as their pleased companion. All is “calm and free,” and “full of life,” it is a “Holy Time.” What a picture!—what simplicity of means! what largeness and perfectness of effect!—what knowledge and love of nature! what supreme art!—what modesty and submission! what self-possession!—what plainness, what selectness of speech! “As is the height, so is the depth. The intensities must be at once opposite and equal. As the liberty, so the reverence for law. As the independence, so must be the seeing and the service, and the submission to the Supreme Will. As the ideal genius and the originality, so must be the resignation to the real world, the sympathy and the intercommunion with Nature.”—Coleridge’s Posthumous Tract “The Idea of Life.”
Since writing the above, our friend ”E. V. K.” has shown himself curiously unaffected by “that last infirmity of noble minds,”—his “clear spirit” heeds all too little its urgent “spur.” The following sonnets are all we can pilfer from him. They are worth the stealing:—
An Argument in Rhyme.
I.
“Things that now are beget the things to be,
As they themselves were gotten by things past;
Thou art a sire, who yesterday but wast
A child like him now prattling on thy knee;
And he in turn ere long shall offspring see.