THE CHILD ANGEL; A DREAM. 1 talk of curtailing this charge, and doing with- supplementary youth, a sorry supplement inout that for the future and the hope that deed, but I fear the best that is to be had. youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which We must ride where we formerly walked: live you were never poor till row), we pocketed better and lie softer-and shall be wise to do up our loss, and in conclusion, with lusty so-than we had means to do in those good brimmers' (as you used to quote it out of old days you speak of. Yet could those days hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him), return-could you and I once more walk our we used to welcome in the coming guest.' thirty miles a day-could Bannister and Mrs. Now we have no reckoning at all at the end Bland again be young, and you and I be of the old year-no flattering promises about young to see them could the good old oneshilling gallery days return-they are dreams, the new year doing better for us." Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most my cousin, now-but could you and I at this occasions, that when she gets into a rhetori- moment, instead of this quiet argument, by cal vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this I could not help, however, smiling at the luxurious sofa-be once more struggling up phantom of wealth which her dear imagina- those inconvenient staircases, pushed about, tion had conjured up out of a clear income of and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest hundred pounds a year. "It is rabble of poor gallery scramblers could I poor true we were happier when we were poorer, once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours but we were also younger, my cousin. I am and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, afraid we must put up with the excess, for if which always followed when the topmost we were to shake the superflux into the sea, stair, conquered, let in the first light of the we should not much mend ourselves. That whole cheerful theatre down beneath us we had much to struggle with, as we grew I know not the fathom line that ever touched to be most a descent so deep as I would be willing to up together, we have reason thankful. It strengthened and knit our com- bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or pact closer. We could never have been what the great Jew Ris supposed to have, we have been to each other, if we had always to purchase it. And now do just look at had the sufficiency which you now complain of. The resisting power-those natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten with us are long since passed away. Competence to age is that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty, insipid, half Madonaish chit of a lady in that very blue summerhouse." THE CHILD ANGEL; A DREAM. but a kind of fairy-land heaven, I CHANCED upon the prettiest, oddest, fan- | heaven tastical thing of a dream the other night, that about which a poor human fancy may have you shall hear of. I had been reading the leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, Loves of the Angels," and went to bed with without presumption. my head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary legend. It had given birth-I was present to innumerable conjectures; and, I remember the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, "what could come of it." Methought-what wild things dreams are! -at what would you imagine? - at an angel's gossiping. Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or whether it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I know-but or there lay, sure enough, wrapt in its little a Child Angel. I was suddenly transported, how whither I could scarcely make out- but to cloudy swaddling-bands Sun-threads filmy beams- ran through some celestial region. It was not the real heavens neither not the downright Bible the celestial napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged orders their natures (not grief), put back their bright intelligences, and reduce their ethereal minds, schooling them to degrees and slower processes, so to adapt their lessons to the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the half-earth-born; and what intuitive notices they could not repel (by reason that their nature is, to know all things at once) the half-heavenly novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its understanding; so that Humility and Aspiration went on even-paced in the instruction of the glorious Amphibium. hovered round, watching when the new-born should open its yet closed eyes; which, when it did, first one, and then the other with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not such as, stained with fear, dim the expanding eyelids of mortal infants, but as if to explore its path in those its unhereditary palaces - what an inextinguishable titter that time spared not celestial visages! Nor wanted there to my seeming O, the inexplicable simpleness of dreams!-bowls of that cheering nectar, -which mortals caudle call below.. Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants, stricken in years, as it might seem, so dexterous were those heavenly attendants to counterfeit kindly similitudes of earth, to greet with terrestrial child-rites the young present which earth had made to heaven. A Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full symphony, as those by which the spheres are tutored; but, as loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes, muffled; so to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the Angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions but forthwith flagged and was recovered into the arms of those full-winged angels. And a wonder it was to see how, as years went round in heaven a year in dreams is as a day-continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but wanting the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering-still caught by angel hands, for ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven. And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was to be called Ge-Urania, because its production was of earth and heaven. And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces: but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of humen imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic bosoms; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the immortal lame one. And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, with pain and strife to But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breathe the air of that super-subtile region, its portion was, and is, to be a child for ever. And because the human part of it might not press into the heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those full-natured angels tended it by turns in the purlieus of the palace, where were shady groves and rivulets, like this green earth from which it came; so Love, with Voluntary Humility, waited upon the entertainment of the new-adopted. And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upon earth, and still goes lame and lovely. By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone sitting by the grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a Child; but not the same which I saw in heaven. A mournful hue overcasts its lineaments; nevertheless, a correspondency is between the child by the grave, and that celestial orphan, whom I saw above: and the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly is a shadow or em blem of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial. And this correspondency is not to be understood but by dreams. And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, how that once the angel Nadir, being exiled from his place for mortal passion, upspringiag on the wings of parental love (such power had parental love for a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable law) appeared for a brief instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely — but Adsh sleepeth by the river Pison. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. DEПORTATIONS from the use of strong I have known one in that state, when he liquors have been the favourite topic of sober has tried to abstain but for one evening, declaimers in all ages, and have been received though the poisonous potion had long ceased with abundance of applause by water-drink- to bring back its first enchantments, though ing critics. But with the patient himself, he was sure it would rather deepen his the man that is to be cured, unfortunately gloom than brighten it, in the violence of their sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the the struggle, and the necessity he has felt of evil is acknowledged, the remedy simple. getting rid of the present sensation at any Abstain. No force can oblige a man to raise rate, I have known him to scream out, to the glass to his head against his will. 'Tis cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the as easy as not to steal, not to tell lies. strife within him. Alas! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false witness, have no constitutional tendency. These are actions indifferent to them. At the first instance of the reformed will, they can be brought off without a murmur. The itching finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with the same natural delight give forth useful truths with which it has been accustomed to scatter their pernicious contraries. But when a man has commenced sot O pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the name which I have written, first learn what the thing is; how much of compassion, how much of human allowance, thou mayest virtuously mingle with thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle. Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain but going through fire? what if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? what if a process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through? is the weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul? Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see them all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it. I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a measure, can do no worse injury to than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them this discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, who, trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from the contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to the weak, the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the convivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for term of life. Twelve years ago I had completed my sixand-twentieth year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty much in solitude. My companions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the X faculties which God had given me, I have length opened my eyes to the supposed reason to think, did not rust in me unused. qualities of my first friends. No trace of them is left but in the vices which they in. troduced, and the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise ample retribution for any supposed infidelity that I may have been guilty of towards them. My next more immediate companions were and are persons of such intrinsic and felt About that time I fell in with some companions of a different order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunken; yet seemed to have something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or what passes for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fancy I certainly possessed a larger share than my companions. Encouraged by their worth, that though accidentally their ac applause, I set up for a professed joker! I, who of all men am least fitted for such an occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I experience at all times of finding words to express my meaning, a natural nervous impediment in my speech! Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit. When you find a tickling relish upon your tongue disposing you to that sort of conversation, especially if you find a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly your greatest destruction. If you cannot crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake for such, divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, but not as I do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks. To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools; to be esteemed dull when you cannot be witty, to be applauded for witty when you know that you have been dull; to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty which no premeditation can give; to be spurred on to efforts which end in contempt; to be set on to provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred; to give pleasure and be paid with squinting malice; to swallow draughts of life-destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors; to mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of grudging applause, are the wages of buffoonery and death. quaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know that if the thing were to do over again, I should have the courage to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the benefit. I came to them reeking from the steams of my late over-heated notions of companionship; and the slightest fuel which they unconsciously afforded, was sufficient to feed my old fires into a propensity. They were no drinkers, but, one from professional habits, and another from a custom derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backsliding penitent. The transition, from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope to commute. He beats us at barter; and when we think to set off a new failing against an old infirmity, 'tis odds but he puts the trick upon us of two for one. That (comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him in the end seven worse than himself. It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines, through stronger wine and water, through small punch, to those juggling compositions, which, under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under less and less water continually, until they come next to none, and so to none at all. But it is hateful to disclose the secrets of my Tartarus. I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of believing me, were I to tell them what tobacco has been to me, the drudging service which I have paid, the Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving slavery which I have vowed to it. How, all connexions which have no solider fasten- when I have resolved to quit it, a feeling as ing than this liquid cement, more kind to of ingratitude has started up; how it has put me than my own taste or penetration, at on personal claims and made the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of me. But out of the black depths, could I be it casually in a book, as where Adams takes heard, I would cry out to all those who have his whiff in the chimney-corner of some but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could inn in Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the the youth, to whom the flavour of his first Complete Angler breaks his fast upon a wine is delicious as the opening scenes of morning pipe in that delicate room Piscator- life or the entering upon some newly disibus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down covered paradise, look into my desolation, the resistance of weeks. How a pipe was and be made to understand what a dreary ever in my midnight path before me, till the thing it is when a man shall feel himself vision forced me to realise it. - how then going down a precipice with open eyes its ascending vapours curled, its fragrance and a passive will, to see his destruction lulled, and the thousand delicious minister- and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel ings conversant about it, employing every it all the way emanating from himself; to faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How perceive all goodness emptied out of him, from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it turned to a negative relief, thence to a restlessness and dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret stands confessed in all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it beyond the power of revocation. Bone of my h bore Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, to reckon up the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot? and yet not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins :- could he see my fevered eye, feverish with last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for this night's repetition of the folly; could he feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outery to be delivered, — it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation; to make him clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em To suffer WET DAMNATION to run thro' 'em. Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be that fine thing you would have us to understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders in your instance that you do not return to those habits from which you would induce others never to swerve? if the blessing be worth preserving, is it not worth recovering? I have seen a print after Correggio, in which three female figures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound at the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him, Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repugnance at the same instant of time is applying a snake to his side. In his face is feeble Recovering! O if a wish could transport delight, the recollection of past rather than perception of present pleasures, languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the former, remorse preceding action—all this represented in one point of time. When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my own condition. me back to those days of youth, when a draught from the next clear spring could slake any heats which summer suns and youthful exercise bad power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy hermit! In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innocence only makes me sick and faint. But is there no middle way betwixt total Of that there is no hope that it should abstinence and the excess which kills you? ever change. The waters have gone over. -For your sake, reader, and that you may |