Where, again, from the poetry taking the form of a narrative, the music was necessarily reduced first to take a very subordinate place, as it naturally does in a ballad as compared with what is properly called a song, and at last to give way altogether to the mere recitation, the composition came to be regarded as rather intended to be spoken or declaimed than sung or otherwise musically accompanied. This is probably the true, though it is not the common, explanation of the terms Dramatic and Epic:-poetry was called dramatic which was to be acted, and epic which was to be spoken. Lyric poetry, of course, was that which was especially adapted to be sung, and to be accompanied by the lyre.

THE YOUNG POET.

AND yet poor Edwin was no vulgar boy;
Deep thought oft seemed to fix his infant eye;
Dainties he heeded not, nor gaud, nor toy,
Save one short pipe of rudest minstrelsy;
Silent, when glad; affectionate, though shy.
And now his look was most demurely sad,
And now he laughed aloud, yet none knew why:

The neighbours stared and sighed, yet blessed the lad;

Some deemed him wondrous wise, and some believed him mad.

Lo! where the stripling, wrapt in wonder, roves
Beneath the precipice o'erhung with pine;
And sees on high, amidst the encircling groves,
From cliff to cliff the foaming torrents shine;
While waters, woods, and winds, in concert join,
And echo swells the chorus to the skies.
Would Edwin this majestic scene resign
For aught the huntsman's puny craft supplies?
Ah, no! he better knows great Nature's charms to prize.

And oft he traced the uplands, to survey,
When o'er the sky advanced the kindling dawn,
The crimson cloud, blue main, and mountain gray,
And lake, dim-gleaming on the smoky lawn;
Far to the west the long, long vale withdrawn,
Where twilight loves to linger for awhile;
And now he faintly kens the bounding fawn,
And villager abroad at early toil:

But, lo! the sun appears! and heaven, earth, ocean, smile

And oft the craggy cliff he loved to climb,
When all in mist the world below was lost-
What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime,
Like shipwrecked mariner on desert coast,
And view the enormous waste of vapour, lost
In billows, lengthening to the horizon round,
Now scooped in gulfs, with mountains now embossed;
And hear the voice of mirth and song rebound,
Flocks, herds, and waterfalls, along the hoar profound.

Oft when the winter storm had ceased to rave,
He roamed the snowy waste at even, to view
The cloud stupendous, from the Atlantic wave,
High-towering, sail along the horizon blue;
Where, 'midst the changeful scenery, ever new,
Fancy, a thousand wondrous forms descries,
More wildly great than ever pencil drew;
Rocks, torrents, gulfs, and shapes of giant size,
And glittering cliffs on cliffs, and fiery ramparts rise.
Thence musing onward, to the sounding shore,
The lone enthusiast oft would take his way,
Listening, with pleasing dread, to the deep roar
Of the wide-weltering wave.
In black array
When sulphurous clouds rolled on the autumnal day,
Even then he hastened from the haunt of man,
Along the trembling wilderness to stray:
What time the lightning's fierce career began,
And o'er heaven's rending arch the rattling thunder ran.
Meanwhile, whate'er of beautiful or new,
Sublime or dreadful, in earth, sea, or sky,
By chance or search, was offered to his view,
He scanned with curious and romantic eye.
Whate'er of lore, tradition could supply,
From Gothic tale, or song, or fable old,
Roused him, still keen to listen and to pry.
At last, though long by penury controlled,
And solitude, his soul her graces 'gan unfold.

LESSON II.

NATURE OF POETRY.

BEATTIE.

1. ALL that has as yet been said, it will be observed, has had respect to the proper shape or outward form of poetry. Such outward form is one variety or other of

that arrangement of words in reference to their sounds which is called verse. Is this all, then? the reader may ask is there nothing more in poetry than verse, nothing except merely a certain outward form? Is there no internal constituent principle of poetry? Verse may be the body of poetry; but has it not also a soul?

2. Most undoubtedly it has. But it is with poetry, or with any other form of the artistic, as it is with everything else, every organization or product that manifests itself to the senses; the sensible manifestation is at once the controlling law, and the only appropriate expression of the inner animating principle. It is with poetry as it is with man himself, the poet. In describing the human being, and distinguishing him from other animals, it would be hardly possible to begin otherwise than by the mention of that most remarkable fact, his erect form. The Latin poet, Ovid, one of the sweetest of the singers in that old tongue, in the famous passage in which he gives his pagan account of the creation of man, dwells emphatically on that distinction as the chief sign of his sovereignty, and the necessary condition of his mental superiority. A modern German speculator, the ingenious and eloquent Herder, in a work which has been translated into English, his 'Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man,' taking up the same view, and carrying it out in the light of modern science, has endeavoured to explain in detail how even such a mind as man has been endowed with would have been cramped, and, as it were, half smothered, and rendered comparatively inefficient and useless, if it had been lodged in any other than the actual human form.

Even so it would be easy to show that the spirit of poetry finds its perfect expression only in verse, and that, deprived of that advantage, it is comparatively only what the mind of a man would be confined in the body of a beast.

3. The distinction between the poetical and the prosaic in conception is simply, that prosaic conception looks at things as they are in themselves, poetic as they are more or less metamorphosed by the intermixture of

something proceeding from the mind by which they are contemplated. The former seeks only the real and the true; the latter, something in addition to that. The poet always takes what may be called an impassioned view of things. He sees everything through the coloured light of his own feelings. Nothing is anything to him without more or less of that irradiation of which his own mind or eye is the source.

4. If this transforming influence were in every case only something peculiar to the individual poet, the exercise of his power might afford him a solitary enjoyment, but it could give him no hold upon his fellow-men. This, however, is not the case. The atmosphere of passion through which the poet looks, is made up of feelings and affections, which, in different degrees of strength and development, are common to all men. What he has acquired, in addition to his larger natural endowment of sensibility and creative fancy, and chiefly through that, and what ordinary men want, is the faculty and the skill which enable him by his representations to call up such passions as he wishes in other hearts, and to control and direct them at will according to his purpose. He is the lord of the magic glass; but most other men have also the capacity of looking through it when he holds it to their eyes, and seeing more or less of what it has to reveal.

5. It is true that what they thus see is in so far an illusion. The power of so seeing has been obtained by their eyes having had, in the phrase of the old popular philosophy of the north, the glamour cast over them. They are in a manner bewitched. The supernatural illumination, in which they are made to see things bathed, is a false show with which they are cheated. It is, literally, the beauty and the splendour of a dream; -that is to say, it belongs not really to the objects, but is showered over them by their own excited minds, of which it is altogether the creation. And if a man be incapable of being thus excited, he will indeed, it may be admitted, escape being deceived by the representations of poetry, but he will also remain dead to the

enjoyment of poetical composition. It will be his, it may be, to see things in what the ancient philosopher called the dry or pure light, but in that only; he will be able to see nothing in what the same authority called moistened light, or, as our own Bacon has rendered and explained the expression, "light steeped in the humours and affections." Now, the man, on the other hand, who can look at things in the latter light is by no means thereby incapacitated for also seeing whatever he wishes so to see in the former. If he is deceived by a poetic representation, it is because he chooses and allows himself to be deceived. It is not a weakness under which he is subdued, but a power which he possesses. Such being the case, it may not be quite so clear that the advantage is upon the whole with him who is proof against the spell of this enchantment. One might be rather inclined to side with the old rhetorician whose saying is reported by Plutarch, that tragedy (as he put it, but he might have said the same thing of poetry in all kinds) is an imposition, in which they who cheat us are honester than they who do not cheat us, and he who is cheated is wiser than he who is not.

6. To him to whom it communicates none of the excitement out of which it has sprung, poetry must always appear more or less extravagant and absurd. The words of the poet can only seem to be true and applicable and appropriate to those who share the emotion by which they have been prompted. If that emotion be something so strange to them, or so alien to their nature, that they have no sympathy with it, and cannot even conceive it to be possible that they should ever themselves be affected by the like, the most apt and natural expression of it will be unendurable or unintelligible. Even its naturalness may possibly not be believed in ; it may be regarded as nothing more than so much hollow affectation, a pretence and a lie: or, if its sincerity be not doubted, it will sound to them as the eager talk of those who are heated and exalted with wine does to a person who is perfectly sober and cool-headed. 7. All emotion involves something of what may be