functions of divine significance. He is a justifier of the ways of God to men. Without that perfect sight of his, why should God have selected him? Had not very God selected him, how should he be so moved? Were his voice unmusical, how should men heark to his news? But once invested, once clearly persuaded that he is a vates, he finds his task become easy to him. He has only to sing aloud, and his heart is eased, and he is glad. Whether his tidings be sad or merry, he is glad; for he is serving an exquisitely beautiful Master. "It is," says Emerson, "dislocation and detachment from God that makes things ugly." He should have said seeming dislocation; no things are quite separated from God, and it is the poet's office to see the faint lines of communication. Those lines detected, the ugly thing is ugly no more, but is glorified in the strange and tender sweetness issuing from God's eyes.

And here we have the clue to all these Proteustricks in which the Seers, from Shakespeare downwards, delight. Everything, Everything, everybody, illustrates the poetic discovery. What the Seer

beholds as an idea he rushes to corroborate in life,

and so creates ideals. He is certain of his truth, but he is never tired of fresh verification. Again and again he approaches us in disguise,—now he is one man, then another man, now one woman, then another woman; but the same revelation is heard, albeit qualified by the character of the personage. By one mouth or another he is bent on reaching our souls. That is the dramatic fortitude, the vivida vis of song. But where one Seer illustrates his truth by human beings, his brother Seer seeks verification in nature, finds sermons in stones, and corroborate wisdom in all things. While Shakespeare plays Proteus, Wordsworth calls hills and woods and streams to witness. Seers there are also who gaze at one aspect of nature, so lost in looking that they can only cry, "See! see!" The light streams straight into their eyes; they will not stir, lest it die away;-they desire no verification beyond the tears on their own cheeks, the ache in their own hearts. Such an one was David Gray.

If Hamlet and the great voices cannot reach us, cannot stir us, tongues have been given to the very hills. If the hills and great forces cannot

move us, there are Seers translating the voice of the running brook. If the running brook and gentle powers have no spell upon us, the cry of a departing voice shall warn us of our souls. Blessings even on the childish voices, which utter tiny truths in tender syllables, dulcet to ears not over keen to the hearing of sounds from the world of spirits.

Let this, moreover, be said, -the Seer never lies. He is the man of truth, who cannot disturb the order and inferences of things, however much he may upset the order and inferences of idealists. He will admit no prevarications, no tawdry insincerities; he is largely sane and beautiful, and need not imitate the devices of the eyeless.

Is it objected that there have been great Poets who have sung things which modern culture admits to be false, not true? But eternal truth is one matter, and contemporary truth is another. We may not believe now in the terror and vengefulness of the Lord God Avatar of the Hebrews, although that belief dwelt in the thunder-cloud of Ezekiel's life, and issued from it in a lightning flash of prophecy. We may not believe in Dante's

Inferno, nor in Mahomet's Paradise, nor in the seventy angels of a Mussulman, nor in Milton's devil, but these are great, either as contemporary or poetic facts, true spiritually. For it is doubtless the business of the Seers to mark the

great epochs in the march of man; and on each occasion of chronicling, the Seer (being not God, but the finite priest) deems in all sincerity that the mystery of things is solved, and bursts into rapturous song. The voice of Job, in eternal wail, sounds over the tracts of time, sounding the weariness of human speculation. The spirit of Eschylus darkly commemorates supernaturalism at strife with intellect. Plato is an awful rumour of all that the unassisted mind of man can conceive of immortality. All these and such things were new, and true; and the intensity of the contemporary revelation, acting through the splendour of the eternal truth, has made them endure for ever. I pin my faith on the Incarnation, but I can admit the spiritual truth of other men who deny the Incarnation,- Plotinus, Proclus, Voltaire, Rousseau, and all others.

For the Temple of Nature, where the poet minis

ters, is a wondrous prism, in shining through which the perfect whiteness of God's truth is merely turned into its constituent colours. None of these colours are false, and none are quite true; here, then, before the prism, all creeds may join the Poet. He may enter in, who knows any one of the thousand names of God, which are scattered for mysterious sounds up and down the earth. Within the temple no blasphemy is heard. The prismatic radiance of God strikes across the altar. A medley of strange tongues is heard on every side,-tongues of all lands, from China to Cana of Galilee, crying together Πατὴρ Ανδρών τε θεών τε ! One understands as much of the white light as the other understands. The fact that each can see, is stirred, and sings exquisitely, is at least a sign that their contradictions are countenanced by the oracle.

It is in the weird pale circle of the moral law that the Seers are bound to have a definite terminology. No modern Seer, for example, can possibly despise the poor,-or sympathize with the scholastic views of Socrates' love for Alcibiades,—or deny the equality of natural rights.