1826. ] The Last Book. 14] 
chapter. Many there were whose pages resembled the leaves of the 
vine—others that emulated the melancholy grace of a cypress branch. 
Here you would see a hook whose delicate and silvery characters had 
been traced in milk, which the warm gaze of enthusiasm would alone 
find legible; farther on, another whose bright but chilling sentences 
were stamped in snow. Anon came rustling on the air the production 
of a mind that deemed the rivers too shallow, and the hills too low, to 
perpetuate the history of thought; and immediately you would see a 
book whose author had taken a lily for his inkstand, and quickened his 
budding images with dew: you might have “kept it as a thing to pray 
by.” One circumstance that peculiarly attracted my admiration was, 
that many volumes had so identified themselves with the subjects they 
discussed, as to have caught the lineaments of their ideal creations. 
Methought it was a touching sight to see the form of a White Doe wan- 
dering, in its patient mournfulness, through the mazes of a Forest Sanc- 
tuary ; it was a pleasant one to behold the long-loved Lady of the Lake 
spell-bound by the impassioned strains of a Troubadour, that seemed 
to have borrowed a note from ,every bird of heaven, and blended them 
into one exquisite intonation of triumph and tenderness. And then you 
were suddenly brought where Manfred, charmed from his “mood of 
stern disdain,” lay couched amid the Pleasures of Hope, yet wishing 
once more that he could be 
“ The viewless spirit of a lovely sound,— 
* * * * 
A bodiless enjoyment, born and dying 
With the blest tone that made him !” 
It was a sight equally stirring (to awaken recollection of a time no less 
golden than our own) to see the splendid imaginations of Sidney, 
Spenser, Marlow of the “ mighty line,”—of honest Deckar and melan- 
choly Ford—of Beaumont, Fletcher—Jonson the rare, and Shakspeare 
the gentle—embodied in a hundred volumes, making circles in the air, 
and wreathing the fine old pages of Chaucer, like “a band of children 
round a snow-white ram.” Milton, on swift but steady wings, breathed 
his etherial air in solitude—displaying to the sun the tail of Juno’s bird 
Ry ie with its hundred eyes, to recompense him for the loss of his own. 
. is themes consisted of alternate light and shadow—of divorce, and con- 
__nubial perfectibility. The spirit of Andrew Marvell was there—and 
Robert Herrick, making a May-day of the long festive year. There too 
% was “glorious John,” shadowed from courtly contamination by the 
_ “Flower and the Leaf” of poetry. Pope, freed from prosaic deformity, 
lived im symmetrical lines. Chatterton, and Collins, and Percy Shelley, 
and Burns—poets of misfortune—were banqueting like bees in the 
_ summer-time. Many too there were, of a different tone and temper— 
r Selden and Bacon—Steele, Addison and Burke ;—and a thousand more,. 
in as many languages, whose very names would make a splendid article— 
but whom I must pass by in silence, not even whispering an All Hail ! 
to Petrarch or Boccaccio. The choicest of those I have named 
seemed to occupy the very centre, the “seventh heaven” of the 
garden: for, it should be observed, there were various degrees 
of warmth and fragrance in the atmosphere, according to the 
good or evil done by the several orders of books. Many indeed never 
entered the garden at all, but were seen to hover about the banks of 
_ two rivers that gushed from the Hills of Criticism and encircled the 
