We could never quite uand the philosophy of this arra, or the wisdom of our aors in sending us for instru to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he . Man found out long sixes. -- Hail dle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon, the ki luminary of the three if we may not rather style thee their radiay, mild vice-roy of the moon ! -- We love to read, talk, sit sile, drink, sleep, by dlelight. They are every bodys sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household pla. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must our aors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fasthey must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbours cheek to be sure that he uood it? This ats for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlanternd nights. Jokes came in with dles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a melange of ce carving they must have made of it ! -- here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horses shoulder -- there another had scooped his palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mares milk. There is her good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilised times, has never experiehis, when at some eic table he has enced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came? The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally, you tell pork from veal in the dark? or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the dle from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, hut he knows it only by an infereill the restored light, ing in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both sehe full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how he burnishes! [p 272] -- There is absolutely no such thing as reading, but by a dle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam e about you, h and teazing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstras. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light, we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the iial Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the suns light. They are abstracted works --
"Things that were born, when the still night,
And his dumb dle, saw his ping throes."
Marry, daylight -- daylight might furnish the images, the crude material; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing (as mihor hath it), they must be tent to hold their inspiration of the dle. The mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night and silence call out the starry fancies. Miltons M Hymn on Paradise, we would hold a good wager, e midnight; and Taylors richer description of a sun-rise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in these our humble lucubrations, tune our best measured ces (Prose has her ces) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier wat, "blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted, courts our endeavours. We would