anomalies of such a state of society are not just
to be charged upon any class of events immediately
connected with them, and those events are most
entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it
most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those
who cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that
many of these anomalies have been incorporated
into our popular religion.

It was not until the eleventh century that the
effects of the poetry of the Christian and chivalric
systems began to manifest themselves. The prin-
ciple of equality had been discovered and applied
by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of
the mode in which the materials of pleasure and of
power produced by the common skill and labour of
human beings ought to be distributed among them.
The limitations of this rule were asserted by him to
be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the
utility to result to all. Plato, following the doc-
trines of Timæus and Pythagoras, taught also a
moral and intellectual system of doctrine, compre-
hending at once the past, the present, and the
future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged
the sacred and eternal truths contained in these
views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract
purity, became the exoteric expression of the eso-
teric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of anti-
quity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations
with the exhausted population of the south, im-
pressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in
their mythology and institutions. The result was
a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes
included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim
that no nation or religion can supersede any other
without incorporating into itself a portion of that
which it supersedes. The abolition of personal
and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of
women from a great part of the degrading restraints
of antiquity, were among the consequences of these

events.

The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art: "Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo crisse." The Provençal Trouveurs, or inventors,

preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealised history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the "Divine Drama," in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and

superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakspeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human kind is distributed, has become less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognised in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.

The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealised, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing

Riphæus, when Virgil calls justissimus unus, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in "Paradise Lost." It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of de vice to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in s slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them in the composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.

Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which fol- | owed it developing itself in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the

wings of his swift spirit world: and Virgil, with

his genius, had affected even whilst he created and none among the fl their notes were sweet, tus Calaber, Nonnus, L have sought even to f epic truth. Milton was if the title of epic in it to the Eneid, still les the Orlando Furioso, t the Lusiad, or the Fairy

Dante and Milton wer with the ancient religi and its spirit exists in the same proportion as its reformed worship of m preceded and the other at almost equal interva religious reformer, and rather in the rudeness al boldness of his censu Dante was the first awake he created a language, i sion, out of a chaos of He was the congregator presided over the resu Lucifer of that starry fl century shone forth from a heaven, into the darkne

is very words are inst as a spark, a burning thought; and many yet their birth, and pregnan has yet found no condu infinite; it is as the first oaks potentially. Veil ai and the inmost naked bea exposed. A great poem is flowing with the waters of after one person and on its divine effluence which enable them to share, a succeeds, and new relat the source of an unfor delight.

The age immediately Dante, Petrarch, and Bod by a revival of painting, sci Chaucer caught the sac superstructure of English the materials of Italian in

But let us not be betra a critical history of poc

society. Be it enough

effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the
word, upon their own and all succeeding times.
But poets have been challenged to resign the
civic crown to reasoners and mechanists, on another
plea. It is admitted that the exercise of the
imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged,
that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine
as the grounds of this distinction, what is here
meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a general
sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive
and inteligent being seeks, and in which, when
found, it acquiesces. There are two kinds of
pleasure, one durable, universal and permanent;
the other transitory and particular. Utility may
either express the means of producing the former
or the latter. In the former sense, whatever
strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the
imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful.
But a narrower meaning may be assigned to the
word utility, confining it to express that which
banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal
nature, the surrounding men with security of life,
the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition,
and the conciliating such a degree of mutual for-
bearance among men as may consist with the
motives of personal advantage.

Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this
limited sense,
have their appointed office in society.
They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the
sketches of their creations into the book of common
life. They make space, and give time. Their
exertions are of the highest value, so long as they
confine their administration of the concerns of the
inferior powers of our nature within the limits due
to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys
gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as
some of the French writers have defaced, the
eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations
of men.
Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the
political economist combines labour, let them be-
ware that their speculations, for want of corre-
spondence with those first principles which belong
to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in
modern England, to exasperate at once the ex-
tremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified
the saying, "To him that hath, more shall be
given; and from him that hath not, the little that
he hath shall be taken away." The rich have
become richer, and the poor have become poorer;
and the vessel of the state is driven between the
Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.
Such are the effects which must ever flow from an
unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest
sense; the definition involving a number of apparent
paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of

harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, "It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of mirth." Not that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the ecstacy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.

The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or poetical philosophers.

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakspeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.

We have more moral, political and historical

* Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere

reasoners

wisdom, than we know how to reduce into praetice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let "I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage." We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind! From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.

The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates new materials of know.edge, and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that

which, if blighted, deni and withholds from the ment and the succession of life. It is the perfect and bloom of all thing the colour of the ros elements which compose dour of unfaded beauty and corruption. What ism, friendship—what beautiful universe whic our consolations on thi what were our aspirat did not ascend to bring eternal regions where calculation dare not e like reasoning, a power the determination of the "I will compose poetry. cannot say it; for the fading coal, which some inconstant wind, awaken this power arises from flower which fades and and the conscious port unprophetic either of it ture. Could this inf original purity and fore dict the greatness of the position begins, inspirat cline, and the most glor been communicated to feeble shadow of the of poet. I appeal to the gr day, whether it is not an finest passages of poetr and study. The toil an by critics, can be justly more than a careful ol moments, and an artificia between their suggestion conventional expressions posed by the limitednes itself; for Milton concei a whole before he execu have his own authority "dictated" to him the And let this be an ans allege the fifty-six vario line of the Orlando F produced are to poetry w This instinct and intuitio is still more observable in arts; a great statue or power of the artist as womb; and the very

hands in formation is incapable of accounting to
itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media
of the process.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest
moments of the happiest and best minds. We
are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person,
sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and
always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden,
but elevating and delightful beyond all expression:
so that even in the desire and the regret they
leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating
as it does in the nature of its object. It is as
it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature
through our own; but its footsteps are like those
of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm
erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the
wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corre-
sponding conditions of being are experienced prin-
cipally by those of the most delicate sensibility
and the most enlarged imagination; and the state
of mind produced by them is at war with every
base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked
with such emotions; and whilst they last, self
appears as what it is, an atom to a universe.
Poets are not only subject to these experiences
as spirits of the most refined organisation, but
they can colour all that they combine with the
evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
trait in the representation of a scene or a passion,
will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in
those who have ever experienced these emotions,
the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the
past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best
and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the
vanishing apparitions which haunt the interluna-
tions of life, and veiling them, or in language or in
form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing
sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom
their sisters abide abide, because there is no
portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit
which they inhabit into the universe of things.
Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the
divinity in man.

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is tnost beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things. Ir transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow

from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.

All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the percipient. "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we per ceive, and to imagine that which we know. creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.

It

A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, or the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men and the exceptions, as they regar those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge and executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives of those who are "there sitting where we dare not soar," are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to