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7. Men of moderate passions employ few epithets, with verbs and substantives of mild signification; excitable men use numerous intensives and words of strong and stirring meanings. Loose thinkers content themselves with a single expression for a large class of related ideas; logical men scrupulously select the precise word which corresponds to the thought they utter, and yet among persons of but average intelligence each understands, though not employing, the vocabulary of all the rest.-George Perkins Marsh (b. 1801).

L'ALLEGRO-MIRTH.

MORNING.

1. Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe,

And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,

To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free;

2. To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweet-briar, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine.

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3. While the cock with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the barn door,
Stoutly struts his dames before:

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Oft list'ning how the hounds and horn
Cheerly rouse the slumbring Morn,
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill

4. Sometime walking not unseen

By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green,
Right against the eastern gate,
Where the great Sun begins his state,
Rob'd in flames, and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight.

While the ploughman near at hand,
Whistles o'er the furrow'd land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his sithe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.

6. Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the landscape round it measures;
Russet lawns, and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide.

7. Towers, and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes.
Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks;

8. Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,
Are at their savoury dinner set
Of herbs, and other country messes,
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses;
And then in haste her bower she leaves,
With Thestylis to bind the sheaves;
Or if the earlier season lead
To the tann'd haycock in the mead.

9 Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite;
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound

To many a youth, and many a maid,
Dancing in the chequer'd shade;

And young and old come forth to play

On a sunshine holiday,

Till the live-long day-light fail.-John Milton.

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"I set out in the morning, in company with a friend, to visit a place where Milton spent some part of his life, and where, in all probability, he composed several of his earliest productions. It is a small village, situated on a pleasant hill, about three miles from Oxford, and called Forest Hill, because it formerly lay contiguous to a forest which has since been cut down. The poet chose this place of retirement after his first marriage, and he describes the beauties of his retreat in that fine passage of his L'Allegro,—

"Sometime walking not unseen

By hedge-row elms,' &c.,

As we ascended the hill, the variety of beautiful objects,

the agreeable stillness and natural simplicity of the whole scene gave us the highest pleasure. We at length reached the spot whence Milton undoubtedly took most of his images: it is on the top of the hill, from which there is a most extensive prospect on all sides. The distant mountains that seemed to support the clouds, the villages and turrets, partly shaded with trees of the finest verdure, and partly raised above the groves that surrounded them, the dark plains and meadows of a grayish colour, where the sheep were feeding at large; in short, the view of the streams and rivers convinced us that there was not a single useless or idle word in the above-mentioned description, but that it was a most exact and lively representation of nature. After we had walked, with a kind of poetical enthusiasm, over this enchanted ground, we returned to the village."-From a letter of Sir William Jones to Lady Spencer, dated 7th September, 1769, in which he speaks of Milton "as the most perfect scholar, as well as the sublimest poet, that our country ever produced."

SHAKSPEARE "THE CHIEF OF ALL POETS."1

1. As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in Shakspeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. This latter also we were to have: a man was sent for it, the man Shakspeare.

2. Just when that chivalry way of life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking down into

1 From Thomas Carlyle's Lectures on Heroes, by permission of Messrs. Chapman & Hall.

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