has consecrated. It is the office of his art, not merely to show to the mind its workings, to hold up to the reader a reflexion of his own feelings, but also to display before him things that by no other means could be revealed-wonders of which otherwise he would never have dreamed. Hence its power to ennoble and instruct. To cut off from poetry this, its high province, is to confound it with metaphysics, and to convert it into the genius which wields the dissecting knife in place of the flaming sword. Metaphysics shows man what he is— poetry, what he is, and what he should be. The one classifies his powers, the other educates them. The poet not only portrays nature, but strives after an ideal excellence, not contrary to, but combined from and founded on that which is real. While limning the earth fairly, he carries us to imagined regions beyond it, measures mortal capabilities, not only as they are, but as they will be, and shows us religion and virtue somewhat as they appear in their own country, as well as here, in their less worthy place of sojourning. ...... Simplicity has assuredly much to answer for, owing to the numbers who have paraded their barrenness under her name. No doubt, it is quite true that needless and incongruous imagery is a blemish; but may it not also be true that he who professes to be so scrupulous in the use of it has made a virtue of necessity, and exhausted his whole store to supply us thus poorly; while the fertility of his more prolific brethren excites his censure, from reminding him but too keenly of the woful pains he has undergone in bringing to light the few thoughts he has himself produced? Some have carried this principle so far as purposely to exclude from their dramas all that is ordinarily termed poetry, as though it were impossible to become poetical without, at the same time, being undramatic. This is too much the case with the dramatic poems of Mr. Taylor. Such a rule looks so like the welcome announcement of tragedy made easy, as naturally to meet with a cordial reception from the less gifted members of the poetic guild. No careful student of human nature, or of Shakspeare, its truest mirror, will deny that metaphorical language furnishes the natural utterance of passion. . Epithets are to poetry what finishing touches are to a painting-if too numerous they give the performance an air of heaviness. In artistic phrase, they kill the lights. The well-chosen adjective, on the contrary, directs a ray to that particular part of an object which it suits the present purpose of the poet to bring out into prominent relief. Such descriptive terms are often alone sufficient to constitute poetry of a high order—as when Milton describes the evening star as 'the sleeping sea, with handmaid lamp attending;' and Shakspeare's graphic expression, 'looped and windowed raggedness,' is another example. Such words contain the subtilized essence of a refined comparison. Such concentration of similitudes, with their brevity and point, have a magic in them to penetrate the soul, powerful as that of the weird needles of the Swedish superstition which parted walls in sunder by a touch. It is singular that those of our modern poets whose perceptions have been most deeply pervaded by the Grecian spirit should have departed so widely from it in the execution. Shelley, whose translations from the Greek are the finest in our language, and whose creations, for the most part, are so eminently classical in their design, has yet overlaid them everywhere with a profusion of imagery, which, with all its richness, is frequently involved and abstract. His poetry resembles nothing so much as a Grecian statue set up in a cathedral, and having its white surface strangely variegated by the crimson, green, and violet tints thrown on it from the painted window. Miss Barrett, who, in her Vision of Poets and Dead Pan, portrays, with a graphic force, like that of Æschylus, a succession of figures worthy of a place on the marble of some antique frieze, has greatly impaired the effect of some among her other poems by those peculiarities of diction which an apparent imitation of the great but immature genius of Keats has now-a-days rendered so prevalent. It will be seen from these passages that the mind of the writer was becoming rapidly alive to the distinction between the use and abuse of imagery in poetry. We have a right to conclude, that verse from his pen in 1846, when these paragraphs were written, would have been a great improvement, in respect of clearness and chastened simplicity, on the poetry published by him only two years before. The following passage from the same paper, though somewhat long, should not be omitted in this place : - It has ever been a part of the province of imagination to bridge with its rainbow those spaces which science has failed to fill up with any certain knowledge. But if it be true, that the more we know the more we discern the extent of the unknown, there can be no reason to fear that the triumphs of science will really diminish the domain of the poetical. These two sources of influence, like the spiritual and providential dispensations of the Divine Being, are formed to work in separateness, but not in hostility. Time, while opening to us many of the doors of mystery, points to yet more beyond them, of which he still holds the key. The poet's great work should be done 'unto God.' When this is the case, his occupation is, without exception, the highest upon this side heaven. To his faith in religion, faith in this fact should be added. The poet, in his Paradise, like Adam in his, has a right direct from God to give names to the creatures— 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 |