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recording his own worship of nature in his boyish days, when he roamed among the hills of his father's parish, far away from the manse. In those strange and stormy delights did not thousands of thousands of the Scottish boyhood familiarly live among the mists and snows? Of all that number he alone had the genius to “here eternize on earth" his joy-but many millions have had souls to join religiously in the hymns he chanted! Yea, his native land, with one mighty voice, has, nearly for a century, responded,

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These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God !"

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How many, we would ask, of the poets of the present day, have proposed to themselves any model of exalted beauty, to which, in their works, they have longed and laboured to conform; any radiant image of the first fair, finished and faultless in all its parts and proportions, that has robbed them of their rest, and haunted them in their dreams, still attracting them to a nearer contemplation of its excellence, and animating them to some effort by which they might gratify in themselves, and in some degree communicate to others, the love and delight with which it has filled their souls? How many of them even have dwelt with humbler admiration on the reflection of that primary excellence presented in the compositions of time-honoured genius, and have attempted to produce on their own age and country, and with themes of their own choice, analogous if not similar effects to those which have for ever embalmed the memory and influence of their classic prototypes? How many of our poets have asked of themselves with a heartfelt and assiduous importunity

"What shall I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come my own?"

How many have answered the inquiry by the exclamation

"Hence all the flattering vanities that lay
Nets of roses in my way;

Hence the desire of honours and estate,
And all that is not above fate!"

How many again have been actuated by the still nobler feeling, that the gift of poetry was bestowed upon them as a divine instrument for doing good, as much as for imparting pleasure, to their species, and that of this talent, as of every other, the God who gave it would demand a strict account?

But a few, we suspect, of those who have in our day desired or attained a poetical reputation, could lay claim to feelings or motives such as we have described. Yet, without some of these sources of inspiration, and, perhaps, more particularly without the highest and rarest that we have named, we do not believe that genuine poetical excellence, or lasting poetical fame, can possibly be achieved.

We know not the precise nature of the devotional sentiment that prompted the Pagan poet when he said

"Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musæ,

QUARUM SACRA FERO, ingenti percussus amore,
Accipiant."

But the sentiment, however shadowy, that he was the servant and priest of the virgin daughters of Jove, must, amidst all the errors of heathenism, have supported the sweetest and stateliest of poets in his noble aspirations after piety and wisdom-after the beautiful and the good. In the days of Christianity the poetical office is not less than ever a sacred ministry; and poets are an anointed priesthood, who have still holier and higher truths to proclaim, and feelings to infuse, than even the imagination that led Æneas into Hades could conjecture or comprehend. While living in a clearer light, and under a purer dispensation, it is still to us a virtual truth, that poetry is a virgin daughter of heaven, whose service can only be well and worthily performed by those who remember the sacredness of her origin, and the benevolence of her errand to the earth.

We are not about to enter on any denunciation of those who have perverted poetry to purposes or propensities of an unworthy nature, and have attempted to lend a new or an additional impulse to self-indulgence, by those graces and embellishments which were intended to adorn the awful form of virtue, and render her features more familiar and more attractive. We are not disposed to think that the influence of such writers is so extensively or so enduringly pernicious, as might at first be thought. We, indeed, consider that it is idle and unjust to declaim in this respect against the perversions of genius, or to exhort the true poet to employ his powers on such objects only as are glorious to himself, and profitable to his species. We doubt whether genius can exist at all, at least genius of a high class, without carrying in its own constitution a practical security against error and vice. There can be no great genius without an ardent longing, and an inextinguishable preference, for what is truly beautiful: and no highly endowed spirit can fail to see almost intuitively that virtue is beauty, and vice deformity. All the better parts of our nature—all the nobler views of our destiny—must have a charm in the eyes of the true poet which never can adorn their opposites. They must be more delightful as objects of contemplation-more inspiring and more satisfying as subjects of representation and developement. If we could conceive a painter, with an exquisite sense of form and colouring, who yet preferred to delineate the lifeless desert or the sickly swamp, before the fertile valley or the heaven-kissing bill; or whose human figures more readily exhibited the loathsomeness of disease and decay, than the purple light of health and happiness-we should imagine an anomaly something akin to that of a great poet, whose sensibility and enthusiasm were yet content to dwell on themes of frivolity and folly, to the exclusion of what was truly noble and touching in human character.

It is not our object here to inquire, in connexion with this view, in what manner some of the greatest poets have been led to devote a part of their powers to subjects of levity and license. Perhaps, in reference to the age and people whom they addressed, even this lowering of

their tone was necessary or serviceable to the perfect success of their mighty mission. The greatest poets, we are inclined to think, ought to embody in themselves the image both of the real and of the ideal world, to enable them the more effectually to convert the sensual vulgarities of the one into the spiritual sublimities of the other. Not without a profound and important meaning of this nature, is the glorious description of his own power by the noblest and wisest of his brotherhood::

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven."

Heaven must be the first object of its contemplation; but on the earth too, and on all objects of earthly interest, its glance must rest, till from this meaner world it is able to raise and refine its earthly disciples to an aptness for that region from which its power is derived, and in which its purposes terminate. The ribald or the rustic, who should be allured, by the merriment of Shakspeare's buffoons or of Chaucer's churls, to obtain even a glimpse of those exquisite revelations of purity and goodness to which these blemishes seem so strangely united, would prove to us the magic efficacy of those master minds, who, from their universal sympathies, even with the failings of their species, were able, by winning their confidence, to promote their amendment more quickly and more completely than a more rigid and repulsive instructor could have done.

But the apparent anomaly we have glanced at is no exception to our proposition-that genius is essentially pure. No great poet ever attempted to embellish error or vice with the charms of poetry, or to practise those deceptions in morality which are alone dangerous. A great poet is as incapable of deceiving others by specious vices or false combinations, as he is of being himself deceived by them. The wand of true genius is an Ithuriel's spear:

"No falsehood can endure

Touch of celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness."

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