Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide.
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighb'ring eyes."

Such was the sensibility of that great man to the gentle, every day beauties of rural life, and it fills us with astonishment at the universality of his genius, which could turn from this visible, diurnal sphere, and create in the unfathomable regions of perpetual darkness, the sublimely terrific abstractions of Sin and Death.

In the more ardent temperament of Byron, this love of nature assumed a still more intense and passionate form. His description of the thunder storm by night among the Alps and over the lake of Geneva, has perhaps for thrilling intensity of feeling never been equalled.

"All heaven and earth are still-though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:-
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain-coast,

All is concenter'd in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.

"Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone;

A truth, which through our being then doth melt, And purifies from self: it is a tone,

The soul and source of music, which makes known Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm,

Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,

Binding all things with beauty;-'t would disarm The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.

"The sky is changed!—and such a change! Oh night, And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light Of a dark eye in woman! Far along, From peak to peak, the rattling crags among Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud, But every mountain now hath found a tongue, And Jura answers, through her misty shroud, Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

"And this is in the night:-most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,-
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!

And now again 't is black,—and now, the glee

Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth."

No where perhaps, in all literature, is the deep sympathy of the human heart with the beauty and sublimity of nature so vividly expressed as in this most memorable description.

Finally, I come to speak on that which is the main subject of this lecture, the immediate moral influence of poetry.

Poetry is the grand expositor of the moral and religious nature of man. All true poets are to a greater or less extent preachers of righteousness, and often when they least intend it. They utter the true voices of universal humanity. They give utterance in clearest and most definite expression to those moral convictions, which are God's primitive law written upon the heart. The soul of every man that is born into the world has a feeling of the nobleness and the glory of virtue. It has the consciousness that it was made for virtue. It has as deep a sense of the meanness and the degradation of vice. These sentiments no personal misconduct

can ever change. No man No man despises and abhors the sinner so much as he does himself. And no man has a heartier admiration for virtue than the habitual transgressor. It follows then, that the moral sentiments of good and bad men are the same. It follows likewise, that no flower of spring, no tint of the evening sky, can appear more beautiful to the eye, than moral loveliness and purity do to the mind. Mountain or ocean is not more sublime than incorruptible integrity, unconquerable fidelity, heroic courage in defence of truth and honor, than that self sacrificing love that is stronger than death. All these qualities are in the highest degree poetic, and the poet if he speak at all, must sing their praise. Whilst he is setting them forth in that exalted eloquence in which it is his prerogative to speak, he is stimulated in his task by the consciousness that he is uttering the sentiments of all mankind, and will meet a response in every human heart.

But vice is essentially unpoetic. To the higher nature of man, the moral and intellectual, where poetry is born, vice is loathsome and abominable. To name it even is accompanied by a secret shame, which damps

and extinguishes all poetic ardor. As Balaam could prophecy only when he would bless the people of God, and found the oracle dumb within him when he would curse them, so the poet is visited by visions of beauty and splendor only when he would uphold the cause of truth and goodness. Vice is moral deformity, and the more it is exhibited the more odious it appears. One of the strongest proofs of the identity and universality of the moral sense is, that it pervades the literature, and particularly the poetry of all nations, and is nearly the same in all. The basis of the Iliad is moral and religious. It inculcates the doctrine of a Providence, of a Witness, and Rewarder of men. Homer collects the armies of Greece before the walls of Troy to avenge an atrocious crime; and the reader when he sees that ancient city uprooted from its foundations, and its inhabitants scattered into slavery, cannot avoid receiving the great moral lesson which it is intended to teach, the endless woes which may be occasioned by one act of moral misconduct. The Greek tragedians considered their plays rather as solemn moral lectures, than as the means of mere public amusement.