved her for her own sake, and that in the calm enjoyment of domestic life, surrounded by his wife and children, he found a consolation for the disappointment of his early hopes and more passionate attachment. could ever have left home; and indeed seems to have had a horror of a sea voyage; for he says in a letter to a friend, when speaking of it, "A part of Noah's judgment, and no small misery, that us Islanders cannot take a view of God's earth, without crossing the stormy, breaking, and deceitful sea." In the same letter he mentions the pleasure which 33 He scarcely 514 he had in the game of chess. From all that is "Love, which is here a care And like wild waves, all our designs commove. It a contentment is, a quiet peace, A pleasure void of grief, a constant rest, Drummond was buried in the church of Lasswade, in the neighborhood of Hawthornden. Lasswade is indeed a most fitting spot for the last resting place of the poet; its quiet pastoral beauty; the river gliding gently on, seeming in its flow to tell of repose and peace; and the lovely scenery by "sweet glen and greenwood tree," through which it bends its way, make Lasswade, with all its Nor can pleasant paths, one of the most lovely spots which can be met with anywhere. we forget that it was here Scott spent some of his happiest hours; it was his favorite haunt in boyhood, and here the first days of his married life, and some succeeding summers were passed, in the indulgence of the simple tastes which so often mark minds of the highest stamp. He loved to trim the garden of his cottage, to cultivate its flowers, and train its ereeping plants; he constructed a rustic archway as an entrance to his humNor," I have heard him say, ble abode. Lockhart tells, " was he prouder of any work than of this." The romantic solitudes by the banks of the Esk, where he delighted to stroll-Roslin with its rocks and glen,-and sweet Hawthornden, "Where Jonson sat in Drummond's silent shade." influenced his mind in no common degree, and first called forth those powers which were to charm the world, in the fine ballads which would alone have sufficed to immortalize his name. - NEW WORK OF HARTLEY COLERIDGE.Hartley Coleridge's "Lives of Northern Worthies" has just appeared under the editorial care of his brother, to whom the public owes the interesting and pathetic memoir and the collection of poems and Marginali, of a man whose brief career was at once uneventful and tragic. The sonnets of Hartley Coleridge are not surpassed by any in the language. When will Messrs. Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston, issue their long-announced reprint of his life and poems. From the British Quarterly Review. STEPHEN'S HISTORY OF FRANCE.* course in common. IN reading Sir James Stephen there is this respect, also, the two friends have their much to remind us of Mr. Macaulay. The points in which they resemble each other are sufficiently observable to render the points in which there is a difference only the more interesting. We may add, too, that something besides the possession of kindred gifts has contributed to place these two names in relationship. The fathers of these gentlemen were public men of great worth, and fast friends; and the sons grew up in habits of intimacy both at home and at college. Mr. Macaulay, with the slight interruption occa. sioned by his visit to India, has been wedded, as the world knows, all his life to literature. Sir James Stephen, on the other hand, has been occupied until somewhat beyond the meridian of his days in professional or official duties. His powers of labor are prodigious. As Under Secretary for the Colonies, his mastery of all questions relating to the history and state of our colonial empire was such, we suspect, as no second man in the kingdom possessed, and such as scarcely any second man could have acquired. An odd kind of paradise to a man of cultivated genius that world of state-papers must have been! But though divorced from literature comparatively during a great part of life, Sir James has been gradually returning to it for some years past; and the productions which have been the result may assist us in judging as to the success with which he would have occupied this ground, had it been, as in the case of Mr. Macaulay, his only ground. We scarcely need say that Mr. Macaulay wrote himself into fame as a contributor to the Edinburgh Review. The same may be said of Sir James Stephen. Mr. Macaulay has now withdrawn from periodical literature, and is employing his powers in a walk of authorship more independent and personal. In * Lectures on the History of France. By the Right Honorable Sir JAMES STEPHEN, K.C.B., LL.D., Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. 2 vols. 8vo. London: Longman. 1851. Both writers are remarkable for the extent of their reading. The reading of Mr. Macaulay, from his having been ever either reading or writing, is probably more discursive and extraordinary than that of his distinguished friend. But the writings of Sir James Stephen exhibit him as a man whose tastes have been always disposing him to make excursions into widely diversified fields of authorship. In literature, we find both bringing within their cognizance, and under the power of their analysis, the well-known and the little known, the light and the ponderous-works which weak men would overlook as insignificant, and works on which even the strong look with dismay, because swollen into libraries, the ore that may be in them having its place as in the midst of a continent of material not very pleasant to deal with. In the power of steady and laborious reading we are inclined to give precedence to Sir James. Few would have had patience to read as our author must have read, in order to write as he has written, on Luther, and Calvin, and Baxter; on St. Francis and Loyola; on the Port-Royalists and the Bollandists. Mr. Macaulay would seem to be endowed with a more restless literary activity, with a more intense and ceaseless curiosity about books, and about what may be seen of humanity through the spectacles of books; and with a memory, if report speaks truly, of more wonderful tenacity than can be attributed to Sir James Stephen. But we are, we think, quite safe in saying, that if Sir James has read somewhat less than Mr. Macaulay, he has reflected more. If he has not travelled so far over the surface of history as his learned friend, it is because he has more frequently descended beneath that surface. If he be not so fully versed in all that men have done, it is because he has felt prompted to concern himself with a prior question-the question as to what men are. That question-the whence and why of humanity-though in itself the question of questions, is one with which Mr. Macaulay will hold no parleyno, not for a moment. No enchanter ever kept more resolutely within his circle than does Mr. Macaulay within his boundary-line of the seen and temporal. His own individuality is marked-potent; but there is no conscious subjectivity in him. He lives to the outward, the inward is left to care for itself. His universe of being, past and present, is, for the most part, a universe of pictures. It is nearly all made up of what the eye can see, the ear can listen to, or the hand can touch. His main business is with the good or bad acting that has taken place in the world, not so much with the actors. The surface deed, and the surface motive, are vividly before you; but rarely does he disclose to you anything more latent. With Sir James Stephen, however, it is not so. He must descend deeper, and as the consequence he must ascend higher. The more he sees of what man has done, the more earnest becomes his inquiry as to what man is; and the more he explores the chambers of the human spirit, the stronger is the feeling which impels him to ascend to the oracle of a higher Spirit, and to ask grave questions THERE. In this fact we have our explanation of the circumstance that the department of reading and authorship on which Sir James Stephen has bestowed the greatest attention, viz., the lives of religious men as such, is that on which Mr. Macaulay would appear to have bestowed the least. Of course, it is manifest enough, that the author of the memorable papers in the Edinburgh Review on Ranke's Lives of the Popes, and on Lord Bacon, must have read considerably both in the history of the Church and in the history of philosophy. But it is no less clear, that, from some cause, Mr. Macaulay has the power of treating even such themes, so as to be capable of infusing into them an extraordinary energy, and of throwing over them an extraordinary brilliancy; and, at the same time, a manner which leaves all the vital questions that should be suggested by them wholly untouched. The pictures which pass before you are pictures of things as they are, not of things as they ought to be. Not that this is consciously done. Mr. Macaulay's sympathies are generous and noble. In so far as he is at all a teacher, his teaching is of admirable quality; but his bias is, we have said on a former occasion, to sink the instructor in the painter, the prophet in the artist. But all sins, even the sins of omission, are retributive. The man who contents himself with being merely artistic, will not rise to the highest eminence even as an artist. Man is not a being of intellect only. He is a moral and religious being. This is to be remembered by those who would discourse of him with the desired fulness, or to him with the desired effect. The artist, speaking to us from the marble, the canvas, or through human speech, must know humanity-know it, and have strong sympathy with it in its highest forms of spiritual beauty and sublimity, if he would depict it effectively in those forms. It is not too much to say, that the degree in which men of genius have failed in their aspirations has resulted more from their want of goodness, than from their want of genius. If Milton had not felt how awful goodness is, his description of it would never have been given to us. So in a thousand instances beside. Herein lies the difference between what is called Christian art and Pagan art. Christianity presents manifestations of beauty and greatness other than are found elsewhere, and higher than are found elsewere; and the artist who would depict them truly, must have come so far under their influence as to have felt their attraction, so as to have been fascinated, as it were, into the study of them. That he should fail in such attempts it is not necessary that he should be a bad man,—it is enough that he is not a good man, and that somewhat in the Christian sense of goodness. This new beauty and new greatness, which came to humanity nearly two thousand years since, have never ceased to be part of it-the purer, the nobler, the progressive part of it. Nothing is farther from our thought than to say, that men of Mr. Macaulay's powers should never give themselves to writing without intending to preach. We have no such meaning. Goethe is not a person to be classed among saints; but he appears to have had his seasons in which he came under the influence of all good along with all evil, and to have concentrated his thought intensely, at intervals, on both. As the result, his estimate of religion in its relation to humanity was such as to dispose him to assign to its subtle, complex, and powerful influence, a large space in every development of man. In his view, to ignore religion in man was to ignore the most potent and productive element of his nature; and to ignore the Christian religion, was to ignore the religious as diffusing its creative and its forma |