Page images
PDF
EPUB

never before been published.— WINSLOW | Colonies! But for him this tea might WARREN.

Dr Sir

BOSTON, DEC. 17, 1773.

-

The Dye is cast! The People have passed the River and cutt away the Bridge! last Night Three Cargoes of Tea were emptied into the Harbour. This is the grandest Event which has ever yet happened Since the Controversy with Britain opened! The Sublimity of it, charms me! For my own Part I cannot express my own Sentiments of it, better than in the Words of Coll. Doane to me last Evening Balch should repeat them The worst that can happen, I think, says he in Consequence of it, will be that the Province must pay for it. Now, I think the Province may pay for it, if it is burned as easily as if it is drank and I think it is a matter of indifference whether it is drank or drowned. The Province must pay for it in either Case-But there is this difference I believe it will take them 10 years to get the Province to pay for it-if so, we shall save 10 Years Interest of the Money-whereas if it is drank it must be paid for immediately. thus He - However, He agreed with me that the Province, would never pay for it.- and also in this that the final Ruin, of our Constitution of Government and of all American Liberties, would be the certain Consequence of Suffering it to be landed.

Governor Hutchinson and his Family and Friends will never have done with their good services to Great Britain & the

have been saved to the East India Company. Whereas this Loss if the rest of the Colonies should follow our example, will in the opinion of many Persons bankrupt the Company.

However, I dare say, that the Governors and Consignees and Custom House officers, in the other Colonies will have more Wisdom than ours have had & take effectual care that their Tea shall be sent back to England untouched-if not it will as surely be destroyed there as it has been here.

Threats, Phantoms, Bugbears, by the million, will be invented and propagated among the People upon this OccasionIndividuals will be threatened with Suits and Prosecutions, Armies and Navies will be talked of, military Executions - Charters annull'd - Treason-Tryals in England and all that - But these Terrors are all but Imaginations-Yet if they should become Realities they had better be suffered, than the great Principle, of Parliamentary Taxation given up

The Town of Boston was never more still and calm of a Saturday night than it was last Night. All Things were conducted with great order, Decency and perfect submission to Government.- No Doubt, We all thought the Administration in better Hands than it had been.

Please to make Mrs. Adams most respectful Compliments to Mrs. Warren, and mine. I am your Friend JOHN ADAMS.

A QUEEN'S SPEECH. The following speech of the Queen of Madagascar was delivered at the opening of a Memorial Church: "I thank the missionaries and the friends beyond the seas who have helped to finish this house; for completion of this stone building as a place in which to pray to, and for praising God and giving glory to Jesus, on account of the redemption he has wrought, is a thing which rejoices both me and you. But not this building alone is called a House of God,' but our hearts too; for Paul says in the Corinthians, Ye are the temples of the living God.' Therefore it rejoices my heart when we all do what we can to extend the kingdom of God upon earth; for that was commanded by Jesus Christ, saying, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' And our friends from beyond the seas have come here and do all they can to benefit us, that we may know Jesus Christ; much

[ocr errors]
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

If it be true I cannot tell
That spirits in the forest dwell,
But, walking in the wood to-day,
A vision fell across my way;
Not such as once, beneath the green
O'erhanging boughs, I should have seen;
But in the tranquil noon-tide hour,
And in the crimson Campion flower,
And in the grass I felt a power;
And every leaf of herb and tree
Seemed like a voice that greeted me,
Saying, Not to ourselves alone
We live and die making no moan.

66

The sunshine and the summer showers,
And the soft dews of night are ours;
We ask no more than what is given;
Our praise and prayer is leaf and bloom,
And day and night our sweet perfume
Like incense rises up to heaven;
Thus our sweet lives we live alone,
We come and go and make no moan."
And so out of the wood I went,
Thinking, I too will be content
With day and night, with gool and ill,
Submissive to the heavenly will.
The power which gives to plant and tree
Its bound and limit, gave to me
Just so much love and so much life;
And whatsoever peace, or strife,

Or sin, or sorrow, may be mine,
Is bounded by a law divine.
I cannot do the things I would,

I cannot take the boundless good
Which love might bring or heart desire,
And though to heaven my thoughts aspire,
'Tis only given me to behold,
Far off, its spheres of living gold.
The little orb on which I ride
Around the sun in circuit wide,
Is all an unknown land to me
And waters of an unknown sea.
The narrow bourne wherein I move,
This little home of hate and love,
Within whose set diurnal round
By strongest fate my feet are bound,
Has light upon it from afar,
As when a dungeon's iron bar
Crosses the splendor of a star!
This world of memory and care,

This cave of thought, this cell of prayer,
This House of Life in which I dwell,
Is vast as heaven and deep as hell,
And what it is I cannot tell.
Of this alone my mind is sure,—
That in my place I must endure
To work and wait, and, like the flower
That takes the sunshine and the shower,
To bide in peace the passing hour;
To know the world is sweet and fair,
Though life be rooted fast in care;
To watch the far-off light of heaven,
Yet ask no more than what is given,
Content to take what nature brings
Of all inexplicable things,
Content to know what I have known,
And live and die and make no moan.

[blocks in formation]

From Blackwood's Magazine.
ILLUSTRATION.

fore, we should say, without the possession of it; for an apt illustration, an exquisite PERHAPS there is no intellectual gift simile, will out if it flashes into the brain. that conveys a greater sense of power There is a certain concentration in the than that of ready and felicitous illustra- matter in hand—the scene, the situation tion, or one that wins its possessor a more - which stands the writer instead of any undisputed pre-eminence. It is one of other gift, and dispenses with all ornathose points on which it may be said that ment. This, we should say, is the case all people know themselves, and are forced with Mr. Trollope, whose metaphor, when to acknowledge a superior. A man may he uses it, is from the open, acknowledged, talk nonsense and not know it, or write familiar stock of all mankind; and recommonplace in full persuasion that he is markably with Miss Austen, in whose original, or uphold his fallacies against the whole range of writings no original figure conclusions of the ablest logician; but he occurs to us, unless it be Henry Tilney's cannot help knowing when he is no hand ingenious parallel between partners in at an illustration. There is no room for matrimony and partners in a countryself-delusion or rivalry. Not only does it dance. Her experienee probably prenot come readily, but he beats his brain sented her with no example of ready illusfor it in vain. It would be a curious in-tration, and she painted men and women quiry how many men live and die, re- as she found them, making a failure when spected and useful members of society too, she tried; like Lydia Bennet, who flourwithout once hitting off a happy simile. ished her hand with its wedding-ring, and We are convinced they would immeasura- "smiled like anything;" or, adding tritebly outnumber that formidable array of ness to common dulness, as in Mr. Collins, figures telling the difference between the whose letter found favour with Mary; sexes, which causes so much anxiety in the "the idea of the olive-branch is not wholly present day. Of course it is competent to new, but I think it is well expressed." people to say that they do not care for When we say that most men are without illustration that it proves nothing the gift in question, it is obvious that we that it is a mere toy of thought," inter- mean of original illustration. Only a fering with and often perplexing the busi- poet could first invest Time with wings; ness of reason and action; but whether but we talk of the flight of time now withwe like ourselves as well without this out pretending to any share of his gift. faculty or not, it is impossible not to en- There are certain figures incorporated joy its exercise in another. We may in the language which we cannot speak treat it as a superfluity; it may lack the without using. We are all poetical by solid satisfaction of reason and demon- proxy. Such common property is the stration, and be only like the nard pistic imagery connected with sunrise and the Jeremy Taylor talks of, the perfume of dawn; sunset and twilight; sun, moon, which is very delightful when the box is stars, and comets; lightning and storm; newly broken, but the want of it is no seas, rivers, frost, and dew; the road, the trouble we are well enough without it;" path, the ladder; the rose, the lily, and but the sudden fresh fragrance is not the the violet; the dying lamp and its exless delicious while it lasts, and invigorat- tinguisher; angels, the grave; the lion, ing to the spirits. the tiger, the wolf, and the lamb; the We use the word illustration as em- eagle, the dove, and the parrot; the goose bracing the widest field, and including the and the monkey. But indeed the list of whole figurative machinery of fancy and incorporated metaphor is endless, and it, imagination-metaphor, simile, imagery, has required a real poet these several figure, comparison, impersonation in hundred years past to hit off anything fact, every method of elucidation through new out of the subjects of it. But they their agency. Of course invention may be are all capable in his hands of a sudden actively and delightfully employed without illumination, of figuring in new characany use of this charming gift, and there- ters, of imparting the surprise which is the

66

[ocr errors]

66

[ocr errors]

very essence of the illustration proper.
And once a surprise is always a surprise
- that is, the flash in the poet's mind
plays and coruscates round it always. We
may weary of the hackneyed use of it; in
dull hands it may sound stale; but no
taint destroys the first freshness when we
come upon it in its right place. There it
still delights us to read how

"The weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane
Be shook to air."

[blocks in formation]

The sunbeam strikes along the world." The grandeur of the comparison when These images and epithets are all obPandemonium rose like an exhalation, vious enough as we read them, but in their never sinks to common-place. The sug place, we recognize them as the poet's gestions of what is noble, beautiful, and own coinage. There is no borrowed air familiar in nature, are really endless, how-about them. Byron tinges opening and ever the soil may seem exhausted to closing day with his own spleen and disprosaic minds, which are yet quite capable content, and makes them sentimental, of being freshened into awakened interest when he throws upon their shoulders the by a new epithet or an original collision task of making life just bearable. After a of ideas, revealing some undiscovered lovely description of sunset, with its transympathy with human feeling. Every sient glories, his own temper speaks in the poet adds something to the common stock person of Myrrha in Sardanapalus," of imagery, and so enlarges our percep"And yet tions. Shakespeare, on saluting a beautiful woman as Day of the World, quickens our sense of beauty alike in nature and in man. It needed imagination first to affix the idea of sovereignty to the morning, but it was at once adopted by the general mind

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye.” Wordsworth first endued it with "innocence," in which we own an equal fit

ness

"The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet."

Often as the dawn comes round, we do not know that anybody has called it confident before Mr. Browning in his "Lost Leader":

It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul,
And blends itself into the soul, until
Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch
Of sorrow and of love; which they who mark

not

Know not the realms where those twin genii

.build the palaces,

Where their fond votaries repose and breathe
Briefly; but in that brief cool calm inhale
Enough of heaven to enable them to bear
The rest of common, heavy, human hours,
And dream them through in placid sufferance."

The fitness of a metaphor to its place may give novelty to the most familiar analogies

"Put out the light, and then put out the light."

When the Ancient Mariner tells his unwilling hearer, "I pass like night from land to land," he imparts to matter-of-fact

"Life's night begins: let him never come back minds a newly-conceived mystery of mo

to us,

There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain; Forced praise on our part, the glimmer of twilights,

Never glad confident morning again."

tion to the most familiar of nature's phe-
nomena. Nothing is more common than
to liken girlish beauty to the rose; but,
nevertheless, George Eliot's picture of
Hetty awakes a more lively and amused
"If

Or associated dew with the memory as sense of the fitness of the simile-
Mr. Tennyson does

ever a girl was made of roses, it was Hetty

« PreviousContinue »