Cirrus@Austlit

Author's note:

Morning has always proved a vigorous and refreshing subject in the hands of our greater poets, Milton especially delighted to describe it, and his touches of that kind, though of an epical brevity, as to particulars, are yet lovingly alive - yes, alive with the whole spirit of the season. They are vital sublimations in the closet of all the cool delight we have before actually experienced upon the 'dawning hills' - of all the strong world-wide beauty into which our memory has been baptised, as it were, for ever 'under the opening eyelids of the morn,' and whilst going joyous forth 'to meet the sun upon the upland vales.' We feel, as we read, that every thought has been dipped in the day-spring. Every word is moist with the dewy freshness of the orient, and glows with a positional splendour that may well seem to have been flushed into it by the veritable presence of Aurora herself. The passage in Paradise Lost, beginning: 'Now morn her rosy steps in the eastern clime,' etc. - that passage alone will fully acquit these remarks of the slightest approach to extravagance.

Shakespeare, also, has interwoven with the mortal business of his subjects such rosy streaks and golden dashes of his morning memories, as are only to be equalled in beauty and richness by their recurrent realities. And they are even more prizeable than they, because everlastingly fixed and encompassed, as a universal intellectual possession, by the spiritual bounds of an immortalized sympathy: because (in other words) they are rich and racy draughts of the morning tide, as quaffed and relished by Shakspeare, and to partake of which, is to become in spirit, for the time, a guest of the Immortals.

The lusty spirit of Old Chaucer, too, ever and anon, is fairly heard to crow for exceeding joy in the bright and breezy mornings of the Past.