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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 56, No. 346, August, 1844 by Various
page 61 of 310 (19%)
"Moonlight" is not quite clear enough--there are too many sparkling
lights. The "Shady Seat" is prettily designed; the lady looks rather too
alarmed, and, for the subject, perhaps there is not enough of shadow--
certainly not "enough for two." We at once recognize Stonhouse in the
"Evening effects of Solitude," and his "Neath Abbey." The former he thus
describes:--

"There, woods impervious to the breeze,
Thick phalanx of embodied trees--
Here, stillness, height, and solemn shade
Invite, and contemplation aid."

We are sure that Neath Abbey is from nature, for it has the sooty and
smoked character of that manufacture-ruined ruin. But we must not pass
by his "Dorothea" from Don Quixote. Nothing can be more happily
expressed than the deep shady retirement of the wood; there are nice
gradations of shades, which is the very character of retirement, and
Dorothea is herself in it, not a bright figure in a black mass--and good
is the figure too, but the feet are unfinished.

Mr Creswick is a large contributor, and least fortunate in his first: it
is not the scene so well given in verse by his friend Townsend; for it
is too pretty, too tight. It wants the "lane;" it is the road-side.


"THE WAYSIDE.

"A lane, retired from noisy haunts of men,
Whose ruts the solitary lime cart tracks,
Whose hedge-sides, propp'd by many a mossy stone,
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