not without ever and anon an upward glance for aid that he may name aright. But only in poetry is it possible to write adequately concerning the poet. The defence of poetry, however, may well be left to the humbler efforts of prose. It is said that poetry is of no practical utility. From those who look at things in so utilitarian an aspect as to see nothing more in the sun than a central hinge for the mechanical forces of our system, or a huge stove whereat the planets may warm their faces, such a verdict is not surprising. But this same sun has a higher, a moral, a religious utility; and this is the species of usefulness possessed by poetry. The mind most poetical is fitted to become the most religious. The poet and the Christian have alike a hidden life. Worship is the vital element of each. Poetry has in it that kind of utility which good men find in their Bibles, rather than such convenience as they have in their railway guides. It ennobles the sentiments, enlarges the affections, kindles the imagination, and gives to us the enjoyment of a life in the past, and in the future, as well as in the present. It cultivates those faculties within us, which the more we cultivate them, the more do we find meanness a thing impossible. From the elevation on which it places us, the steepness of the descent required for the deed of baseness appears in its true shame and peril. Under its light and warmth we wake from our torpor and coldness to a sense of our capabilities. This impulse once given, a great object is gained. The precise direction which this revived activity shall take, we learn as a subordinate branch of knowledge from a contemplation of ourselves and our particular circumstances. Thus Schiller has truly said, 'Poetry can be to a man what love is to the hero. It can neither counsel him, nor smite with him, nor perform any labour for him, but it can bring him up to be a hero, can summon him to deeds, and arm him with strength for all that he ought to be.' From a false estimate of the office of poetry in this respect, arises the error of those who would have the poet select every-day and domestic themes for his art. Thus Emerson, in one of his Essays, writes as follows :-' Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our negroes and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung.' Alas! for the poets that are, or that are to be, if it is only by hanging their pearls upon shapes so uncouth that they are to secure their immortality. The poet sets before men the lesson which it is for them, not for him, to apply. A writer who should endeavour to eke out his own deficiencies by thus seeking to give his poem an interest and a power from extraneous sources which he himself was unable to impart, would bear no little resemblance to those Nestorian missionaries among the Tartars, who professed to cure diseases with holy water, but mistrusting the virtues of their panacea, thought it expedient previously to mingle rhubarb with the large draughts of the sacred element they prescribed. The poet makes man wiser, by causing truth to speak to him in a language that appeals to his whole nature, not merely to a part of it, and which reaches the heart as well as the intellect. Taught by him, we render it filial love as well as filial obedience. He makes man better, too, by revealing as none else can do, the native loveliness of generosity and patriotism, affection and self-sacrifice. It is no fair argument to urge that many poets have fallen short of such precepts in their practice. Truth and beauty are not changed by the imperfection of their human advocates. If some have been 'like diamonds cut with their own dust,' such fate, while mournful for themselves, has ever been among the most memorable of lessons for others. The very monument posterity sets up perpetuates the warning as well as the glory. The failure of the undistinguished has its teaching for a few. But when the hero falls, all eyes are upon him. It is not before the dismantled hut, but when gazing on the ruined temple, that we feel with most solemnity the frailty of man. Poetry does much also to increase our happiness by keeping alive within us those early feelings of love and confiding faith which a life of contact with the world tends so commonly to extinguish. It prevents the heart from growing old with the body, and like Idunna's fragrant apples, whose taste preserved the gods of Valhalla from old age, renews within us a divine youth. Such were my son's views concerning the function of the poet in 1846. And it will, perhaps, be manifest to the reader that in these prose passages there are considerable indications of cultivated perception in relation to that art. But the writer is still intent on becoming a pastor and a preacher. Of preaching he can still say, 'I love it from my soul, for its own sake and for the sake of others.' He is quite alive, also, to the danger of allowing a love of fame— the passion so common with the poet-to become his guiding purpose. His great pleasure, he states, would lie in the sense of having done something in the face of difficulty which it would be good and beautiful to do. It is not needful to enter upon any defence of such aspirations. The desire to give form and reality to the good and beautiful may have respect to the good of others quite as much as to our own. In this view, the feeling under consi deration may spring from benevolence more than from egotism, from generosity more than from selfishness. The Creator Himself makes the created to participate in the pleasure of his work. We are wont to conceive of him as happy in the contemplation of such reflexions of his own happiness. And surely it may be permitted to the creative genius of man to find pleasure in the thought of extending delight kindred to its own to the distant and unborn. It is clear, accordingly, that there are conditions of the purest benevolence which are inseparable from what men call ambition. Power, eminence, influence may be earnestly coveted, but it may be from a desire of the gratification to be found in the consciousness of having done something to diffuse the peaceful, the pleasureable, and the elevating. One of my son's earliest pieces of poetry, written while a youth, is to this effect : : THE CHOSEN LOT. Mine be the music of the poet's dream, I woo the poet's heritage for mine, The stars of Fancy o'er his path that gleam Yes! though I wander but a little way On life's rough path, and many sorrows come Death's footsteps to my dream-embowered home, Time's breath will waft its leaves men's hearts among. According to the measure of a man's humane feeling will be his indisposition to be divorced from humanity-his solicitude to be felt in its midst as an influence for good. The manly makes us to be at one with man. The love of fame for its own sake is simply a love of self; but we may shrink from the thought of being forgotten by our species from a sincere love of them, and we may covet power in order that the pleasure possible to ourselves from that source may be a pleasure imparted by our means to others. It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact, that the most ambitious men are often the least selfish, while the non-ambitious are the most so. On these grounds, I was not disposed to deal harshly with my son's purposes and hopes, as set forth in the letter cited. They were, in some respects, disappointing to me. But it is with youth as with the newly-loosened carrier pigeon, which, from its high and strange place in the air, glances and darts right and left, before seeing the looked-for landmark, and rushing off on its intended track. Nor are the projects which in this stage of our experience seem to be failures really such. In ways too subtle for our foresight, they contribute to qualify us for doing the work which is ultimately given us to do. We rough-hew many things in our young and hopeful days, and what we finish at last is, perhaps, finished the better by the help of such preliminary practice. My impression was, that this contemplated series of ecclesiastical dramas would never see the light. But I had little doubt that something cognate would come, and would draw to itself a good deal of the spirit proper to the sort of compositions which were not to come. We have seen that with the opening of 1847 my son's religious and speculative perplexities had passed away. One effect of this better state of spiritual health was a determination to return to the plan of study which he had sketched for himself in his letter from Bremen. German philosophy was to be really studied after all. The letter to a friend, from which the following extract is taken, bears date February 7th, 1847 You will, perhaps, ask what can be occupying me so intensely? The fact is neither more nor less than this, that having had some conversation with VOL. I. e Tholuck on the matter, I find from what he said that my difficulty with the philosophy must have been more in my attempt at it alone, without any assistance, than anything else. Of course, if there be a possibility of accomplishing the business, I would not willingly disappoint my father in the matter. Accordingly, I have renewed my efforts in going three times a-week to a man who fills people with philosophy on being filled with a large sum of money, and not without success. I have said nothing to my father about it, nor shall I till I have concluded the study, because I would rather surprise and please him by being able to show him what I have done, than by merely speaking of what I mean or hope to do. The immediate consequence is, that I feel myself congealing into prose very fast, and more full of arguments than of poetical fancies. Perhaps it will not be until summer that I can thaw myself back again into poetry. But the thing is useful, and I need the sort of balance furnished by a heavy mass of logical lumber. The more I think of the matter, the more I am convinced that it was with great reason that my father wished me to make myself acquainted with the philosophy of the age. That it is false and worthless I feel convinced, but its effects have been so momentous as to demand the attention of all thinking men. It is this philosophy, and this alone, which has reduced Germany to that state of general indifference to all that is essential to Christianity, in which no longer a portion of it is found. It is true that the whole bent of my mind is so strongly set the other way—so much more full of love for art than for science-so much more disposed to admire a grand and beautiful production than a merely learned or argumentative one, as to deprive me of all inclination ever to write a philosophical work. But it is not less true that, as a part of mental education, such study will improve me; and that beyond this, it is only by thus entering the camp of the Danes, and, like my namesake, in the disguise of a minstrel, examining their positions for myself, that I can learn effectually to combat them afterwards. Such, in fact, is the great want of the age. With the strife between Dissenter and Churchman, Baptist and Pædobaptist, I do not feel inclined to take part. But the great verities of religion, and whether we shall have a religion at all, or take philosophy instead, this is the true point of contest, and here the stand must be made. During the remaining months of the session the writer continued a close student of German speculation. It was then that he laid for himself the foundation of that rational system of philosophy, as opposed to the sceptical and the mystical, which he employed with so much effect in after years. At the close of his severe labour in this direction, he thus writes: |