Some such chill has during the last thirty years fallen on much of our poetry, from the influence of negative philosophies. There have been poets amongst us who, if they had not lived under this cold shadow, possessed gifts which might have carried them to far greater heights than they ever reached. As it is, their poetry, whatever its merits may be, has in it no skylark notes, no tones of natural gladness; still less does it attain to that serener joy, which they know, who, having looked sorrow in the face, and gone through dark experiences, have come out on the farther side. These modern poets have nothing to tell of the peace which "settles where the intellect is meek." They know nothing of "Melancholy fear subdued by faith, Of blessed consolations in distress; These things they cannot know; because the roots of them lie only in spiritual convictions, from which the philosophy they have embraced has wholly estranged them. The Experience Philosophy, so long in the air, has put on many forms and taken many names. Whether it call itself Phenomenalism, or Positivism, or Agnosticism, or Secularism, in all its phases it is alike chilling to the soul and to soul-like poetry. No doubt it offers to imagination an ideal, but it is an ideal which has no root in reality. With such an ideal, imagination, which is an organ of the true, not of the false, which is intended to vivify truth, not to create the fictitious, can never be satisfied. Imagination, as has been said, is an eagle, whose natural home is the celestial mountains. Unless it knows these to be, not cloud shadows, but veritable hills, whither it can repair and renew its strength, the faculty pines and dies. If it could not believe that the ideal on which it fixes its eyes, with which it strives to interpenetrate the actual, is truth in its highest essence, imagination would be paralyzed, poetry extinct. But we need not fear any such catastrophe. Negative philosophies may for a time prevail; but they cannot ultimately suppress the soul, or stifle vivid intuitions which flash up from its depth and witness to its celestial origin. Those "gentle ardors from above,” which in better moments visit men, it is the privilege of poetry to seize, and to clothe forever in forms of perfect beauty. To conclude. There are many ways of looking at life, and each way has an ideal, and a poetry appropriate to it. There is the view which looks on the world as a place for physical enjoyment, and its ideal is perfect health, bodily vigor, and high animal spirits. And there is a poetry answering to this view, though not a very exalted poetry. Again, there are views which make intellectual truth, or at least perfect æsthetic beauty, their aim; and under the power of these ideals, poetry no doubt rises to a much higher level. But as such views leave out the deeper part of man, they do not adequately interpret. life, or permanently satisfy the heart. Some there are who, having tried life, and not found in it what they expected, have grown disappointed and cynical, or even defiant and rebellious. And these moods have found poetic utterance in every age, and in every variety of tone. But the poets who have lent their gift to express these feelings only have not much benefited mankind. Yet others there are who, having looked below the surface, have early learned that, if the world is not meant to give absolute enjoyment, if pain and sorrow are indeed integral parts of it, it yet contains within it gracious reliefs, remedies, alleviations; and that for many sensitive hearts one of the alleviations is poetry. "We live under a remedial system;" and poetry, rightly used, not only helps to interpret this system, but itself combines with the remedial tendencies. Again, there are high-toned spirits which regard the world as a scene made to give scope for moral heroism. Devotion to some object out from self, to friendship, to country, to humanity, - each of these is a field in which poetry finds full exercise, and on which it sheds back its own consecration. But neither of these last views, noble as they are, can by itself withstand the shock of circumstance, unless it is secured on a spiritual anchorage. The poet who has himself laid hold of the spiritual world, and the objects that are there, is especially fitted to help men to do this. While, in virtue of that insight which great poets have, he reads. to men their own thoughts and aspirations, and “ comforts and strengthens them by the very reading," he lets down on them a light from above which transfigures them, touches springs of immortality that lie buried within, and sets them murmuring; opens avenuesfor the soul into endless existence. Before men, overborne by things seen, he sets an ideal which is real, an object not for intellect and imagination only, but for the affections, the conscience, the spirit, for the whole of When their hearts droop he bids them man. "look abroad, And see to what fair countries they are bound." His voice is a continual reminder that, whether we think of it or not, the celestial mountains are before us, and thither lies our true destiny. And he is the highest) poet who keeps this vision most steadily before himself, and, by the beauty of his singing, wakens others to a' sense of it. 79 37 23 CHAPTER IV. THE POET A REVEALER. HAZLITT has somewhere said that " 'genius is some strong quality in the mind, aiming at and bringing out some new and striking quality in nature." The same thought seems to have possessed Coleridge, when, in the third volume of The Friend, he labors to reconcile Bacon's insistence on observation and experiment, as the tests of truth, with Plato's equal insistence on the truth of ideas, independent of experience. In the "prudens quaestio," says Coleridge, which the discoverer puts to nature, he is unconsciously feeling after and anticipating some hidden law of nature; and that he does so feel after it till he finds it is in virtue of some mysterious kinship between the guess of the discoverer's mind and the operations of nature. In the physical world, we observe that those guesses of genius, which are the parents of discovery, are born in gifted minds, here or there, just when some new invention or discovery is required to carry on the course of human affairs. The mariner's compass, whoever may have been its discoverer, was introduced into Europe the century before Vasco da Gama and Columbus undertook their voyages, and, as it would seem, to enable them to do so. Newton wrought out his system of Fluxions, and published his Principia, with its announcement of the law of gravitation, at a time when physical inquiry must have remained at a standstill, if these discoveries |