up the gently sloping banks among the flowers that grow there; he who can hold familiar intercourse with the sea, and ask of each wave that comes its message, and hear and understand the ready and glad response it gives, lifting its head with its wreath of spray, and showing its breast all jewelled, that it may speak out freely and clearly; he who can stand in the mid-way valley of mountains, and learn most surely, and with rapture strange, that

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Every mountain now hath found a tongue;"

And hear

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Jura answering from her misty shroud,

Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud."

He who in the softly silent night, can read the unlettered page unfolded in the heavens, and music hear, as if on each bright star a syren sat, hymning from harps, until the circumambient air is filled with instant harmonies;he who can realize the poet's brightest dream—

"Which is not all a dream,"

but instinct with reality, and feel that it is truth, diviner than most sage philosophy, and welcome that inspiration which will rejoice in the effort for a personal completion of the vision, that,

Endued with various forms, various degrees

Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refined, more spirituous, and pure,
As nearer to Him placed, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work ;"-

he it is, whose soul is the home of beauty, the resting place of love, the repose of religion, and the fairest type of heaven.

True poetry is therefore the child of, and is consecrate to, nature; and the true poet's spirit, is nature's self. Keats-glad, happy and loving Keats, pre-eminently the poet of flowers, could

"Feel the daisies growing over him,"

as he was dying; seeing nature's spirit, through her simplest yet her loveliest forms, even to the last. Shelly, the gifted and early-lost Shelly, was only less than Keats, in his command of the serene inspiration of nature, yet possibly, from constitutional accidents, more clear in his discernment of, and more intense in his devotion to, her spirit, communed with friendly talk, and utmost fervour, with that spirit, when embosomed in the lowliest forms. And though the grandest scenes did not o'ertop his flight, yet, in humble guise, the spirit seemed more dear to him. Here is a stanza or two from his Ode to a Skylark :

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Like a poet, hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears, it heeded not.

Teach me half the gladness

That thy heart must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world would listen then, as I am listening now."

Read his poem-"The Cloud-" of which the following is the opening stanzas:—

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shades for the leaves when laid

In their noon-day dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,

And laugh as I pass in thunder."

Communion with nature! Look at the vignette again. Look at its spirit,-at the poem of the picture, if you will, with your spirit, and with all the poet's blessing that you can invoke. The artist's grouping of nature is pleasing and truthful, for so have I soon her grouped, and smiled at the reality. Nature is then, indeed, an universal harmony, a perpetual melody, an unwearied symphony. Even the shell is minstrel! the truant from the deep, steals to us with a song. Some sudden wave, visitant in its coral home, may have lifted it up from its endeared depths, and exiled, or lost, it yields not its joyousness, but gives out to a kindly ear, its home-taught melody, and ceaseth not to sing. Its song is one of home, it learned it there, and it cheers its absence.

I have seen nature's loveliest image, childhood, lay close its ear to a shell. The spirit of that child, unvexed by life's cares, and uncharmed by grosser fancies, lives in its own dreams, until it starts into a kind of newness of life, or, more properly, into other ranges of life, which it afterwards recognises and rejoices in, as the realities of its dreams-the correspondencies of its being. See !-it presses its ear to the shell, and instantly its soul is awake. What is dull monotony and unmeaning sound to the parent, is music to the child, of varied cadence, all blending in harmony,—is the voice of a spirit, uttering familiar words. Is it not so? See how its ringlets instinctively cluster and entwine around the shell; its eye, looking, not so much wonderingly, as affectionately; its cheek flushed

with the stealings of sympathy which gather in its heart; its mouth half opened, not indicating surprise, but intensity, as if it would not lose a note of a lovely strain, or a word of a familiar passage. It hears, and its hearing is feeling. The passage to the soul is unobstructed. Communion here is uninterrupted. The child cannot tell its rapture. It attempts to; it has not yet learned that nature's blessing is incommunicable, only as soul drinks into soul. When the communication is assayed, the vernacular is palsied, and the vocabulary becomes a blank. He who has seen the child thus, and not felt his soul stirred, until the gushings of joy welled up, suffusing his eyes with the overflowings of gladness, is stranger to the loveliest types of beauty, and the holiest symbols of love.

And so have I seen the child of nature, in manly or womanly form, wandering on the shore of the sea, turning away from the sterner harmony of the waters, to hear and interpret the song of the shell. Is this fantasy? It is simplicity in sympathy with nature; it is oneness with nature. Nature is simple, and with simplicity does she commune. He who values the sea, as the highway of commerce, or the battle-range of armaments, may regard devotion to its music, its spray and its shells, as fantasy. I love the sea, because sometimes the clouds come almost down in tempest-sport, to rest upon the uplifted waves, that tower to mountain-heights, and nearly dip their lightning edges in the foaming billows. I love the sea, because, when sun, or moon, or stars are shining out from