rhythmic, have iterations and alliterations like the marriage-service and burial-service in our liturgies.

Poetry will never be a simple means, as when history or philosophy is rhymed, or laureate odes on state occasions are written. Itself must be its own end, or it is nothing. The difference between poetry and stock poetry is this, that in the latter the rhythm is given and the sense adapted to it; while in the former the sense dictates the rhythm. I might even say that the rhyme is there in the theme, thought and image themselves. Ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case: the verse must be alive, and inseparable from its contents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the body, and we measure the inspiration by the music. In reading prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags; but in poetry, as soon as one word drags. Ever as the thought mounts, the expres sion mounts. 'Tis cumulative also; the poem is made up of lines each of which fills the ear of the poet in its turn, so that mere synthesis produces a work quite superhuman.

Indeed, the masters sometimes rise above themselves to strains which charm their readers,

and which neither any competitor could outdo, nor the bard himself again equal. Try this strain of Beaumont and Fletcher :

"Hence, all ye vain delights,

As short as are the nights

In which you spend your folly!
There's naught in this life sweet,
If men were wise to see 't,
But only melancholy.

Oh! sweetest melancholy!

Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes,
A sigh that piercing mortifies,

A

A look that's fastened to the ground,
tongue chained up without a sound;
Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale Passion loves,
Midnight walks, when all the fowls

Are warmly housed, save bats and owls;

A midnight bell, a passing groan,

These are the sounds we feed upon,

Then stretch our boncs in a still, gloomy valley.
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."

Keats disclosed by certain lines in his Hyperion this inward skill; and Coleridge showed at least his love and appetency for it. It appears in Ben Jonson's songs, including certainly The Faery beam upon you, etc., Waller's Go, Lovely Rose! Herbert's Virtue and Easter, and Lovelace's lines To Althea and To Lucasta, and Collins's

Ode to Evening, all but the last verse, which is academical. Perhaps this dainty style of poetry is not producible to-day, any more than a right Gothic cathedral. It belonged to a time and taste which is not in the world.

As the imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man, so also is this joy of musical expression. I know the pride of mathematicians and materialists, but they cannot conceal from me their capital want. The critic, the philosopher, is a failed poet. Gray avows that "he thinks even a bad verse as good a thing or better than the best observation that was ever made on it." I honor the naturalist; I honor the geometer, but he has before him higher power and happiness than he knows.

Yet we will leave to the masters their own forms. Newton may be permitted to call Terence a playbook, and to wonder at the frivolous taste for rhymers he only predicts, one would say, a grander poetry: he only shows that he is not yet reached; that the poetry which satisfies more youthful souls is not such to a mind like his, accustomed to grander harmonies;—this being a child's whistle to his ear; that the music must rise to a loftier strain, up to Händel, up to Beethoven, up to the thorough-base of the sea

shore, up to the largeness of astronomy: at last that great heart will hear in the music beats like its own; the waves of melody will wash and float him also, and set him into concert and harmony.

Bards and Trouveurs. - The metallic force of primitive words makes the superiority of the remains of the rude ages. It costs the early bard little talent to chant more impressively than the later, more cultivated poets. His advantage is that his words are things, each the lucky sound which described the fact, and we listen to him as we do to the Indian, or the hunter, or miner, each of whom represents his facts as accurately as the cry of the wolf or the eagle tells of the forest or the air they inhabit. The original force, the direct smell of the earth or the sea, is in these ancient poems, the Sagas of the North, the Nibelungen Lied, the songs and ballads of the English and Scotch.

I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of the vast and the ideal, in the Welsh and bardic fragments of Taliessin and his successors, than in many volumes of British Classics.' An intrepid magniloquence appears in all the bards, as :

"The whole ocean flamed as one wound."

King Regnar Lodbrok.

"God himself cannot procure good for the wicked.'

Welsh Triad.

A favorable specimen is Taliessin's Invocation of the Wind at the door of Castle Teganwy:

The strong creature from before the flood,

Without flesh, without bone, without head, without feet,
It will neither be younger nor older than at the beginning;
It has no fear, nor the rude wants of created things.
Great God! how the sea whitens when it comes !

It is in the field, it is in the wood,

Without hand, without foot,

Without age, without season,

It is always of the same age with the ages of ages,
And of equal breadth with the surface of the earth.
It was not bcrn, it sees not,

And is not seen; it does not come when desired;

It has no form, it bears no burden,

For it is void of sin.

It makes no perturbation in the place where God wills it, On the sea, on the land."

In one of his poems he asks: —

"Is there but one course to the wind?

But one to the water of the sea?

Is there but one spark in the fire of boundless energy

He says of his hero, Cunedda,

"He will assimilate, he will agree with the deep and the

shallow."