represent. Of course there is in the poem an underlying moral; but this could have been brought out just as well, and better, in connection with a form representative of what really takes place on the earth. The following is a specimen of Longfellow's more artistic method:

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary ;

It rains, and the wind is never weary ;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;

My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary.

Even in the last stanza of this, however, some would say that there is too much of a tendency to moralize. This tendency which Longfellow manifests, in common with Whittier and most of our American poets, is something that of course, in its way, is inartistic; not that a poem should have no moral, but, as has been said before, that this should be represented rather than stated. But the power to represent, as all art should represent, -as well as the artistic sense to appreciate such a representation when it has been produced,-seems, as yet, not to have been fully developed among us. Most of us appear to think that thought alone constitutes poetry, or, if not this, at least thought in connection with a strong and metrical expression of it, without regard to other features

necessary to render its character in all respects representative.

The truth is, however,-and this is the truth which the whole line of our argument has been intended to emphasize, that poetry is more than thought; it is more even than a strong and metrical expression of thought. The mere fact that a girl was drowned on the sands of Dee, or that three fishermen were lost at sea, is not enough to account for the interest that we take in Charles Kingsley's O Mary, Go and Call the Cattle Home, and The Fishermen. It is his poetry that interests us; and by his poetry we mean the representative way in which he has told these tales. So with reference to any statements of facts or opinions. If Wordsworth had said that Milton had a bright intellect and lived a comparatively solitary life, few would have found his words particularly interesting, or noteworthy; but when, in his sonnct on that poet, he said:

Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart,

the representative nature of his statement, giving it form and beauty-which latter exists, if at all, as a characteristic of form,-made his expression at once attractive and fitted it to be remembered. So, again, it is not Pope's authority, nor the thought in the following lines, which gives them such a value that they are inserted in every book of quotations; it is the representative form in which the thoughts are expressed, without which form, mere statements to the effect that order must characterize heaven, or that wise and good men are cautious, would not be deemed deserving of remembrance.

Order is heaven's first law.

-Essay on Man, 4.

In one word, then, the important thing that needs to be borne in mind in judging of poetry, is that it is an art, and partakes of the nature of the fine arts; and that, as such, its one essential is a representative form appealing to a man through that which causes him to admire the beautiful. Tennyson has expressed this truth well in what he calls The Moral of his Day-Dream.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And if you find no moral there,
Go, look in any glass and say,

What moral is in being fair.

O to what uses shall we put

The wildweed-flower that simply blows?
And is there any moral shut

Within the bosom of the rose ?

But he has suggested in his next stanza another truth that needs to be considered in connection with the last, before all the facts concerning the functions of poetry in the world can be understood.

But any man that walks the mead

In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find,

According as his humors lead,

A meaning suited to his mind.

And liberal applications lie

In Art like Nature, dearest friend,

So 't were to cramp its use, if I

Should hook it to some useful end.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE USEFUL ENDS OF POETIC REPRESENTATION.

These are all developed from Possibilities and Methods of Expression underlying equally the Formation of Poetic and of all Language-Poetry forced to recognize that Nature symbolizes Processes of Thought—Influence of this Recognition upon Conceptions of Truth, Human and Divine, Scientific and Theologic-And its Effects upon Feeling and Action-Conclusion.

PERHAPS this discussion of poetry as a representa

tive art can be brought to a close in no better way than by dwelling for a moment upon the thought suggested by the stanza at the end of the last chapter. Poetry is not, in a technical sense, a useful art, yet its forms have their uses, and many uses—as many, in fact, as have the forms of nature itself, which poetry, when it fulfils its mission, employs in its representations. To give a complete list of these uses here would be irrelevant. It is sufficient to suggest, that in the last analysis all of them are developed from possibilities and methods of expression, underlying the formation of all language but especially of poetic language.

Language involves, as we have found, a representation of mental facts and processes through the use of analogous external facts and processes, which alone are apprehensible to others, and which alone, therefore, can make others apprehend our thoughts. But facts and processes fitted to furnish such representations may be

perceived on every side of us in the objects and operations of what we term nature. It is the poet, however, who is most conscious of these analogies, for he, instead of accepting those noticed by others and embodied in conventional words, is constantly seeking for new ones and using these. To the poet, and the reader of poetry, therefore, all nature appears to be, in a peculiar sense, a representation, a repetition, a projection into the realm of matter, of the immaterial processes of thought within the mind. This, as I interpret it, is what Wordsworth meant when he said:

I have learned

To look on nature not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but-

because finding in nature the representations of human thought

hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity.

-Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey.

There is, accordingly, a literal as well as a figurative sense, in which the poet

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

-As You Like It, ii., 1: Shakespear.

Whatever others may say or think,

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks

A various language.

-Thanatopsis: Bryant.

In a true sense of the term she has a voice; and she has more than this: she has a voice which says something, which imparts definite intelligence. We have found how in every process in one department of nature, the mind of