"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!"
said Shakespeare. The conception of a similar scene, and, no doubt, the unrecognised remembrance of this line, suggested,
"How calm on yonder stream the moonlight sleeps."
There a copyist would have stopped, but he was in close communion with nature, listened himself to her teachings, and learned more.
"How calm on yonder stream the moonlight sleeps,
"Fair image woman of thy maiden breast
"Unmoved by love. Anon some vagrant breath
"Ruffles its surface, and its pure still light
"In tremulous pulses heaves;—brighter, perchance,
"The feverish glitter, but its rest is o'er!"
Duke of Mantua.
The descriptions of nature in his writings are part of this ministry of interpretation. All see, but who, beside the gifted, can either by pen or pencil
"stay
"Yon cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape,"
permitting not
"the thin smoke to escape,
Nor those bright sunbeams to forsake the day."
Wordsworth's Sonnets.
Our great Maker gives to some men general excellence of parts, so as to secure success in whatever pursuit they follow; others are more exquisitely moulded, and receive from His hand that peculiar and indestructible form of genius, which no external circumstances can affect. It was that general superiority of abilities, which would alone have secured Mr. Roby eminence in any walk of life he had chosen; but the mechanical routine of monetary transactions could not prevent the artist's eye from guiding his pencil, render the ear deaf to the latent melody, or hinder for a moment the genius stamped as creative by its Maker from peopling the old ruins of the Past with living forms of beauty or of terror. Education could no more train mere excellence of parts to this, than any process of progressive development raise the lower orders of creation into the higher.