pulous spirit of his wife, in the full consciousness of the turpitude of the act, that it is in violation of the most sacred laws of religion, honor, and hospitality, becomes the assassin of his sovereign and benefactor. The very elements seem to shudder at the horrid deed. "The very night became unruly, the chimneys were blown down, lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death, and prophesying with accents terrible of dire combustion, and confused events, new hatched in the woful time." But this was nothing to the tempest which then began in the soul of the murderer. The hour of retribution immediately commences, and no warning can be more impressive than the language of his guilty conscience.

"Henceforth to me there's nothing serious in mortality; All is but toys, renown and grace is dead.

The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees

Is left this vault to brag of."

The wife becomes a still more melancholy object. That indomitable spirit, daring almost to sublimity, is at length subdued by the subtile poison of guilt, and though before the world she carries a calm demeanor and an

open brow, when sleep transports her soul to the spiritual world, her body rises to enact before the astonished eyes of mortals the horrors that are going on within. How awfully is symbolized the undying remembrance of the soul in those "damned spots," which will not be washed away, and even when they are obliterated the smell of blood remains!

The exceptions which may be pleaded to the general principle, that the poet is always a witness for virtue, are only apparent. It may be said that Byron and Burns were immoral men, and have occasionally shocked the moral sense of the world as well by their writings as their conduct. It may be answered, that no where can they find a severer condemnation than out of their own mouths. There are other passages, where every principle is asserted which they violated, and which show that their moral perceptions were as much keener than those of other men as their intellects were stronger, and their passions more intense; and their prospects for futurity become blacker as we contemplate their moral obliquities, for we perceive that they must inevitably fall under the condemnation of that servant, who knew his

Lord's will, and yet transgressed it, who must "be beaten with many stripes."

The last universal sentiment of human nature which I shall mention as naturally finding expression in poetry, is devotion. No nation has ever been found so ignorant, so rude, and so barbarous as to be without it. The existence of a creating and superintending Power comes so near a necessary intuition of the human mind, that it may to all practical purposes be considered as such. All that we see around us, and all that we feel within us, bears testimony to the presence and agency of an Infinite Spirit, whose perfections are equally disclosed by the greatest and the least of his works, the spangled heavens which shine upon us by night, and the insect which floats upon the breeze. That Power, from the very condition of his being, sustains a near relation to every human soul. When the idea of God is once formed, it becomes in the highest degree poetic. To the Creator of all things we gradually transfer all the grandeur and beauty of the material world, and whatever of dignity and excellence there is in our spiritual being, till at length he sits enthroned amid the splendors of the universe.

And our natural conceptions of him cannot perhaps be better expressed than in the words of a modern poet.

"Thou art, O God, the life and light
Of all this wondrous world we see :
Its glow by day, its smile by night,
Are but reflections caught from thee:
Where'er we turn, thy glories shine,
And all things fair and bright are thine.

"When day with farewell beam delays,

Among the opening clouds of even, And we can almost think we gaze

Through golden vistas into heaven,
Those hues that mark the sun's decline,
So soft, so radiant, Lord, are thine.

"When night, with wings of starry gloom,
O'ershadows all the earth and skies,
Like some dark, beauteous bird, whose plume
Is sparkling with a thousand eyes,
That sacred gloom, those fires divine,
So grand, so countless, Lord, are thine.

"When youthful spring around us breathes,
Thy spirit warms her fragrant sigh,
And every flower the summer wreathes,
Is born beneath that kindling eye;

Where'er we turn, thy glories shine,
And all things fair and bright are thine."

But it is to divine revelation that we are indebted for the sublimest strains of devotional poetry. Without supernatural aid the human mind would never have attained to those pure and elevated ideas of the Deity which give the Psalms their surpassing beauty and sublimity. The Hebrew prophets, besides being the religious instructers of mankind, stand apart and on high in the literature of the world. Like the pyramids of Egypt, they are the imperishable monuments of another age, constituting not only the wonder of all time, but the inexhaustible treasure from which their successors have drawn their richest materials, as those vast structures of Egyptian art might serve as quarries from which half a score of modern cities might be built. As they were the brightest emanations of poetic and divine inspiration united, so has their power over the human mind and heart been unapproached. In them the soul in all ages has found the most adequate expression of its highest conceptions of the Invisible, the Infinite, the Eternal, of whose greatness and glory all human language is but a whisper and a breath. Take, for instance, a description of a thunder storm by David, and you imme