Harpies and Sirens, and all the magic and Mystery of Medea and the Golden Fleece. What a delicious perpetuity of stimulus and excitement, when the unexplored world was not only a continual novelty, offering fresh nations and wilder wonders with every new coast that was navigated, or country that was explored, but supernatural prodigies, "Gorgons, and Hydras, and chimeras dire," established themselves in every lone mountain and sequestered cave; and the woods, waves, and fields were peopled with satyrs, fauns, and nymphs; while innumerable deities, hovering in the elements, occasionally presented themselves to human vision! In those imaginative days the faculties of man kept bounding from one enchantment to another. All nature was ready-made poetry, and life itself the very quintessence of vitality. Oh, the contrast of the present!--We have passed through all the stages of civilization, and arrived at the antipodes of the fabulous: the world is in its old age; the fountain of its young fancies is as dry and dusty as a turnpike-road. We have fallen upon evil days, ay, and upon evil tongues too, for there is a suicidal rage for destroying the imaginations of our own youth, and degrading into bald, hateful allegory, all the poetic visions and romantic illusions of the world's infancy. It is a dull, plodding, scientific, money-getting, measuring, calculating, incredulous, cold, phlegmatic, physical age-a tangible world, limited to the proof of sense- -a horrible æra of fact. We have dragged up Truth from the bottom of a well, and looking through her muddy spectacles, refuse to If it appear too see any thing beyond our nose. startling to aver that ignorance is bliss, I can maintain, from my own experience, that it is sometimes a misery to grow wise. With what awful wonder, not untempered by delight, have I, when a boy, contemplated a Will-o'-the-wisp, or Jack-o'-lanthorn, especially if he performed his luminous minuet in the vicinity of a churchyard; and how intensely was I interested in Dr. Shaw's account of the mysterious ignis fatuus which attended his whole company for above an hour in the valleys of Mount Ephraim, in the Holy Land; not to mention the numerous ballads and stories illuminated by the presence of this ominous flame!-Alas! it never appears to me now; and if it did, I should only recollect that one nasty philosopher has assured me it is generated by putrescence; another maintains it to be gaseous; and I have the satisfaction of reflecting that, under a new modification, I may every night see those fine old mysterious personages, Jack and Will, imprisoned in a lamp, and shedding their innocuous light upon the gutters of Thames-street and Pudding-lane. Their near relation, the fire-damp, the destructive agency of which, in mines, has rivetted my attention to many a tale of terror, has, by another lamp, been rendered so passive and uninflammable, that he now takes fire at nothing, and affords no materials for sympathy or fear. Thunder and lightning have lost many of their sublime associations, since I have learnt the theory of their production. Every theatre contains a Salmoneus -the electric fluid has been brought down from Heaven by a Prometheus in the shape of a kite, and we have even converted it into a plaything, bidding it stream from our knuckles at the working of a glass machine. Not content with familiarizing and degrading every thing that was grandly real, we have utterly annihilated all that was strikingly illusory. As to the man in the moon, whose features I could once distinctly recognize, I take it for granted that he has long since been had up, or rather down, to Bow-street, and committed as a vagrant. The Patagonian giants of Magellan, and the nine-feet high Tartarians of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, have no more real existence than the Brobdignagians of Swift; and as to the "Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," our cursed good sense compels us to laugh at them as ridiculous and unwarrantable fictions. Let no author calculate on being able to invent any thing permanently supernatural and appalling; all his impossibilities will be realized, his mysteries familiarized. Does the reader recollect the Spectre Boat in Coleridge's Ancient Mariners, or the Storm Ship in Washington Irvine's story of Dolph-Heyliger, which, to the consternation of nautical eyes, was seen ploughing up the waves at the rate of ten knots an hour in a dead calm, or sailing with great velocity right against the wind and tide, manifestly impelled in this preternatural manner by spectral or diabolic influence? These watery apparitions have lost their terrors the boiling of a kettle has dissolved the mystery; an impalpable vapour performs all these pro.. digies at once, and we go to Richmond and back in : the steam-boat, against wind and tide, by the aid of no other demons than a copper of water and half a chaldron of coals. Ghosts of all sorts have been compelled to give up the ghost, and the Red Sea must possess incredible shoals of exorcised apparitions. The unicorn is defunct as an imaginary animal; it has been recently discovered in the interior of Asia, and now only lives in stupid reality. A stuffed mermaid has been exhibited in Piccadilly. Sphinxes, griffins, hypogriffs, wiverns, and all the motley combinations of heraldry, will probably be soon visible at sixpence a-head; while the thought-bewildering family of witches, wizards, and conjurers, spite of the demonology of King James and the authority of the sorceress of Endor, have been all burnt out and obliged to move over the way-into the verge of history. Our judges no longer, like Sir Matthew Hale, fall upon their knees after condemning an old woman to be burnt for witchcraft, and thank God that they have not departed from the approved wisdom and venerable institutions of our ancestors; but content themselves with applying the same phraseology to other abuses equally inhuman, and alike destined to correction in the progress of light and reason. Oberon and Titania, and Puck and Robin Goodfellow, and all the train of "urchins, ouphies, fairies green and white," who were wont, with tiny feet, to imprint the mystic ring upon our meadows, and drop the magic tester in cleanly chambers, whither are ye fled? Ye are gone, with the " giants of mighty bone and bold emprise," to people the belief of less sensual nations, leaving us to grope our lonely way through this ignorant present, these dark ages of the mind, this night of fancy, this tomb of the imagination. I myself, simpleton that I am, have been instrumental in defrauding my mind of some of its most hallowed and romantic impressions, by joining the rabble rout whom the peace vomited forth to penetrate into all the sanctuaries of the Continent. What vague and reverential notions had I of the interior of a Catholic church !-how deeply interesting to read, at the commencement of a romance, that "the evening bell was just tolling for vespers, when the beautiful Donna Clara, attended by her Duenna, entered the great church of St. Ildephonso, at Madrid!”— and what a rich association of gorgeous shrines, lovely nuns, choral monks, mellow symphonies, floated up at the bidding of this simple exordium! I have stood in these churches. Heavens! what a revulsion !—It is like being admitted behind the scenes at a theatre. I have seen them used as a thoroughfare by porters and errand-boys, making a short cut from one door to another, first carefully dipping their dirty fingers in a puddle of holy water;-I have gazed upon shrines of tin and tinsel flaring in the sickly light of two farthing rushlights;---I have beheld nuns, old, ugly, and corpulent, with a bundle of keys, relics, and trumpery, at their girdle; and as to getting a glimpse of even one that was loveable---filthy hags! I wouldn't cross a five-barred gate to kiss a whole convent. A vineyard, which my imagination had clothed with all sorts of scriptural and poetical embellishments, |