the pander of bad passions; but when genius thus stoops, it dims its fires, and parts with much of its power; and even when poetry is enslaved to licentiousness or misanthropy, she cannot wholly forget her true vocation. Strains of pure feeling, touches of tenderness, images of innocent happiness, sympathies with suffering virtue, bursts of scorn or indgination at the hollowness of the world, passages true to our moral nature, often escape in an immoral work, and show us how hard it is for a gifted spirit to divorce itself wholly from what is good. Poetry has a natural alliance with our best affections. It delights in the beauty and sublimity of the outward creation and of the soul. It indeed portrays, with terrible energy, the excesses of the passions; but they are passions which show a mighty nature, which are full of power, which command awe, and excite a deep though shuddering sympathy. Its great tendency and purpose is, to carry the mind beyond and above the beaten, dusty, weary walks of ordinary life; to lift it in a purer element; and to breathe into it a more profound and generous emotion. It reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of early feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the

spring-time of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid delineations of its tenderest and loftiest feelings, spreads our sympathies over all classes of society, knits us by new ties with universal being, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.

We are aware, that it is objected to poetry, that it gives wrong views and excites false expectations of life, peoples the mind with shadows and illusions and builds up imagination on the ruins of wisdom. That there is a wisdom, against which poetry wars, the wisdom of the senses, which makes physical comfort and gratification the supreme good, and wealth the chief interest of life, we do not deny ; nor do we deem it the least service which poetry renders to mankind, that it redeems them from the thraldom of this earthborn prudence. But, passing over this topic, we would observe that the complaint against poetry as abounding in illusion and deception, is in the main groundless. In many poems there is more of truth than in many histories and philosophic theories. The fictions of genius are often the vehicles of the sublimest verities, and its flashes often open new regions of thought, and throw new light on the mysteries of our being. In

poetry, when the letter is falsehood, the spirit is often profoundest wisdom. And if truth thus dwells in the boldest fictions of the poet, much more may it be expected in his delineations of life; for the present life, which is the first stage of the immortal mind, abounds in the materials of poetry, and it is the high office of the bard to detect this divine element among the grosser labors and pleasures of our earthly being. The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise, tame, and finite. To the gifted eye, it abounds in the poetic. The affections which spread beyond ourselves and stretch far into futurity; the workings of mighty passions, which seem to arm the soul with an almost superhuman energy; the innocent and irrepressible joy of infancy; the bloom, and buoyancy, and dazzling hopes of youth ; the throbbings of the heart, when it first wakes to love, and dreams of a happiness too vast for earth; woman, with her beauty, and grace, and gentleness, and fulness of feeling, and depth of affection, and blushes of purity, and the tones and looks which only a mother's heart can inspire ;-these are all poetical. It is not true that the poet paints a life which does not exist. He only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's etherial essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together

its scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys. And in this he does well; for it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence, and physical gratifications, but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher being. This power of poetry to refine our views of life and happiness, is more and more needed as society advances. It is needed to withstand the encroachments of heartless and artificial manners, which make civilization so tame and uninteresting. It is needed to counteract the tendency of physical science, which being now sought, not, as formerly, for intellectual gratification, but for multiplying bodily comforts, requires a new development of imagination, taste, and poetry, to preserve men from sinking into an earthly, material, epicurean life.

A FRAGMENT.

BY THE REV. CHARLES T. BROOKS.

"THERE is a rapture on the lonely shore
By the deep sea, and music in its roar :"
Thus sung the Bard; and yet he ne'er had stood
By "Purgatory,"* where its crystal flood

* Near Newport.

All green and glassy murmurs evermore,—
He ne'er had heard the music of that roar,
Nor had he heard the deep and sullen shock
Of bellowing billows at the "Sounding Rock."
He ne'er had heard the gently rippling wave
Moan o'er the pebbly flood of "Conrad's Cave."
Would he had heard these tones that he might tell
What music lingers in the solemn swell

Of the wild waves along our rock-bound coast;
How like some stern and ever mustering host,
Old ocean's billows roll and murmur here,

And greet with trumpet tones the enchanted ear.
Solemn and stately now the gathering throng
Of waves on waves deep-sounding sweep along
In measured march, far as the eye can reach
Onward they come, still onward to the beach,
Lo! in the van, with manes of flying foam,
Rank upon rank like fierce war steeds they come,
As up the beach the snow-white lines advance
Their curling manes in the gay sunlight glance.

But ah! these words are feeble-lovely isle!
Whether the summer waves serenely smile,
Or wintry breakers dash with solemn roar
Around thy stern and wild--thy noble shore—
Thou hast a charm no pen or tongue can tell.