endeavouring to become wise and good; may He prepare you for high and useful service in His church and the world; and O may he crown a long and happy life with a calm and peaceful death. Such are my ardent and happy desires. And it is to me an encouraging thought, that such desires may be realised. You may grow wise and good; you may have the richest blessings of God resting upon you; you may be happy and useful. This year may witness your improvement. You may learn much with which you are not now acquainted; you may become much better and happier than you now are. God desires you to be happy. Jesus died to make you good. Your sins may all be pardoned. I desire to aid you in becoming wise-to minister to your improvement—and to help you to be happy. You will then, I hope, read these letters under the feeling that Uncle Joseph is your friend: and his great object in writing is to make you wiser, and better, and happier. I begin this year's letters, according to promise, by one on Poetry. You will have learned by this that Uncle Joseph is a lover of good poetry. And it is an opinion of mine-and I am far from being alone in that opinion that childhood and youth are deeply poetic periods of human life. They are fine subjects for poetic musings, and young people have a strong love for poetry. The same feeling that makes young people fond of flowers, and birds, and pictures, and music, and home, and all beautiful things, makes them fond of poetry. The warm language of poetry suits their warm nature. God designs that we should love poetry. Hence he has not only clothed the world with beauty, and made creation to teem with poetic objects, but, as I hope to show in a future letter, the Bible contains the richest and most genuine poetry.

I can fancy a sharp little fellow beginning the reading of this letter, and ere he has read a page, he lifts up his head, and says to his Father or Mother-What is Poetry? This question, my young friends, has been often asked; and many different answers have been given. Indeed, it is

much more easy to ask questions than to answer them. It is the easiest thing in the world to ask questions; it is often most difficult to answer them. As I intend giving you a letter on the "Poetry of Milton," and another on the "Poetry of the Bible,” I will try, as well as I can, to answer the question, "What is Poetry?" It is one on which I have often thought, and on which I have read all that I have seen written on the subject. Some of the deepest thinkers have written on the question, and have given their views in answer to it. I will describe it partly in my own language, and partly in that of others. Poetry is something that cannot perhaps be exactly defined, any more than the odour of a flower can. The flower must be smelt, that we may fairly appreciate it. Poetry too must be felt in its influence on our minds to be fairly understood and recognised; still many of its qualities many be pointed out and described in writing. Poetry is not the mere jingling of words together at the end of lines, any more than the rattling of peas in a tin box is music. Many seem to think that if they can make lines rhyme and jingle at the end, that they can make poetry. In many of the verses that are called poetry there is not a spark of the thing itself, any more than there is heat in a painted fire. What is Poetry, then? you ask. Well, then, I will try to answer the question as well as I can. The words of the true poet have a similar influence on the soul as music. The poet's words are charmed words; his sounds have a power to move and to thrill the sympathetic soul. This is evidently the opinion of Tennyson. The following lines are from his graceful pen. He calls them THE POET'S SONG.

"The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,

He passed by the town, and out of the street;
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he sat him down in a lonely place,
And chaunted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark dropt down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,

And the snake slept under a spray ;

The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey,

And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay,

For he sings of what the world will be

When the years have died away."

A poet is also a painter; but he paints with words. He catches and brings before our minds the varied glories of the heavens above, and the earth beneath, and the waters of the ocean. He paints and sings the seasons as they roll round; he paints humanity in its varied developments; he portrays the passions and workings of our nature. Some poets, by the magic power of genius, bring before us the distant and the past. They make the mind's eye see what the eye of the body never saw. And, even in objects of every day notice, the poet sees a meaning, and leads us to see a meaning and an interest we never saw and felt in them before. The genuine poet throws a charm over the objects which he paints. His own sympathetic soul makes us see with deep interest, and strongly sympathise with, the objects, persons, or events which have deeply interested his own soul. As the sun not only reveals surrounding objects, but guilds them with the glory of his own beams, and warms us while gazing on them,—so also the poet throws a glow of interest over the objects or subjects of his song, and kindles in our souls a feeling similar to that which has pervaded his own. This view of the poet as a painter is expressed by Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer, in the following lines, which might have been intended as his own epitaph.

THE POET'S EPITAPH.

"Stop mortal, here thy brother lies,
The poet of the poor;

His books were rivers, woods, and skies,
The meadow and the moor.

His teachers were the torn heart's wail,

The tyrant and the slave;

The street, the factory, and the jail,

The palace and the grave!

The meanest thing, earth's feeblest worm,

He feared to scorn or hate;
And honoured in a peasant's form,

The equal of the great.

But if he loved the rich, who make
The poor man's little more;

Ill could he praise the rich, who take
From plunder'd labour's store.
A hand to do, a head to plan,

A heart to feel and dare,

Tell man's worst foes, Here lies the man
Who drew them as they were.

Poetry is sometimes of the narrative kind, but the poet narrates in his own way. He brings the events of his song before our minds, with a power and a vividness that the dry historian never attempts. He makes us see and feel as if present when the events of which he sings took place. He excites our indignation if he sings of wrong; he fires us with enthusiasm if he sings of patriotism and bravery. He raises in us the feelings which the events themselves would have excited in a thoughtful and sensitive spectator. The following very fine lines will best express the ideas which I wish to convey of the nature and power of genuine narrative poetry. They were composed by the Rev. Charles Wolfe; they are martial in their character and spirit. I am sure, however, that their influence is beneficial rather than otherwise. There is a tenderness and beauty about them which every sensitive heart at once recognises.

THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero was buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,—
By the struggling moon-beam's misty light,
And the lanterns dimly burning.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;

But we stedfastly gaz'd on the face of the dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollow'd his narrow bed,
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,

That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,
And we far away on the billow.

Slightly they'll talk of the spirit that's fled,
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him ;

But little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on,
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done,

When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun,
That the foe was sullenly firing.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,

From the field of his fame fresh and gory; We carved not a line, we raised not a stone, But we left him alone with his glory.

I unhesitatingly say, my young friends, that is a specimen of true poetry. The heart that indited them was the heart of a true Briton, as well as a true poet. I am no warrior. I hate its "pomp and circumstance;" but I enjoy such poetry as this, and I doubt not you can also.

Again, I observe, my young friends, that it is not necessary that words should rhyme, or be expressed in measured numbers, in order to be poetical. The imagination of the poet expresses his conceptions and feelings