JOHN MILTON.

MILTON is the last of the great English poets; he is the last of that class that depended on their own energy for success, and described nature as it is. Strictly speaking, there are but four English poets; Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare and Milton; no others. emulate these. Take them all in all, they are as far from the generality of those that bear the name, as heaven is from earth. They are poets, according to Dryden's definition, and more, "they perfected, and all but created," "their arts." "These giant-sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth, but they tower above their fellows," and excel them as much as universal genius exceeds a particular talent. They lived in the dawn of science; but they rose, in their own art, to such sublime heights, that they have never been emulated; and they rendered their names as imperishable as the English language,

It is ungenerous, however, to give them, in the English language, an exclusive claim to the distinction of Poet: according to the notions of Mr. Hazlitt, we are all poets, and the world is full of poetry, nothing but poetry, save a vast proportion of what professes to be such. "The best general notion," he ob

serves, "which I can give of poetry, is, that it is the natural expression of any object or event, by its vividness, exciting a voluntary movement of the imagination, and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds expressing it." "Many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower, that spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun'-there is poetry in its birth." "Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry." "Man is a poetical animal :-The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes at the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood d; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god;-the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act." This is a grand flourish to

wards rejecting all distinctions: it would be as easy to conclude with D'Holbach, that the universe is composed only of matter, and that the different phenomena that are displayed, are the effects of motion, and the results of organization. Mr. Hunt's definition is more definite, accordingly: poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see it in the poet's book, is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains; and its ends, pleasure and exaltation.

The charm, the sacredness, the dignity which we are accustomed to attach to poetry, and which seem to be inseparable from it, are not to be embodied in definitions; and the more there is written about it, the more difficult the solution of the question, What is Poetry, seems to be. Poetry has become prostituted: its votaries no longer acquire the distinction of the venerable, and the notion that there is something divine in the art, is not generally entertained in these days of "equality and equal rights." It is a late discovery that "man is a poetical animal." But few appreciate the power of poetry, and none acknowledge the divinity of its nature, "Rocks and deserts reecho sounds; savage beasts are often soothed by music, and listen to its charms; and shall we, with all the advantages of the best education, be unaffected

with the voice of poetry?" This appeal, which was made to a Roman tribunal, might be made with equal significance to those who debase the profession of the divine art, either for profit, or to serve the purposes of their own peculiar system. It was not so regarded by those who excelled in it; the master-spirits of the art considered it the divinest of all the arts: that it was the offspring of the highest powers of their being; that it was the development of the divinity within, or the principles and germs of their future being, which was wrapped up in the immortal soul. Chaucer sings from an "excess of spirit;" Spenser from the "infusion of a sweet spirit;" Shakspeare's eye

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

and Milton did not believe that poetry was to be "raised from the heat of youth or the vapors of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." That alone which is pure, lovely, and ennobling in its nature, is poetry. That only which brings one into sympathy with universal nature; which has the energy and immortality of the soul itself; that which possesses something that is not of this earth, but has something divine in it, is poetry. "We

agree," says Dr. Channing, "with Milton in his estimate of poetry. It seems to us the divinest of all arts; for it is the breathing or expression of that sentiment, which is deepest and sublimest in human nature; we mean, of that thirst or aspiration, to which no mind is wholly a stranger, for something purer and lovelier, something more powerful, lofty and thrilling than ordinary and real life affords. No doctrine is more common among christians than that of man's immortality; but it is not so generally understood, that the germs or principles of his whole future being are now wrapped up in his soul, as the rudiments of the future plant in the seed. As a necessary result of this constitution, the soul, possessed and moved by these mighty though infant energies, is perpetually stretching beyond what is present and visible, struggling against the bounds of its earthly prison-house, and seeking relief and joy in imaginings of unseen and ideal being. This view of our nature, which has never been fully developed, and which goes farther towards explaining the contradictions of human life than all others; carries us to the very foundation and sources of poetry. He who cannot interpret by his own consciousness what we now have said, wants the true key to works of genius. He has not penetrated those sacred recesses of the soul, where poetry is born and nourished, and inhales immortal vigor, and wings herself for her heavenward flight." Passion is to poetry what colors are to the painter; poetry displays the universe in the colors which the passions throw over it, but in designs, according to her own conception. Poetry, as Macauley