On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    its honour . Grey and hoary with antiquity , the massive columns , though scathed and rent and bruised by a thousand storms , yet uplift themselves in stately dignity ; or , like reverend sages , more reverend from the scathe of elements , stretching out their arms in counsel , or upwards in appeal to the Father of Creation : and they look so nobly calm , so gently majestic . Enchained for a

    time is every faculty , corporeal and intelligent , till wondering love grows bold , familiar ; but in that boldness is no rudeness : it is reverential still : like the confiding assurance of candid and unsophisticated youth in the supervision of an ancient man , whose face age has not crimped with frowns—whose voice peevishness has not cracked into treble pipes by scolding—whose moral beauty and benignity have grown under Time ' s touch—whose

    authority is benevolence . In the familiarity is no insolence ., no presumption , nor servilely courting of old Wisdom ' s condescension . It is the open spirit of a child to a parent , whose philosophy in training that child , has been , and is , so unlike so many of the world ' s wise ones ; the philosophy which has deemed the task , the rod , the scourge , the unswerving imperative mood , and all lessons of fear , and duty , and obedience , and all coercive disci ' pline , do but alienate the child ' s love , and turn the fountains of

    affection to lasting- streams of bitterness , which transform beauty into deformity—cnange light to darkness—substitute hypocrisy of form for mind ' s earnestness , and dry , heart-gnawing convention and compulsion for the gushings and bubblings of devoted tenderness . It is in the assurance of reciprocated affection that youth grows bold in ancient wisdom ' presence , and that such child is familiar with such parent . So , on the subsiding of the floods of emotion , mine-line awe . and love , and reverence , vou floods of emotionmingling aweand loveand reverence , you

    , , , stand amidst this age-worn magnificence , and look upon those antique oaks with a deep serene of joy . Your eye courses the whole ; then approach and examine in detail parts and particulars : and how many images arise from the survey ! Fancy suggests an alternation and succession of comparisons , and each comparison gives instant birth to its appropriate feeling . You ring the changes on your sensations : yet all are pleasant ones .

    Listen—you cannot avoid thinking that these venerable sages are going to speak : would they would ! What lessons they might teach—what important secrets divulge : they who have looked on the world for ten centuries , what think they of the ' social system V Of what politics are they ? Tory ? Whi g ? Radical ? What ? Radical to a certainty ; genuine , staunch , honest

    radicals , for they would have all mankind happy at no declension , no party ' s suffering . What tales might tiiey tell of fear and strife , of hypocrisy and war , of song and sport , of mirth and laughter . Mirth and laughter ?—ay , there have been jovial doings in this hall of ages . Were not Robin Hood and his merry men all occasional deniiens here ? To be sure they were ; this was the favourite retreat , and here it was they took their

    Untitled Article

    496 A Peep into Sherwood Forest .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 426, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/44/