goes on to show—to produce a picture in words, there must be a principle of selection, and that principle cannot be comprehended without much reflection on the mode in which external objects operate upon the mind. "Sometimes a happy genius, and sometimes a strong passion, vivifies a whole scene in a single line. But the observer of nature, who has neither genius, nor passion, nor metaphysics, can do little or nothing but enumerate. That he may do with great accuracy, for he may be a noticing and strong-sighted person. Not a feature of a landscape shall escape him—each sentence of his description shall constitute a natural and true image, and ordinary people like himself will think it admirable. Yet shall it be altogether worthless; while one stanza of Burns' wafts you into the very heart of Paradise." And thus it is that such a man as Wordsworth will make more of
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye,
than men of low degree will make of a cedar of Lebanon, or a Royal Oak:—"he will make a better poem on a gooseberry bush, than you will do on the great Persian sycamore, which is about seventy feet in girth." There is a "knack" in first-rate descriptions; and this knack is innate, or connate, or what you will—except acquired. Improved and refined by practice it unquestionably is; but the artificial manufacture of it is Brummagem ware—and the difference between them is that between delf and porcelain, plated and plate. Now, Miss Mitford has a natural gift for description. It is not, perhaps, of a very lofty order, or large compass; and though tinged with the couleur de rose of fancy which idealises, it has little of the imaginative, creative
Light that never was on sea or shore.
But in her own sphere, she is a fine describer. Let but her foot be on her native heath, and her name is—Miss Mitford. Her testimony is not given on hearsay, or on the strength of a well-stocked library; she testifies to what she has seen, and heard, and felt, on the breezy downs of the Day-side of Nature. To her we may apply what an eminent French critic says of the greatest of living French novelists:—"On n'a pas affaire ici à un peintre amateur qui a traverse les champs pour y prendre des points de vue: le peintre y a vécu, y a habité des années; il en connait toute chose et en sait l'âme."[1] Some three-and-twenty years since, the Shepherd of the Noctes was made to say, "I'm just vera fond o' that lassie—Mitford. She has an ee like a hawk's, that misses naething, however far off—and yet like a dove's, that sees only what is nearest and dearest, and round about the hame-circle o' its central nest. I'm just excessive fond o' Miss Mitford."[2] Cowper does not more effectually transport us, without material locomotion, from the fireside by
- ↑ "Causeries du Lundi," tom, i., p. 282.
- ↑ The gallant shepherd goes on, in his fervour, to protest that "the young gentlemen o' England should be ashamed o' theirsells for letting her name be Mitford. They should marry her whether she will or no—for she would mak baith a useful and agreeable wife. That," concludes honest James,—"that's the best creetishism on her warks.",,,,—Noctes, No. xli (1829); see also Noctes, Nos. xxix. and xxxix.
