beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of
Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the
Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on
their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! The writer's
genius, though not "dipped in dews of Castalie," was baptised with the
Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of
it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a
subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we
say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on
leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the
reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of
confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever
cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls
its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his
heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he
says,

"As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the
country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me
on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the
woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner,
locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an
uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest
composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and
make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take
me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh,
and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still
worse to me, for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it
would go off, and the grief having exhausted itself would abate." P.
50.