Commemorative Feelings, or Miscellaneous Poems.

RUINS.

AMONG the class of pensive pleasures, which, like mournful music, soothe our feelings while they awaken our sensibility, there is none more interesting than the contemplation of Ruins.

Yet it is infinitely more easy to experience this sensation than to define its origin. Nor is it always for our happiness to look for causes when we are satisfied with the effects. But this is a subject that peculiarly awakens our curiosity and inquiry, as it is in apparent opposition to every rule by which we are in general influenced. For, if PERFECTION be in every instance the source of admiration, whether in

Nature or Art, it is here that IMPERFECTION, nay even DESOLATION, charms; and perhaps it is much more easy to say what it is not, than to define what it is.

Decrepid age, feeble, bending, tottering, in danger of falling with the least gust of wind at every step;­or some mutilated wretch deprived of a leg or an arm;­a house half pulled down, half standing forlorn, or ravaged and black with fire;­a garden whose fences are broken, and whose walks and wonted beauties are all choked and overrun with brambles and every reptile weed;­these all are Ruins! Yet in what different forms must they appear, before they can produce any thing like pleasure to the beholder? pleasure of that pensive kind so con‐

genial to a tender heart. It is, however, of no rustic origin: the vulgar cannot experience it: the peasant, scared and overcome with superstitious fears, passes with hasty steps the spot, where the pilgrim feet of taste and feeling will linger with untired delay.

To one of this cast, a fine Gothic moss‐clad ivied Ruin, whether it be abbey or baronial castle, is an object beyond measure interesting.

It is a beautiful record of ages past; a page of history illuminated by the pleasures of imagination; a theatre which the changing seasons and revolving years have decorated, softening every tint to harmony, and which the spectator can people with actors at his bidding. It is no

regretted friend he mourns; no individual sorrow blends with the scene: it is a "tale of other times," united with the sympathies of our nature for the fate of the human race "now to the earth gone down."

It is Desolation clothed in the garb of beauty by the hand of Time, that fascinates his attention, and steals him from himself.

Hours uncounted pass away; the sun has set, and the rising moon still finds him on the battlement. All personal regard absorbed, danger unfelt, unthought of, every faculty is enchained by the new beauties that surround him, which the moon begins to illuminate with still more enchanting effect.

The whole Ruin soon becomes a superb, a sublime transparency; and each broken pillar and Gothic arch appears hung with drooping plants and ivy, waving and sighing in the evening breeze.

And could Time roll his ages back, and give the scene its original 'perfections' the soul of taste and feeling would arrest his hand, and stay his reverted step; since to its slow and gradual progression he owes that soft, contemplative, and pensive pleasure produced alone by the BEAUTY of DESOLATION.