actual, and its hopes of the possible. While the world has thus been led astray by such opinions as that expressed by Lord Bacon; and while rhymers have written and published piles of most distressing and wearisome books, founded upon this misconception, it is no wonder that poetry has fallen into some disfavor with earnest men, who have something else to think of and to do than to read for amusement mere fictions and fables without the soul of truth in them; fictions which are ALL fiction, and inane repetition set to a sing-song; teaching nothing, containing nothing, and as worthless as Lord Bacon imagined all poetry to be. While such ideas have been considered criticism, the province of poetry has been restricted as a necessary consequence. The poet, too commonly by his own consent, has been tethered with a critical string. Criticism has said to it-" You shall not touch upon religion; that is not within your province. You shall not meddle with politics, they are alien to you. You shall not take an excursion into the regions of science; for science and poetry are antagonistic. You may weave cobwebs; you may listen to the birds singing, the streams flowing, or the sea roaring; you may make temporary, Shakspeare, which unfortu- | bounds than the aspirations of the soul of nately he did not. "One of the later man, its knowledge and enjoyment of the schools of the Grecians," says he, "is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies, where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant; BUT FOR THE LIE'S SAKE. But I cannot tell: this same truth is a naked and open daylight that doth not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candlelight. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day, but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or a carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A MIXTURE OF A LIE DOTH EVER ADD A PLEASURE. One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesythe wine of demons,' because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie." So said the great philosopher; and so too many have believed, because they were told to believe by one who spoke with so much authority. Lord Bacon did not reflect on the abuse of this word, LIE. It is very obvious that he used it without having clearly defined the sense in which he did So. HE, of all men, ought not to have forgotten what he so well knew, that a fiction is not necessarily a LIE, and that fables are truths to the wise and to all who can understand them. His very illustration re-love verses or write pastorals; you may be futes him for candlelight is as true in its own way as the sunshine, and never makes the diamond or carbuncle he speaks of more or less than a diamond or a carbuncle. If, by a difference of light, it produces a kind of brilliancy in the diamond which sunshine does not produce, it is a form of the truth deserving to be studied for that very reason. Plato, though he would have banished poets from his ideal republic, meaning thereby the writers of licentious and mischievous plays, and not the real poets-else he would have banished such men as himself-had more correct notions of the sublimity and divinity of poetry than Lord Bacon, for he said that "Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” And this, indeed, is the secret source of the power and grandeur of poetry. The highest poetry approaches nearest to vital truth; and poetry is only good and beautiful, and worthy to be loved and admired of men, in proportion as it so draws near to and identifies itself with the truth. To it no truth can be alien or inappropriate. It embraces all things, and has no other passionate or musical, or merry or melancholy, if you will; but you must at all events amuse us, and leave serious subjects alone." So in effect, though not exactly in words, have said the most authoritative critics. Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Akenside, informs us that-" With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author he had nothing to do; his business was with his poetry," and this he said, although his poetry could not be properly considered without the politics and religion which gave it a color. Again, in his Life of Dr. Watts, he hints, what is known to have been his belief, that good poetry could not be written upon a religious topic. "It is sufficient for Watts," said he, to have done better than others, what no man has done well." To introduce politics into poetry is thought to be wrong by many critics, who would think you injured them if you questioned their acuteness. union of politics with poetry," say they, "is always hurtful to the politics and tatal to the poetry." In fact, they consider it un "The Mr. modating himself to the same error. No poet he, weaving capricious dreams But one who uttered without shows and seems seems, pardonable to wed them together; or even to let the smallest love passage take place betwixt them; "as if," say the objectors, "we have not politics enough in the newspapers, in public places, at the very corners of the streets." And they say right, if their idea of poetry be right; but not right for those who have notions more exalted and sympathies more extended. These persons confound politics with party, which is one mistake: and they think poetry This, it must be admitted, is strange destined for mere amusement, which is language to come from one who has himself another. They do not think that there are the vision and true faculty divine. As if politics far better than any parties that a poet could not utter "serious facts" ever were formed; and that the amuse- without "shows" and " "and as if ment found in poetry is a mere acci- a poet were of necessity a vain dreamer, dent an extrinsic adornment only-and and an idler of no use or advantage to that its object is to teach, exalt, and society. Truly the clear-sighted men of refine; to inspire, like religion, the humble this day, whose time and energies are ocwith dignity, the sad with comfort, the cupied with steam-engines and iron roads, oppressed with hope: to show the abun- with atmosphere as a moving power, with dant and overflowing blessing of familiar wondrous mechanism of every kind, and things-the riches, the beauty, and the with the onward progress of the nations, beneficence of nature; to fill all men with must be somewhat puzzled when they hear the love of God and of one another; and to one worthy to rank as a poet depreciating encourage society in its onward career from it thus. bad into good, and from good into better, through all Time into Eternity. The lovers of mere amusement have not reached this pinnacle; and see not so far away, nor so goodly a prospect beneath and around them. But they ought to educate their faculties, until their minds can soar to these pure, high regions, before they pronounce what poetry ought not to be, and define the limits which it should not overstep saying to it, "This shall you touch upon, but not upon that. This shall you sing of for my idle hours, but that shall you not breathe for the delight and instruction of men, more earnest, and of finer sympathies than we." Yet, after all, it is not so surprising that critics should go wrong, when those who should be superior to the critics-the poets themselves-have set the bad example. When Charles II. objected to Edmund Waller, that his verses upon Cromwell were better than those he had written about his lawful sovereign, Waller replied " Your Majesty knows that we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth." In this pretty speech, he behaved like a courtier and a man of the world, but not like a poet; and committed treason to the majesty of his art, that he might escape| the semblance of treason to a very inferior thing, the majesty of Charles Stuart. We find a modern poet, too, seriously accom Another poet, whose writings testify loudly to the utter untenableness of such a theory—namely, William Wordsworthhas also uttered a sentence which some have interpreted to the depreciation of his divine art. He says, in an essay supplementary to one of his early prefaces, "that the appropriate business of poetry, her appropriate employment, her privilege, her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and the passions." This, however, is no depreciation of poetry, though at first glance it may look so, to assert that its province is not to treat of things as they are. His meaning is, not merely as they are; but to add to them a grace and a beauty over and above their positive existence. He will not diminish the existence of a thing, but he will increase its existence by the aid of the beauty perceived by the senses and given by the passions. He never considers that the province of poetry is the unreal against the real, the fictitious uninclusive of the true ; and against such a theory his poems are immortal evidence, as Milton's are, and Shakespeare's, and those of all great poets. Very many of those who restrict the domain of poetry, are fain to admit upon discussion, that Religion and Politics, in their highest sense, are the legitimate sources of the noblest inspiration: but they scientific minutiae of Darwin, and their instipulate for pure religion, not sectarianism, capability of poetical treatment; but he and for catholic and national politics, not carries his principle too far, and falls into for party warfare. This being conceded- a great mistake. Any one must have stuand that Poetry should enter within these died "the great truths of science" to little precincts solely in search of truth, and for purpose, who can talk of the "satisfied and the promulgation of truth-they would, unimpassioned intelligence" with which he nevertheless, shut another door against it- comprehends them. Those truths, even the door of science. Within this they will the very least of them, are of sublimest imon no account suffer it to enter. "The port; and it is not after such a manner scholar," says Madame de Staël, as quoted that those who have most studied, and who by D'Israeli the elder in the Fourteenth know most of the ever-wondrous, ever-new Chapter of his Essay on the Literary Cha- revelations of science, would think it fitting racter, "has nothing to say to the poet, the for the humble spirit; humble in the littlepoet to the naturalist." The author of ness of the highest knowledge; to speak Sketches of the History of Literature and either of the known or the unknown agenLearning in England, published in Knight's cies of the Infinitude. Poetry may and Weekly Volume, falls in a degree into this must treat of the Great Truths of Science, error. He says, in his notice of Darwin, wherever it suits its purposes to do so, or it truly a master of rhythm, but no poet, that abdicates a portion of its high prerogative. his scientific descriptions, in the Botanic This it can do without allusion to techniGarden and the Loves of the Plants, "dis- calities and trivialities such as those which play more ingenuity than poetry”—a judg-so offend us in the writings of Darwin. As ment in which all men will agree. He goes on to say-"Poetry and Science are two rival and hostile powers. Whenever anything has been reduced to matter of science, its poetical character is extinguished; it ceases to appeal to any passion or affection.rious regions to turn an "undazzled gaze" What was veneration or terror, religion or superstition, becomes satisfied and unimpassioned intelligence. Imagination is dethroned there; its creative power abolished and destroyed, its transforming illumination made impossible. Even mere wonder, the lowest of all the imaginative states of mind, ceases, when the scientific comprehension is complete; for of course, when understood, no one thing is really more wonderful than another. for the solitary stanza of Campbell, no true poet will take it for his guide. No man knew better than Campbell that Science was the nursing mother of Poetry, who showed it whither to fly, and to what glo in search of new inspiration. In spite of his authority in this stanza, great as many will consider it, we in our day must acknowledge that the withdrawal by Science of the veil from Creation's face, though it may deprive Fancy of some filagree adornments, robs Imagination of nothing. The rainbow has venerable associations, when we think upon it as the "bow of God"—the sign of the Covenant that the earth should no more be deluged with the waters; Methinks thy jubilee to keep The first-made anthems rang The tendency of science is to reduce and level; the tendency of poetry is to magnify and exalt. Each, therefore, has its proper and peculiar ground. They cannot act in concert. In other words, it is impossible to treat any subject at once scientifically But Science, which shows us the secret wonand poetically." The illustrious author of the Pleasures of Hope has expressed a similar sentiment in his celebrated Ode to the Rainbow: ders of its mechanism, adds a new delight to its contemplation without depriving it of this. We see it spanning heaven like an arch; we see it, if we stand upon the mountain-tops, developed into the complete circle; we see its counterpart in the spray of the torrent on a sunny day; and can produce Irises as often as we will in the glancing drops cast upwards in the sun-shine. Both of these writers are wrong in this par- from the paddle-wheels of victorious steam ticular, the first more especially so. No-the same in their magnificent hues, so exdoubt the prose writer is quite correct in quisitely overlaid, and gliding the one into his condemnation of the technicalities and the other with such perfect loveliness; When Science from Creation's face and we acknowledge the simplicity, the grandeur, the majesty of "the material law" which is obeyed in their formation. We find that law to be, not cold, as the poet sings, but warm and fruitful, producing invariable and inevitable results from the same causes; and that both the cause and the effect are proofs of infinite wisdom and divine goodness, filling all nature with things of beauty of which the contemplation increases our enjoyments and exalts our souls; and makes us fitter to be true men in this world and to mount in the scale of creation in the next to a state of higher intelligence, purer love, and more certain happiness. The comet careering through the heavens does not cease to impress the mind with its grandeur and its mystery because it is no longer thought to scatter war and pestilence from its horrid hair; but inspires emotions still more sublime of the might and majesty of God, when we consider that his hand who made it made also that awful intellect of man, which traces its course through the infinitude of space, and calculates its coming from afar. The sun is not less poetical as the centre of a vast system than as a mere adjunct to the earth, set in the heavens to give her light and to form the succession of her seasons. The planets are not less the poetry of heaven because astrology is defunct, and do not the less loudly chant to the devout soul in the silence and splendor of the midnight, that "the hand that made them is divine" because we believe them to be, like the kindred planet on which we live and move, the abode of myriads of important spirits, playing their allotted part in the mighty progression of the universe. The stars scattered in such seeming confusion over space, are not the less poetical because we, by the aid of science, have discovered order amidst apparent disorder, because we have grasped the majestic secret of gravitation, and beheld the simplicity, the unity, and the universality of the law which upholds and regulates them, in all the complication of their stupendous harmony. The Milky Way, as resolved into suns, systems, and firmaments, by the telescopes of Herschel and Lord Rosse, does not the less impress us with ineffable awe and adoration, because it is no longer a faint light in the heavens, but a congregation of innumerable worlds. The Nebula in Orion, that white fleecy cloud on the far verge of space, does not become unpoetical, when we know that it is a universe; nor do we look upon that great constellation of Orion itself with less prostration of our feeble powers-with less hopefulness that we too shall be made perfect, because Science teaches us that our sun and all its train of planets are moving steadily and surely towards one of its stars; and that in this mystic development, 6000 years multiplied by 6000, and that product multiplied by itself, are but a fragment of a cycle-the morning of a day which has begun and will be ended. No. Poetry is not inimical to Science, nor science hostile to Poetry. Poetry is universal. It includes every subject; and can no more be restricted in its range, than the Intellect, the Hope, and the Faith of man, of which it is the grandest exponent and the most sublime expression-making Intellect more intellectual, Hope more hopeful, and Religion more religious. Even those critics and poets who have striven to it, in mere dogmatism and wilfulness of assertion, have, in spite of themselves, done homage to its nobler uses, and blessed where it was their intention to revile. Dr. Johnson did not always exclude poetry from any one field of human inquiry. "In a poet," says he, in his Rasselas, "no kind of knowledge is to be overlooked. To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination. He must be conversant with all that is awfully vast, or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, the meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety; for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of religious truth; and he who knows most will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and of gratifying his readers with remote allusions and unexpected instruction." This is well said, and although it applies mainly to the adornments, and scarcely to the essentials of poetry, it is easy to see that the critic had forgotten the previously recorded opinions already alluded to, when he wrote it; and that in his heart he would set no limits to the illimitable. It may seem superfluous to some minds to dilate upon a matter that ought to be so obvious; but " error is a snake that requires much killing." Those to whom the case is clear, will pardon the truisms of the refutation for the sake of those who have not hitherto taken the trouble to think, or who, having taken the trouble, have arrived at wrong conclusions. In returning more especially to the subject of the duties of the poet in the present age, we must first of all consider what the age is; what are its desires and aspirations what its characteristics, and at what point of human development it actually stands. That the age is utilitarian, most men assent. The fact seems to lie upon the surface. Let us inquire what the word means, that we may see our way clearly as we go on. Bentham either invented it for his philosophy, or it was fastened upon him by others. In either case it is a good word, if its meaning be not unduly restricted. Some men are such strict utilitarians, that in the furnishing of a house (for other people) they would exclude the ornamental. They would have the kitchen poker and the roasting jack, the chair, the table, and the bed, the carpet, and perhaps the curtains; but not the picture, nor the bust, nor the poem, the play, and the novel. These are a small class only, and utilitarianism is a much better thing than they would make of it. This class of people are rarely met with in private life, and if they preach such a doctrine, they rarely practise it: but we sometimes hear of them in public, in the House of Commons for example, where the money of the nation is begrudged for every purpose tending to the advancement of art, or literature, or the encouragement of those who excel in them. But individual men are generally ashamed of such a restriction as the physical to their idea of utility. True utility by no means excludes the ornamental. It does not consider man as an animal only, but as a being with an immortal soul. Utilitarianism, in its widest and only true sense, includes the wants of both soul and body-of the complete man. It is not only necessary that we should gain victories over time, and space, and the obstruction of matter. The mind has its cravings as well as the body, which must be satisfied. Utilitarianism of this kind is essentially popular, democratic, and philanthropic. It requires that the bulk of mankind should be made physically comfortable, as a preliminary to their being mentally and spiritually happier than they are or ever have been. Without losing any of their hopes of a higher state of existence in another world, or departing from the faith which teaches that hope, the men of the present day are very strongly impressed with the belief that the world can be made very much better than it is. Looking back to History, they find that man's career is but a record of misery; and that the fearful Book, which tells of his misdeeds and of his sufferings, is black with crime and red with blood. They find also that the many have been the victims of the evil passions of the few; that bloody wars, debasing superstitions, revenge, cruelty, lust, and ignorance, have filled the world with misery since time began; that "the weak have died to satisfy the strong;" that in the more peaceful periods of human history, when art, science, and learning flourished-when intellect gained its most splendid victories-the great masses of mankind were sunk in physical or mental slavery-by far the greater portion in both; and that in the bosom of civilization herself, the multitudes have not participated in her benefits, but have been the prey of poverty, vice, disease, crime, and all unspeakable miseries. Reason and faith, and all experience, as far as it has gone, combine to show that this state of things is not a necessary consequence of man's nature. By looking about us, we see that many evils have been remedied; that a great many more are falling beneath the advances of intelligence, and the spread of the sublime doctrine of Christianity that we ought to love one another; and we are encouraged by that which has been already done to hope for much more. Science, by increasing the physical comforts of mankind, is preparing the way for mental blessings and mental progress, to an extent which to some minds seems Utopian to imagine, but which will be realized nevertheless. All our physical conquests over matter are proofs and results of mental energies, working to various ends, and all of them, we cannot doubt, though we may not yet understand, to ultimate mental and spiritual, as well as physical, good. The utilitarian, who confines utility to merely physical advantage, may deny in a great degree the usefulness of literature, and wholly deny the usefulness of poetry. Believing it to be founded on fiction; to be, as the ancient father has it, "the vain shadow of a lie," he may say that he will have none of it; and turn his mind to the contemplation of his money bags. But there are better and truer utilitarians than the men of this class; who can see a beauty, and consequently a good, in every manifestation of the human intellect; who know that Beauty and Truth and Goodness are but three sides of one eternal prism, of which the one cannot exist without the others; and in |