sional man, all have their respective paths chalked out for them; but how many are there not included under any of these heads? If such were to retire from the world, would the world miss them? Alas no! In the selfish whirl of modern society the purest and the mightiest minds are when they sink down but as wounded soldiers in a disastrous retreat, the crowd rushes on and forgets them. It is, indeed, now in more senses than Sir Thomas Browne intended, "too late to be ambitious." Let us not, as some perchance have done, puffed up with vainglory, led away by dreams of fancied usefulness, measuring ourselves not by the just dimensions of our meridian shadows, but by the deceitful lengthenings of the world's evening sun, neglect the great purpose of our habitation in our earthly tabernacle, the salvation of our own souls. Things here are to be accounted evil or good, so far only as they unfit or prepare us to meet that day, which shall make "pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment." * * Hydriotaphia. 76 OF POETRY. "Not empire to the rising sun, Swift. THERE seems little foundation for the complaint we sometimes hear made, that the present is not a poetical age. It would be a strange anomaly in the history of mankind, if it were the fact, that an age, so full of experiment, so fertile in every species of moral phenomena, throwing light over so many of the darker mysteries of our nature, had produced no one capable of presenting its character to posterity in the most permanent and magnificent form. The truth is there are poets; but whether it be that the public taste naturally oscillates from admiration to neglect, or that the realities of life are become more interesting, strange and various, there never was a period when poets found more difficulty in obtaining a hearing. Another serious obstacle to the progress of the privileged few is the innumerable host of pretenders, who choke up all the avenues to the public ear. To notice these would be a trial of temper and a waste of time, but if we consider what poetry really is, and measure some of our poets by a fair standard, we shall find that there have been, and still are those among us who will endure the test. Poetry seems to be the art of clothing sublime and beautiful ideas in figurative and impassioned language metrically arranged. If in this definition the word rhythmically were substituted for metrically, there would be no sufficient distinction between poetry and prose, since there is rhythm or melody in the periods of all fine prose writers. It will include the parallelism of the Hebrews, which may surely be considered a species of metre. It will also include pathos, because pathos is beautiful, though poetical only so far as it is beautiful, as it may trench upon what the Greeks called "the hateful," which excites disgust; or the misery described may be so overwhelming as to excite anguish; in either case the bounds of poetry are passed, for in the depth of beauty there is ever a principle of repose. Thus Eschylus, not less philosophically than poetically, calls Helen "the spirit of a breathless calm."* Again, Shakspeare has been sometimes blamed for not terminating his tragedy of Romeo and Juliet according to the ver... sion of the story by Luigi da Porto and Bandello' who make Juliet awake after Romeo has poisoned himself, and before he dies. Now whether Shakspeare had read this version or not, a man who has studied the character of his mind will hardly believe that so obvious a conclusion did not suggest itself to him, but, as I once heard a German remark, such a scene would have been "trop déchirant," the ideal would have been lost in the natural. The Germans, during the latter half of the last century, broke up new ground in literature; the impulse they gave to the mind naturally communicated itself first to the English, as the people who in character and language most resembled them, and latterly, within the last few years, to the French and Italians. The old vein was indeed everywhere exhausted; the Germans have the merit of priority in point of time, and also of invention, as they had a literature to create, but they did but what the English, in a great measure at least, would have done, had the former delayed much longer. English writers began in fact to revert to their ancient models long before German literature was extensively known in this country; but though few were * Φρόνημα νηνέμου γαλάνας.” Agamemnon. aware of it, the influence of Germany was felt notwithstanding. To this influence, combined with the natural tendency of mankind to run from one extreme to another, from the depth of the definite to the heighth of the ideal, many of our faults, as well as of our excellences, must be attributed. From these two causes spring our besetting sins of sentimentality, vagueness, transcendentalism, and affectation; our worst literary feature, writing without thought, and without taking pains, seems chargeable upon the bad habit we have got into of being always in a hurry. The most difficult task of a poet is to unite the ideal and the definite in just proportions, so that one shall not swallow up the other. Goethe may be said to have entirely succeeded in amalgamating these discordant elements in the first part of Faust; but as the bent of his mind was to soar too high, in two others of his best works, Iphigenia and Tasso, he seems to have been compelled to tie himself down to the simple forms of the Greeks. Though the subject of this chapter is English poetry, it will not be inconsistent with the design, for reasons which will presently appear, to say a few words on the first part of Faust, the most remarkable work of the most remarkable man of our times. If we compare Goethe with Shakspeare, and there are few who can endure such a comparison better, |