were breathing new blood into the nation's heart- and when the unexplored regions of a new world were stimulating fancy and enterprise, if in such an age the voice of Sidney was demanded to vindicate that art, which flourishes best in the atmosphere of generous emotions, we fear a mightier magic must be appealed to in our generation, when a mechanical philosophy, dealing in things of sense alone, and therefore proud and selfsufficient, is proclaiming that the chief avenues to truth are her paths of observation and experiment. We take side with Shakspeare, and beneath the shield of his name maintain that there is a high road to truth, a sacred way lighted by the highest intellectual faculty-the imagination; and there the humble and docile spirit may advance more safely than when holding the hand of an unimaginative and faithless spirit of inquiry. Better far to confide in that wisdom, which, like Shakspeare's, learns more of truth in the recesses of its own being, than in the complicated processes of that vain philosophy, which goes about to peep and peer into the chambers of nature. When the imagination is shut out, and our thoughts surrendered to the dominion of the mere speculative power, infidelity is ready to follow quickly in the train, because the aspirations of the soul are suspended. What but this is the secret of that scandal of atheism from which Sir Thomas Browne labored to vindicate his profession? When Chaucer portrays the "Doctor of Physic," he makes him rich in all the lore of the outward world" of cold or hot, or moist or dry," but one significant line tells, as a natural sequel, of his irreligious temper :

"His study was but little on the Bible."

It matters not whether speculation is busy among the nerves, or with the palpable substance of the brain-our mortal mechanism or whether armed with a mighty calculus it reach to the mechanism of the heavens; the knowledge which is not spiritualized by imagination, may take the name of philosophy, but the poison of a godless wisdom is in it-it is sensual, hollow, and perishable. Accustomed to acquire knowledge chiefly by processes of the understanding, we are apt to grow skeptical respecting the functions of imagination. It becomes mysterious to us, and in our feebleness and pride we question the existence of its highest forms. It is thus that the genius of Shakspeare is looked on as anomalous and inexplicable. But we ask no better proof of the presence of such a sovereign power in the mind, and of its might in revealing truth, than the creations in his dra

mas. By what observation or experience-in what walk of his life, or in what volume could Shakspeare have gathered the materials to place before the mind's eye, in such reality, those beings whose names, or little more, had been made familiar by history. How happens it, that so far as personal character is concerned, or the periods of history which he has touched, there is a stronger light than all the chronicles can give? What faculty but imagination could take the skeleton of some old tradition-the dry bones of some mouldering legend, and clothe them with flesh and blood, and give them life? Or when passing above nature, he creates Ariel, and Puck, and the Wierd Sisters nameless and sexless-does not the heart instinctively recognise that they, too, are true-almost historic personages -and in that instinct is there not an acknowledgment of the virtue of imagination, such as it had being in the soul of Shakspeare?

We dwell on these subjects, because, in approaching the examination of the works of one who has earned some of the muse's highest honors, we are anxious first to disabuse the mind of that low estimate of poetic genius which people are apt to give in to, when every mawkish versifier is styled a poet. The artifice of a flowery diction is confounded with the simple majesty of true inspiration. "I must confess," says Lord Shaftsbury, in his advice to an author, "there is hardly any where to be found a more insipid race of mortals than those whom we moderns are contented to call poets, for having attained the chiming faculty of a language, with an injudicious random use of wit and fancy." Imagination is feebly appreciated, too, not only in consequence of the loose colloquial acceptation of the word, but because it is cramped in the narrow definitions of the schools of metaphysics, teaching that its office is to dissect what nature offers, and then culling its materials to build up a new nature of its own. No-lofty as this faculty is, it is not so presumptuous -it has an humbler wisdom: its chief duty is rather to take nature as it is, and to disclose the moral and spiritual associations of all that is palpable to the eye and ear-to show not only the outward world of sense, but the inner world of the human soul— and to give them unity.

Another great authority for the worth of poetic wisdom is Milton, for he, too, accomplished his own conception of the poet's calling. It would be easy to show that at no period-in the buoyancy of youth-in the bitterest of his controversies, or in his state services- whether vindicating his private good name,

or standing forth to defend the English people in favor, or in poverty and persecution did he forget that the great business of his life was to give utterance to the promptings of imagination. Poetry was his imperial theme-the controlling and harmonizing idea of his existence, and the aspirations of his inmost nature may be traced throughout all his writings, no matter how unpromising their topic. The art enters into his scheme of education, "not," as he protests, "the prosody of a verse among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which teaches what are the laws of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand master piece to observe. This would soon show what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play-writers be, and what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things." When Milton addresses the parliament, he is true to his fraternity, and cites, as an authority to that tribunal, the imaginative lore of "our sage and serious poet, Spenser, whom," he adds, "I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." And when nearly thirty years before its consummation, the idea of his "adventurous song" broke the bonds of silence in anticipations that at some distant day he might "take up the harp and sing an elaborate song to generations" and when he spake of being "led by the genial power of nature to another task" than polemic theology, and of" the inward prompting that by labor and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of nature, he might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let die," all-not less than his immortal epic -show his deep conviction that the highest aim of the human mind is poetry that the things of "highest hope and hardest attempting proposed by the mind in the spacious circuits of her musing" are to be wrought out by the imagination. This may conflict with the pride of the understanding and the conceit of pedantry, as it is the error of unimaginative intellects that the faculty in question is among the subordinate powers of the mind. In the spirit of Milton, it brought an intuitive sense of its majesty, which bursts forth in its own sublime vindicationprobably the most eloquent annunciation of the functions of the imagination ever uttered:

"These abilities, (by which the grandest poetry is produced,) wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, but yet to some (though most abuse) in every nation: and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and

cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God's true worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from within; all these things with a solid and treatable smoothness to point out and describe." With such thoughts of the poet's office, Milton goes on in a prophetic mood to covenant for the production, after some years, of "a work not to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite; not to be obtained by the invocation of dame memory and her syren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases."

Besides these authorities for the opinion that the highest poetry is a birth from the greatest intellectual energy, there are writers of our own day who have deemed its defence no unworthy task. The students of Coleridge's writings will recollect it as a favorite theme scattered among the fragments of his philosophy and criticism. Winning their way as the works of that gentle sage are, into many a thoughtful spirit, we shall content ourselves with one expression of the lofty estimate of poetic genius which he so faithfully cherished: "No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language." And how familiar is that other exquisite sentence growing, in which he tells us poetry has been to me its own 'exceeding great reward;' it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude, and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me."

Another writer, lately among the living, devoted much of his

efforts to the same cause- the discrimination of genuine poetry from that which claims kindred with it, with no better title than a tawdry rhetoric, or a technical and artificial polish. We allude to the late Sir Egerton Brydges, whose natural enthusiasm seems to have received an additional impetuosity from the disgust with which he regarded pretenders in poetry. He was as prodigal of his thoughts as of his fortune, and his opinions are to be gathered not only from his larger works, but from a multitude of prefaces to the volumes of old English literature, to the recovery of which he so largely contributed. We propose to quote from several of these, perhaps somewhat at the cost of coherency, some detached passages on poetic genius, for few writers have more earnestly repudiated that vulgar fallacy, that the work of imagination is to falsify, and that there is no distinction between the poet's creations and the fictions of a silly novelist :

"True poetry is the illustration of truth, in its most sublime, most beautiful, or most affecting appearances, embodied to the mental eye! It is the gift and the duty of this inspired art not merely to represent the material form, but the internal movements, the sentiments which are associated with an image. This is the poet's creation: the spell that calls to life the materials with which he deals! . . . . Truth, eternal and grand truth, is { the object; but it must be truth exhibited, not by reasoning, but by the lamp of imagination. . . . . The true poet seeks to exemplify moral truths by the rays of an inventive imagination. There is implanted in him a spiritual being, which adds to the material world another creation, invisible to vulgar eyes." . . .

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... "We have nature before us, but not nature associated and embodied with intellectual and moral impressions and feelings. We require the aid of the great poet to do this for us. . . . We want only things as they are, but in their fairest, best, and most affecting shapes and tints. We want to have the ideal associations, which come mistily upon us, rendered more distinct. and impressive. We want to have the slumbering inscriptions of the soul wakened and made legible. Whatever does this, gives us the charm and the use of poetry. . . . . There are millions of associations of the moral and spiritual with the material world, which are constantly flitting in a more or less clear and luminous state across the human brain. These it is the business of poetical genius to detect, and bring into distinct and visible form: to embody them in elegant and vigorous language, and to add the harmony of rhythm."

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