Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/141

 Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams, Wide stretching from the Hall, in whose kind haunt The Hospitable Genius lingers still, To where the broken landscape, by degrees Ascending, roughens into rigid hills, O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise."

As I called up the passage on the spot where, as a yet unformed conception, it had first arisen in the mind of the writer, I felt the full force of the contrast presented by the two pictures which it exhibits,—the picture of a high but evanescent human happiness, whose sun had set in the grave nearly a century ago; and the picture of the enduring landscape, unaltered in a single feature since Lyttelton and his lady had last gazed on it from the hill-top. "Alas!" exclaimed the contemplative Mirza, "man is but a shadow, and life a dream." A natural enough reflection, surely,—greatly more so, I am afraid, than the solace sought by the poet Beattie under its depressing influence, in a resembling evanescence and instability in all nature and in all history.

All very true,—none the less so, certainly, from the circumstance of its being truth in advance of the age in which the poet wrote; but it is equally and still more emphatically true, that the instability of a mountain or continent is a thing to be contrasted, not compared, with the instability of the light cloud? that, when the winds are up, float over it, and fling athwart the landscape their breadth of fitful shadow. And, alas', [sic] what is human life? "even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time,