hide of anonymousness, through which only the judicious catch sight of the betraying ears, has often indued Zoïlus with a terror not his own.

JOHN.

After all, they have only interfered with the larder of Genius. They keep it upon a spare diet, that it may sup the more heartily with the Muses. Hunger has wrenched many a noble deed from men; but there is a corrupting leaven of self in all that Ambition can caress out of them, which soon turns it quite stale and musty. Impletus venter non vult studere libenter was the old monkish jingle, and let us be grateful in due measure to the critics who have made the poets unwillingly illustrate it.

PHILIP.

Surely, you jest. A greasy savor of the kitchen intrudes itself into whatever is done for the belly's sake. No. What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for Love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone. And it is love that has inspired all true hearts. This is the ample heritage of the poets, and it is of this they have made us heirs. When the true poet is born, a spirit becomes incarnate which can embrace the whole rude earth as with the soft arms of a glorifying atmosphere. The inarticulate moan of the down-trodden he shall

clothe in language, and so wing it with divine music that the dullest heart shall look up to see it knocking at heaven's gates. The world's joy, erewhile a leaden cloud, shall turn golden under his sunlike look. And when such a spirit comes forth from its heavenly palace, where it had been wrapped softly in the imperial purple of noble purposes and happy dreams, and tended by all the majestical spirits of the past, when it comes forth in obedience to the beckonings of these its benignant guardians, saying, “Behold, my brethren are ahungered and I will feed them; they are athirst and I will give them drink; my plenty is for them, else is it beggary and starving," and is jeered at and flouted because it can speak only the tongue of the heaven whence it came, now foreign and obsolete, what bewildering bitterness, what trembling even to the deep Godward bases of faith, what trustfulness mocked into despair, become its portion! The love, the hope, the faith, which it had sent out before it to bring it tidings of the fair land of promise, come back pale and weary, and cry for food in vain to the famishing heart which once so royally entertained them. The beautiful humanity, a vision of which had braced the sinews of its nature, and had made all things the vassals of its monarch eye, seems to it now but as a sphinx, from whose unchangeable and stony orbs it can win no look of recognition, and whose granite lips move not at its despairing cry. You smile, but let me think it is

for sympathy. A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point. But how many noble hearts have writhed with its venomous stab, and festered with its subtle malignity!

JOHN.

Yet, from some of its hurts a celestial ichor flows, as from a wounded god. I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tenser for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly. We may be but the chance acquaintance of him who has made us the sharer of his joy, but he who has admitted us to the sanctuary of his grief has made us partakers also of the dignity of friendship. Sorrow, you will allow, if not scorn or neglect, is a good schoolmaster for poets. Why, it has wrenched one couplet of true poetry out of Dr. Johnson.

PHILIP.

You mean that one in his "Vanity of Human Wishes,"

"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."

You might have instanced, too, his letter to Lord Chesterfield, though it be not in verse. But illfortune, if it bring out the poetry of a prosaic nature, will but deaden a highly poetical one.

JOHN.

You agreed with me in my praise of Elizabeth Barrett's lines; can you give me an illustration of Chaucer's

"Infantine,

Familiar, clasp of things divine"?

PHILIP.

It would be difficult. An author's piety cannot be proved from the regular occurrence of certain decorums and respectabilities of religion in his works, but from a feeling which permeates the whole. I have read books in which the name of God was never once so much as alluded to; which yet irresistibly persuaded me of the writer's faith in him and childlike love of him. And I have read others, where that blessed name, with a parenthetical and systematic piety, made part of every sentence, and only impressed me like the constantly recurring figures upon calico. There is no intentional piety about Chaucer, no French collarand-wristband morality, too common in our day. Now, certain days of the week, and certain men, seem to claim a monopoly in religion. It is something quite too costly and precious to make part of every day's furniture. We must not carry it into the street or the market, lest it get soiled. We doff it and hang it up as easily as a Sunday suit. ancients esteemed it sacrilege to touch what was set

The

apart for the gods. Many of our own time imitate that ethnic scrupulousness, and carefully forbear religion, yet are deemed pious men, too. In Chaucer, you will find a natural piety everywhere shining through, mildly and equably, like a lamp set in an alabaster vase. The wise man maintains a hospitable mind. He scruples not to entertain thoughts, no matter how strange and foreign they may be, and to ask news of them of realms which he has never explored. He has no fear of their stirring any treason under his own roof. Chaucer apparently acted upon this principle. He loved speculation, and, when he was running down some theological dogma, he does not mind leaping the church inclosure, and pursuing his prey till it takes refuge under the cassock of the priest himself. But, though he seems not to set much store by forms and outward observances, he is quite too near the days of wonder and belief and earnestness, not to be truly religious. The earliest poetry of all countries is sacred poetry, or that in which the idea of God predominates and is developed. The first effort at speech which man's nature makes in all tongues is, to pronounce the word "Father." Reverence is the foundation of all poetry. From reverence the spirit climbs on to love, and thence beholds all things. No matter in what Scythian fashion these first recognitions of something above and beyond the soul are uttered, they contain the germs of psalms and prophecies.