through the future, as if it were the passing hour. They observe the contradiction between things as they are, and things as they should be; and though they have no power to turn the current of circumstances, that flows with all the vehemence prejudice and passion can produce, yet they foresee and foretell the change with as much accuracy as if the life of all future events were before them, and as if they were already actors in the scene which is yet to come. Their influence is that of mind-the silent, but deep and lasting effect which reflection produces on all who are capable of appreciating the object it has toiled for. They make no sudden inroads, and create no violent revolutions, but improve man's social and moral condition by the gentler path of thought. Their sole sceptre is that of character-the high moral energy of virtue. Men are made to feel that their interests are in the care of their safest and. only true benefactors, and the result of their exertions is seen in the slow, but constant progress of civilisation, which is both the proof and the consequence of intellectual improvement.

Their rule is not the barren one of mere station. There are no marshaled train of followers, no armies, no wealth, none of the common modes of clouding the perceptions of mankind by an imposing array of power, and none of the false dignity which men honour and fear in their hearts, but which continues not beyond the grave of its possessor, and holds its last day of state in his shroud. Their desire is to elevate manto make him feel the dignity of his nature, and not to be elated by, or in any way to honour the accidental importance that is derived from fortune, and not from the individual. If they err, it is in the commission of the generous error—and which none but the noblest and most liberal feelings could dictateof rating too high the human capacity, and fixing in too lofty a sphere the destinies of our race. The mistake, if it be one, is derived from themselves; in their own bosoms there is the consciousness of superiority to those about them, and if this were the only feeling, it would lead to a degrading opinion of all belonging to man; but there is at the same time a sense of inferiority, in finding that the energy of will, and that of intellect, are not equal-that our wishes and our attainments bear no proportion-that the term of life is too short for effecting great things, and too precarious to do more, or even to expect to do more, than make the commencement, which others are to follow out, and which is all we leave behind us-a bare and unfinished impression, that others are to correct, value, and remould.

The sole energy that these great characters wield, is that of truth; and its simple majesty at last triumphs. Its modest appeals, which had been received theretofore with a haughty

rejection, now become commands; and the same form, that like a supplicant, stood trembling before the dominion of pride and prejudice, now dilates itself into grandeur. The small cloud that occupied no space in the vast circle of men's thoughts, now quickens to a tempest; and instead of being borne down by hostility, of conceding to feelings, of bowing to the prescriptive regulations of custom, and becoming but an integral portion of the past, it assumes a dignity, prepares for the contest, and is for ever fixed among and attached to all the events of all future time. It is a striking and beautiful view, thus to see the growth of truth; to see its quiet, gradual, often obstructed, but majestic development, from the point where, like an infant, it has no right, till it bears an authority of its own, and rears, it may be from ruins, the battlements of human institutions; till it has placed on the eternal basis of its own worth the principles which are hereafter to direct and govern the conduct of men. The sole wish of this class of the highly intellectual, is, as we have said, to elevate human nature. They feel, within themselves, a capacity for perfection,-a deep and unceasing admiration for that ideal and abstract beauty that exists in all the pursuits of mind; and which, shadowy and distant as may be its attainment, or, to the dull-edged apprehension of the mass, doubtful as may appear its existence, is with the higher order of intellect, the stimulus to effort, the source of all that is great and powerful and beautiful. It is the idol of all affection,--a being that the imagination has endowed with grace and loveliness, and breathed over it the life that has come warm with the rapture of our own souls. It evades expression, eludes being fixed, by the strongest grasp of our intelligence; but an unseen and yet pervading mystery, a vision, a mere dream, yet one to which memory clings, and though born in the idle and vacant hours of night, one that haunts us; that, like the eye of a portrait, beams with a life and lustre all the spirituality of the original; to which we can affix the shape, the real body, the majesty and grace of perfect beauty, though they are wrought by the glowing power of the imagination, and have no other basis than the fading colours of the canvass. It comes from the past, through all the glory we attach to the men of antiquity,--lives within us as the fountain of inspiration, a part of the same existence which has floated through the minds of myriads, and which, still unexhausted, freshens the energies of all it animates. We can imagine some of the great spirits who have trod, in an earthly form, this orb, and illuminated it with an intelligence that belonged to a higher sphere, after their labours were over, and time and their destiny had met, looking back on the past almost as if it were a waste: their intellectual creation, which, at the time, was wrought with the severest

toil, and that gathered about them the halo of glory, in all its lustre, which brought the admiration and intoxicating praise of the world, the humble respect of friends, the envy and animosity of enemies, seems to them but a rapid sketch, thrown off as a pastime, rather than the full force of a mind, that all acknowledged to be impelled by a mighty genius. In the superiority of their present power, in the newly acquired compass of their minds, their career seems an idle hour, their life a distant spot in the vast ocean of the past, and to have gone by like a dream,-all unsubstantial and devoid of action. Of course, it can only be the greatest intellects who leave the world with this feeling of inferiority. It is they alone who ever aspire beyond the measure of their intelligence, who are ever following, with eager and daring impetuosity, the wide grasp of their conceptions. But we can conceive Shakspeare, who has left less of himself than the usual vanity of men of genius generally dictates, folding his hands with despair, over the works that men now regard as wrought by inspiration :--we can fancy him, weighing the full value of life, and asking himself whether he had acted up to the real spirit and meaning of existence, whether he had performed all that the consciousness of possessing a great mind, should have directed,-whether his influence had found its way to the hearts of his cotemporaries, and given them the inclination towards the useful and the good,-whether future generations should record him, as one to whose voice they listened, to whose instruction they bowed, who had become the impelling principle of their conduct, and interwoven his own feelings and excellence with the flow of their thoughts, and the current of their being.

We can bring before us Dante, on his death-bed, sighing over broken hopes, and the unfulfilled desires ambition led him to entertain, taking a gloomy view of all parts of his life, save the portion where a generous disposition urged him, in the cause of freedom, to enter the warring factions of his country, and battle on the side of that he deemed the right. But he holds in his hand his Commedia, and laughs at his own invention. The torments of his Inferno, the coming punishments of his Purgatorio, the pleasures of his Paradise, though wrought with all the power and sublimity genius can bring, are then to him only emblems of idleness, of time misspent, of opportunity neglected. Though the rest of mankind are held in amazement at the wonderful creations of his imagination; though they sigh over the syren song of Francesca, in her wo, and listen until they almost seem realities, to the shrieks and curses of Ugolino in his agony, yet a voice within, that becomes stronger as time closes over us, upbraids him, and declares his career to have been useless and void, save the portion where

he engaged in the active duties of life, and made man the object of his thoughts,--where he warred for the rights and interests of his country, and put aside the selfish ambition of present or future renown.

And Tasso, the mild and melancholy Tasso, with the scar of thought upon his brow, and whose brain, in its workings, had fed upon itself till his days became engulfed in the vortex of derangement, perhaps he did not look with contempt upon the results of his labour. The struggle with him, even to bear existence, had been too constant and agonising; his misery had been too acute and too crushing to allow of his marring his last hours, which may be considered only as an interval of returning reason, with utter despair. Hope had been, through life, his sole star of joy--and to fancy it withered, at the moment when it is most wanted, and when it is all that is left, would be imagining a scene of too great horror. Yet it may have been so; and he who had done nothing but contend with that bitterest of enemies, the agony of one's own bosom, and the fierce hostility of rivalry and envy from without, did, as he was dying, look back upon the past, and trace but his footstep's empty tread, no mark, not even a shadow of his existence, for the future to know. Tasso's life differs from most of the other great poets'. He seems to have busied himself very little in the things about him, either from the morbidness of his nature, or a refined fastidiousness that shrank from the approach or contact of common things. All was poetical, feeling, and sensitive; a character that envenomed the barbed points that penetrated his soul, and gave a double triumph to the malice of his foes; and his history, from his woes, madness, imprisonment, forms one of the most interesting chapters in the book of human life.

We can conceive Milton the happiest, at the last, of all who pursue this shadow of ideal perfection. It is a singular fact in his history, that he was able to control the vivacity and ardour that belong to the poet's temperament, and forego the intoxicating pleasure that poetry seems to create, for the barren and uncongenial struggles of political strife. But there is an intense innate zeal in the poet's character that imparts itself to all he undertakes, and there is a love of and necessity for excitement, and a facility of being excited, that impels him to share and become a part of all that is acted near him. He is like the harp that every breath of air makes vibrate; and it is this sensitiveness, this facility of receiving impressions, that is perhaps the source of greatness in him, by the constant vigilance with which the mind is kept active, and the deep feeling with which he imbibes every thing till it becomes a portion of his nature: but it is, at the same time, his source of misfortune and ruin, in making him give way easily to the current, on which he

finds a pleasure in being borne, till he is thrown aside, the victim of circumstance. But with Milton the attainment of poetic fame seems to have been secondary to that of great learning and universal knowledge. We therefore find him casting aside the beautiful illustrations of fancy, the glowing splendour of imagination, and the radiant panoply of thought, which his young mind wore, for the coarser simplicity of dry utility, the duller, but more difficult glory of erudition. All his life, from his juvenile poems to his last immortal labour, where he made himself the cotemporary of all future time, seems to us a waste. And yet it is but a proof how little we are able to judge of the workings of a great mind, or determine what will be the results of its internal efforts. Before we can say how unfortunate that Milton ever entered the political arena of his country, we must decide whether it was not an improvement to his intellectual energy; and whether the knowledge he displays of the fiercest of human passions, and the tortures of a proud and guilty soul, was not gathered from observing the scenes and the men about him.

Yet unlike the other great men we have named, he could point to other records than those in which he followed the vanity-but the beautiful, the intensely beautiful vision—of ideal perfection. There was not with him the deep scorn we supposed to exist with the rest of his own exertions; though he might regret the train of circumstances which drove him from literature, or rather the department of poetry and history, yet he could look back with some pride and gratification at the view of no part of his life being thrown away. He had encouraged no dreams of power or false hope, but kept before him the one great object which he felt conscious he was able to secure, and which he had set out in life with the determination to obtainimmortality of fame. He had been useful, and though the outline of thought that he had sketched in the early part of his career, before he knew the difficulties with which a student must contend, was not altogether filled, yet enough had been done to show the spirit with which he wrought, and that all his powers had been exerted to influence men's minds, and impress their vigour on the times.

We have thus attempted to express our admiration of the philosophic mind as it exists among the higher order of intelligences, and we have hazarded the opinion that the only true greatness is to be found in that class of intellect. We also think, that so far from being speculative, in the invidious sense with which the word is generally used, we regard it as the most practical, and the most useful, if utility be measured and valued according to the elevation of our nature, the only true VOL. XVIII.-No. 37.

3