But to our brook and pebbles. See how one pleasant thing reminds people of another. A pebble 
reminded us of the brooks, and the brooks of the poets, and the poets remind us of the beauty and compre- 
hensiveness of their words, whether belonging to the subject in hand or not. No true poet makes use of a 
word for nothing. “ Ccerule stream,” says Spenser; but why ccerule, which comes from the Latin, and 
seems a pedantic word, especially as it signifies blue, which he might have had in English? The reason is 
not only that it means skyblue, and therefore shews us how blue the sky was at the time, and the cause why 
the brook was of such a colour (for if he had wanted a word to express nothing but that circumstance, he 
might have said sky-blue at once, however quaint it might have sounded to modern ears : — he would have 
cared nothing for that ; it was his business to do justice to nature, and leave modern ears, as they grew 
poetical to find it out) ; but the word ccerule was also a beautiful word, beautiful for the sound, and expres- I 
sive of a certain liquid yet neat softness, somewhat resembling the mixture of soft hissing, rumbling, and 
inward music of the brook. — We beg the reader’s indulgence for thus stopping him by the way, to dwell on j 
the beauty of a word ; but poets’ words are miniature creations, as curious after their degree, as the insects 
and the brooks themselves ; and when companions find themselves in pleasant spots, it is natural to wander j 
both in feet and talk. 
So much for the agreeable sounds of which the sight of a common stone may remind us, (for we have not 
chosen to go so far back as the poetry of Orpheus, who is said to have made the materials of stone-walls . 
answer to his lyre, and dance themselves into shape without troubling the mason.) We shall come to 
grander echoes bye-and-bye. Let us see meanwhile how pleasant the sight itself may be rendered. Mr. 
Wordsworth shall do it for us in his exquisite little poem on the fair maiden who died by the river Dove. 
Our volume is not at hand, but we remember the passage we more particularly allude to. It is where he : 
compares his modest, artless, and sequestered beauty with 
A violet by a mossy stone 
Half hidden from the eye ; 
Fair as the star, when only one 
Is shining in the sky. 
Is not that beautiful ? Can any thing express a lovelier loneliness than the violet half hidden by the mossy 
stone — the delicate blue-eyed flower against the country green ? And then the loving imagination of this 
fine poet, exalting the object of his earthly worship to her divine birth-place and future abode, suddenly 
raises his eyes to the firmament, and sees her there, the solitary star of his heaven. 
But stone does not want even moss to render him interesting. Here is another stone, and another 
solitary evening star, as beautifully introduced as the others, but for a different purpose. It is in the open- ■ 
ing words of Mr. Keats’s poem of Hyperion, where he describes the dethroned monarch of the gods, sitting 
in his exile 
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, 
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 
Far from the fiery noon, and Eve’s one star, 
Sate grey-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone. 
Quiet as a stone ! Nothing certainly can be more quiet than that. Not a syllable or a sigh will stone utter, 
though you watch and bear him company for a whole week on the most desolate moor in Cumberland. | 
Thus silent, thus unmoved, thus insensible to whatever circumstances might be taking place, or spectators 
might think of him, was the soul-stunned old patriarch of the gods. We may picture to ourselves a large ; j 
or a small stone, as we please — Stone-henge, or a pebble. The simplicity and grandeur of truth do not 1 
care which. The silence is the thing, — its intensity, its unalterableness. 
Our friend pebble is here in grand company, and you may think him (though we hope not) unduly 
bettered by it. But see what Shakespeare will do for him in his hardest shape and in no finer company than 
a peasant’s : — 
Weariness 
Can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth 
Finds the down pillow hard. 
Sleeping on hard stone would have been words strong enough for a common poet ; or perhaps he ; 
would have said “resting,” or “profoundly reposing;” or that he could have made his “bed of the bare 
floor;” and the last saying would not have been the worst; but Shakespeare must have the very strongest | 
words, and really profoundest expressions and he finds them in the homeliest and most primitive. He 
does not mince the matter, but goes to the root of both sleep and stone — can snore upon th e flint. We see > 
the fellow hard at it — bent upon it — deeply drinking of the forgetful draught. 
Green, a minor poet, author of the “ Spleen,” an effusion full of wit and good sense, gives pleasant ad- | 
vice to the sick who want exercise, and who are frightened with hypochondria. 
Fling but a stone, the giant dies. 
And this reminds us of a pleasant story connected with the flinging of stones, in one of the Italian 
novels. Two waggish painters persuade a simple brother of theirs, that there is a plant which renders the i 
finder of it invisible, and they all set out to look for it. They pretend suddenly to miss him, as if he had ! 
gone away ; and to his great joy, while throwing stones about in his absence, gives him great knocks in the H 
ribs and horrible bruises, he hugging himself all the while at these manifest proofs of his success, and the i 
little suspicion which they have of it. It is amusing to picture him to one’s fancy, growing happier as the 1 1 
blows grow worse, rubbing his sore knuckles with delight, and hardly able to ejaculate a triumphant Hah ! j 
at some excessive thump in the back. 
