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    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

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    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.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/44/