SECOND RHAPSODY.
Have we not been speaking of all the Seasons as belonging to the masculine gender? They are generally, we believe, in this country, painted in petticoats, apparently by bagmen, as may be daily seen in the pretty prints that bedeck the paper-walls of the parlours of inns. Spring is always there represented as a spanker in a blue symar, very pertly exposing her budding breast, and her limbs from feet to fork, in a style that must be very offensive to the mealy-mouthed members of that shamefaced corporation, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. She holds a flower between her finger and her thumb, crocus, violet, or primrose; and though we verily believe she means no harm, she no doubt does look rather leeringly upon you, like one of the frail sisterhood of the Come-atables. Summer again is an enormous and monstrous mawsey, in puris naturalibus, meant to image Musidora, or the Medicean, or rather the Hottentot Venus.
"So stands the statue that enchants the world!"
She seems, at the very lightest, a good round half hundred heavier than Spring; and, when you imagine her plunging into the pool, you think you hear a porpus. May no Damon run away with her clothes, leaving behind in exchange his heart! Gadflies are rife in the dogdays, and should one "imparadise himself in form of that sweet flesh," there will be a cry in the woods that will speedily bring to her assistance Pan and all his Satyrs. Autumn is a motherly matron, evidently enceinte, and, like Love and Charity, who probably are smiling on the opposite wall, she has a brace of bouncing babies at her breast—in her right hand a formidable sickle, like a Turkish scymitar—in her left an extraordinary utensil, bearing, we believe, the heathenish appellation of cornucopia—on her back a sheaf of wheat—and on her head a diadem—planted there by John Barleycorn. She is a fearsome dear; as ugly a customer as a lonely man would wish to encounter beneath the light of a September moon. On her feet are bauchles—on her legs huggers—and the breadth of her soles, and the thickness of her ankles, we leave to your own conjectures. Her fine bust is conspicuous in an open laced boddice—and her huge hips are set off to the biggest advantage, by a jacket that she seems to have picked up by the wayside, after some jolly tar, on his return from a long voyage, had there been performing his toilet, and, by getting rid of certain encumbrances, enabled to pursue his inland journey with less resemblance than before to a walking scarecrow. Winter is a withered old beldam, too poor to keep a cat, hurkling on her hunkers over a feeble fire of sticks, extinguished fast as it is beeted, with a fizz in the melted snow which all around that unhoused wretchedness is indurated with frost; while a blue pool close at hand is chained in iciness, and an old stump, half buried in the drift. Poor old, miserable, cowering crone! One cannot look at her without unconsciously putting one's hand in his pocket, and fumbling for a tester. Yes, there is pathos in the picture, especially while, on turning round your head, you behold a big blockhead of a vulgar bagman, with his coat-tails over his arms, warming his loathsome hideousness at a fire that would roast an ox.
Such are the Seasons! And though we have spoken of them, as mere critics on art, somewhat superciliously, yet there is almost always no inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, paintings, poems, or prose-works, that—pardon our tautology—are popular with the people. The emblematical figments now alluded to, have been the creations of persons of genius, who had never had access to the works of the old masters; so that, though the conception is good, the execution is, in general, far from perfect. Yet many a time, when lying at our ease in a Wayside Inn, stretched on three wooden chairs, with a little round deal-table before us, well laden with oatmeal cakes and cheese and butter, nor, you may be sure, without its "tappit hen"—have we after a long day's journey—perhaps the longest day—
"Through moors and mosses many, O,"
regarded with no imaginative spirit—when Joseph and his brethren were wanting—even such symbols of the Seasons as these—while arose to gladden us many as fair an image as ever nature sent from her woods and wildernesses to cheer the heart of her worshipper who, on his pilgrimage to her loftiest shrines, and most majestic temples, spared not to stoop his head below the lowest lintel, and held all men his equal who earned by honest industry the scanty fare which they never ate without those holy words of supplication and thanksgiving, "Give us this day our daily bread!"
Our memory is a treasure-house of written and unwritten poetry—the ingots, the gifts of the great bards, and the bars of bullion—much of the coin our own—some of it borrowed mayhap, but always on good security, and repaid with interest—a legal transaction, of which even a not unwealthy man has no need to be ashamed—none of it stolen, nor yet found where the Highlandman found the tongs. But our riches are like those that encumbered the floor of the Sanctum of the Dey of Algiers, not very tidily arranged; and we are frequently foiled in our efforts to lay our hand, for immediate use or ornament, on a ducat or a diamond, a pistole or a pearl, a sovereign, or only his crown. We feel ourselves at this moment in that predicament, when trying to recollect the genders of Thomson's "Seasons"—
"Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come,
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend!"
That picture is indistinctly and obscurely beautiful to the imagination, and there is not a syllable about sex—though "ethereal mildness," which is an Impersonation, and hardly an Impersonation, must be, it is felt, a Virgin Goddess, whom all the divinities that dwell between heaven and earth must love. Never to our taste—but our taste is inferior to our feeling and our genius—though you will seldom go far wrong even in trusting it—never had a poem a more beautiful beginning. It is not simple—nor ought it to be—it is rich, and even gorgeous—for the Bard came to his subject full of inspiration; and as it was the inspiration, here, not of profound thought, but of passionate emotion, it was right that music at the very first moment should overflow the page, and that it should be literally strewed with roses. An imperfect Impersonation is often proof positive of the highest state of poetical enthusiasm. The forms of nature undergo a half humanising process under the intensity of our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because only the soul of genius can give it a presence—though afterwards all eyes dimly recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their harps, and go drown themselves in Helicon.