“Sometimes adropping from the sky I heard the sky-lark sing; Sometimes all little birds that are, Now they seemed to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning! And now ’twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel’s song, That makes the heavens be mute.”
And Wordsworth in that beautiful couplet—
“Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam; True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!”
There is a sweet little bird in the description of a Summer’s morning, by Thomas Miller, which I would fain add to this goodly company—
“A little bird now hops beside the brook, _Peeping about like an affrighted nun_, And ever as she drinks _doth upward look_, Twitters and drinks again; _then seeks her cloistered nook_.”
But alas the prettiest part of it is borrowed from one of those same “lenders’ books.” John Bunyan’s—no less. The Interpreter takes Christiana into the “Significant Rooms,” where he shows her that “one of the chickens went to the trough to drink, _and every time she drank she lifted up her eyes toward heaven_. ‘See,’ said he, ‘what this little chick doth, and learn of her to acknowledge whence your mercies come, by receiving them with looking up,’” And now, having winged our way from angels to John Bunyan, let us lay these same lenders’ books upon the shelves until a future period.
_The Salamander: Found amongst the Papers of the late Ernest Helfenstein. Edited by E. Oakes Smith. Second Edition. New York: George P. Putnam. 1 vol. 12mo._
Mrs. Smith has written nothing so well calculated to convey to the majority of readers a clear sense of the richness, originality, and elevation of her genius, as this wonderful little story. It evinces a high degree of creative power, being an organic product of the mind, with a central principle of life, and vital in every part. The scenery, events and characters have all a living connection with the leading idea of the work, and illustrate each other. The form is the ever facile and yielding instrument of the plastic spirit within, and varies with the variations in the story and the changes in the thought or feeling expressed. By a felicity of nature, Mrs. Smith appears instinctively to subordinate the material to the spiritual; and thus by making the former simply the symbol by which she expresses the latter, she spiritualizes matter, and makes it the living body of the soul. She vivifies and vitalizes the form until it becomes o’er informed with spirit. Natural objects as used by the poet, derive all their effect from being the pictorial language of impassioned thought, the visible image being but the embodiment to the eye of the viewless force which penetrates and animates it; and fitly to employ objects as exponents of thoughts, a firm, decisive grasp of spiritual realities, of something lying back of all expression, is necessary. The moment the material predominates over or precedes the spiritual, it becomes so much dead matter, without significance, because without life. A great excellence of the present story is the constant dominion exercised by the soul over or through its forms of expression, and the physiognomical character of the style and imagery. When we thus speak of it as pre-eminently spiritual, we of course imply that it is thoroughly alive.
