you can say for yourself is that you are not so great a fool as you seem to be.  Vealy is the period of life in which you filled a great volume with the verses you loved, and in which you stored your memory, by frequent reading, with many thousands of lines.  All that you outgrow.  Fancy a man of fifty having his commonplace book of poetry!  And it will be instructive to turn over the ancient volume, and to see how year by year the verses copied grew fewer, and finally ceased entirely.  I do not say that all growth is progress:  sometimes it is like that of the muscle, which once advanced into manly vigor and usefulness, but is now ossifying into rigidity.  It is well to have fancy and feeling under command:  it is not well to have feeling and fancy dead.  That season of life is Vealy in which you are charmed by the melody of verse, quite apart from its meaning.  And there is a season in which that is so.  And it is curious to remark what verses they are that have charmed many men; for they are often verses in which no one else could have discerned that singular fascination.  You may remember how Robert Burns has recorded that in youth he was enchanted by the melody of two lines of Addison’s,—­

  “For though in dreadful whirls we hung,
  High on the broken wave.”

Sir Walter Scott felt the like fascination in youth (and he tells us it was not entirely gone even in age) in Mickle’s stanza,—­

  “The dews of summer night did fall;
    The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
  Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,
    And many an oak that grew thereby.”

Not a remarkable verse, I think.  However, it at least presents a pleasant picture.  But I remember well the enchantment which, when twelve years old, I felt in a verse by Mrs. Hemans, which I can now see presents an excessively disagreeable picture.  I saw it not then; and when I used to repeat that verse, I know it was without the slightest perception of its meaning.  You know the beautiful poem called the “Battle of Morgarten.”  At least I remember it as beautiful; and I am not going to spoil my recollection by reading it now.  Here is the verse:—­

  “Oh! the sun in heaven fierce havoc viewed,
    When the Austrian turned to fly: 
  And the brave, in the trampling multitude,
    Had a fearful death to die!”

As I write that verse, (at which the critical reader will smile,) I am aware that Veal has its hold of me yet.  I see nothing of the miserable scene the poet describes; but I hear the waves murmuring on a distant beach, and I see the hills across the sea, the first sea I ever beheld; I see the school to which I went daily; I see the class-room, and the place where I used to sit; I see the faces and hear the voices of my old companions, some dead, one sleeping in the middle of the great Atlantic, many scattered over distant parts of the world, almost all far away.  Yes, I feel that I have not quite cast off the witchery