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So to the unthinking boy the distant sky
Seems on some mountain’s surface to relie;
He with ambitious haste climbs the ascent,
Curious to touch the firmament;
But when with an unwearied pace,
He is arrived at the long-wish’d-for place,
With sighs the sad defeat he does deplore,
His heaven is still as distant as before!
The Infidel, by JOHN NORRIS.

In the modern tragedy of The Castle Spectre is this fine description of the ghost of Evelina:–“Suddenly a female form glided along the vault. I flew towards her. My arms were already unclosed to clasp her,–when suddenly her figure changed! Her face grew pale–a stream of blood gushed from her bosom. While speaking, her form withered away; the flesh fell from her bones; a skeleton loathsome and meagre clasped me in her mouldering arms. Her infected breath was mingled with mine; her rotting fingers pressed my hand; and my face was covered with her kisses. Oh! then how I trembled with disgust!”

There is undoubtedly singular merit in this description. I shall contrast it with one which the French Virgil has written, in an age whose faith was stronger in ghosts than ours, yet which perhaps had less skill in describing them. There are some circumstances which seem to indicate that the author of the Castle Spectre lighted his torch at the altar of the French muse. Athalia thus narrates her dream, in which the spectre of Jezabel, her mother, appears:

C’etoit pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit,
Ma mere Jezabel devant moi s’est montree,
Comme au jour de sa mort, pompeusement paree.–
—- En achevant ces mots epouvantables,
Son ombre vers mon lit a paru se baisser,
Et moi, je lui tendois les mains pour l’embrasser,
Mais je n’ai plus trouve qu’un horrible melange
D’os et de chair meurtris, et trainee dans la fange,
Des lambeaux pleins de sang et des membres affreux.
RACINE’S Athalie, Acte ii. s. 5.

Goldsmith, when, in his pedestrian tour, he sat amid the Alps, as he paints himself in his “Traveller,” and felt himself the solitary neglected genius he was, desolate amidst the surrounding scenery, probably at that moment applied to himself the following beautiful imagery of Thomson:

As in the hollow breast of Apennine
Beneath the centre of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eyes,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o’er the wild.
Autumn, v. 202.

Goldsmith very pathetically applies a similar image:

E’en now where Alpine solitudes ascend,
I sit me down a pensive hour to spend,
Like yon neglected shrub at random cast,
That shades the steep, and sighs at every blast.
Traveller.

Akenside illustrates the native impulse of genius by a simile of Memnon’s marble statue, sounding its lyre at the touch of the sun:

For as old Memnon’s image, long renown’d
By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch
Of Titan’s ray, with each repulsive string
Consenting, sounded through the warbling air
Unbidden strains; even so did nature’s hand, etc.

It is remarkable that the same image, which does not appear obvious enough to have been the common inheritance of poets, is precisely used by old Regnier, the first French satirist, in the dedication of his Satires to the French king. Louis XIV. supplies the place of nature to the courtly satirist. These are his words:–“On lit qu’en Ethiope il y avoit une statue qui rendoit un son harmonieux, toutes les fois que le soleil levant la regardoit. Ce meme miracle, Sire, avez vous fait en moi, qui touche de l’astre de Votre Majeste, ai recu la voix et la parole.”

In that sublime passage in “Pope’s Essay on Man,” Epist. i. v. 237, beginning,

Vast chain of being! which from God began,