stance. When we gaze on some picturesque landscape, the impressions that it produces, which differ not from our customary impressions, we are not entitled to denominate poetical; its poetry consists in the nobler and newer impressions that it bestows. But both the old and the fresh impressions are emanations from ourselves; they are not peculiarities of the landscape. And the extraordinary impressions are the necessary offspring of the ordinary, because the ordinary were once extraordinary: the whole of our career is a train of transitions by which the uncommon becomes the common; and the susceptibility to former extraordinariness and uncommonness, must be of course identical with the susceptibility of wonder and admiration at present novelty. The entire life of every man may thus be proved to be poetical, however mechanical and prosaic in the texture of its incidents. If every man has the natural perception of the beautiful, and the natural perception of the harmonious, and if this perception lies at the foundation of poetry; if the relation of every man to the universe is a plastic and spiritualizing relation, and if this relation is the first evolvement of poetry; if every man has the susceptibility of the uncommon and the extraordinary, and if the interweavement of this susceptibility with his activities is the continued progress of poetry;-then must every man be poetical. It does not alter the case to say, that few are conscious of all this from an analysis of their faculties. Multitudes of men are ignorant of the facts of human physiology; but that does not stop, in those who are ignorant, the play of the lungs, or the circulation of the blood. From the artificial notions that prevail in the world on all subjects, many suppose that poetry is only a special mode of composition, in contradistinction to prose. When told, what I have just been propounding, that poetry is an essential and unpausing vitality of every rational intelligence, they would immediately conclude that such a doctrine is a monstrous paradox. But it is a paradox to them, only because their literary associations are as conventional as their social life. Let them forget their literary conventionalism, and give themselves up to the fresh impulses of nature, and they will quickly discover that what I have

been declaring is an eternal truth. Suppose each person now before me, were to furnish me with his autobiography, what would be its most striking and interesting features? Not the outward facts; but the successive steps of mental growth: and one of the prime movers in that mental growth must have been imagination. The aim to construct a world of unspeakable splendours beyond and above the tangible, must ever have been present, though it might seldom clothe itself with utterances that could convey to others any accurate picture of its aspirings. Yet what were its various phases but so many poetical unfoldings,-unfoldings which, if incorporated into the symmetry of an artistic form, would have constituted poems such as those that have made the Miltons and the Shakspeares famous? When we group vividly before our fancy, the past, the present, the future of our being-our doubts, our temptations, our hopes, our plans, our deeds-what we have vanquished, what we have yet to vanquish—the knowledge that we have gained, the knowledge that we seek-the mysteries that we have pierced, the mysteries whose meaning still evades the grasp of our researches,-and when we give to this contemplation the continuity and the comprehension of a whole, are we not thus doing the highest labour of the poet, though our epic poem is written only on the tablets of our brain? When we select a portion of this epic poem of our life, and dwell less on its relation to ourselves than on its positive constituents, and crowd it with the human creatures who gave it its animation, and with their words, and acts, and manners, and garb, and character, and place ourselves as co-agents among them, as co-agents fulfilling a part prominent or subordinate with them, but still only fulfilling a part, we have unconsciously created, in what seemed merely a reverie, the whole of a dramatic poem. When we select another portion of this epic poem of our life, and cluster round it our burning sympathies for some object of affection or of patriotism, no whisper of emotion may flow from our lips, yet this process, forgotten almost as soon as finished, was the rapid and unwitting engraving of a lyrical inspiration upon our heart. We all live, and think, and dream, more poetry than the greatest Poet has ever

written. This does not lessen the merit of those to whom the name of Poet is more peculiarly applied. Their merit remains the same, whether or not we admit that all men are poets in the sense of poetical feeling, and conception, and aspiring. The power to give an artistic incorporation to an idea must always be an additional power to that which simply conceives the idea; a power therefore to be venerated and admired by those who possess it not. If it had no higher title to praise, it would at least have that of spontaneous and conscientious employment in the elaboration of something definite; whereas the involuntary poetry that traverses our mind is no more worthy either of approval or of blame than the involuntary working, in health or sickness, of our material mechanism. But the Poet is more than a worker, as distinguished from the recipient of unspontaneous musings. He does what God did at creation; he communicates to an idea a permanent form, and makes an evanescent phantasy a visible, substantial, symmetrical reality. Few hath the Great Spirit endowed with this noble prerogative-the prerogative of garbing an idea in a drapery of sublimity or of grace; and therefore those few should be more willingly and fervently honoured by the sons of men.

I have prefixed these remarks on the nature of poetry, in order that you might more accurately perceive the influence of the Poet as an agent of civilization. All men possessing the poetical faculty, it is the province of the Poet to nourish, to excite, to enlighten that faculty. This is his province; whether he employ prose or verse, truth or fiction, the simplest artistic exhibitions, or the most complicated. The value of his agency must therefore be ascertained from the value of that universal faculty in human beings to which he speaks. And what is the distinguishing value of that faculty? To give an interest and an attraction to duty which no other influence could present. Sympathy might occasionally urge us to generous deeds; a conviction of conscience might make us scrupulously perform what we conceived to be right; the deep motives of religion might support amid trial and struggle, and hallow the peril that they could not dispel: but man needs more than this- -pro

found and perennial as are these and divers other sustainments. He needs something which, on the hardest sphere of the practical-on the dullest aspect of the commonplace on the meagrest detail of the habitual— may cast the rich lavishment of an impalpable glory, and visions of the supernatural, and revealings of the miraculous. He needs something which may tell him at every step, that what environs him, however fair, and brilliant, and happy, is but a diminutive fragment of his being. He needs not only to be pervaded by the thought that he belongs to the immortal and the infinite, and that his mind is endowed with powers that can march with an archangel's boldness on the verge of eternal mysteries. This thought gives him the persuasion of his mental strength; of the magnitude and manifoldness of the objects that he can embrace, and of his destiny as a child of the everlasting God. But he needs something also, which, while softening and irradiating the actual, and making it eloquent with multiplied meanings, yet does so without that feeling of awfulness and of stringent consciousness which the metaphysical, the spiritual, the religious are apt to occasion. Even those whose worldly circumstances are the most satisfactory, would scarcely be content to smile responsively to their smiling fortune, if they could not make their position radiant with hues and glad with melodies borrowed from the fairyland of their fancy. We never meet with a bliss, but we imagine a greater; we never meet with a success, but we imagine a more triumphant; we never gather a harvest on the field of truth, but we imagine a more abundant; we never gaze on a scene of nature, but we imagine a lovelier; we never contemplate a work of art, but we imagine a more sublimely conceived and a more elaborately finished. In these various cases, it is the poetical faculty within us that speaks; and which speaks thus, not, as might at first sight appear, to fill us with useless discontentment, but to pervade us with higher pleasures than what could have fallen to our lot, if what we saw and attained perfectly succeeded in satisfying the yearnings of our bosom. If there was a definite attainable goodness, or a definite attainable truth, or a definite attainable beauty, our life would cease to be life,

and our mind to be mind. It is in the search for the unattainable that our attainable felicity is placed. In our wanderings through heaven and earth, through space and time, our heart bounds rapturously at every renewed rush of our daring footsteps, not on account of the conquests that we have already gained, or the path of progress over which we have rapidly swept, but on account of the heights that are still above us, and the wonders that are still before us. And all poetry, by whatever name it may name itself, is a picture of our wondrous march towards the unattainable. Let it not be said that this poetical faculty in man requires rather to be checked than to be indulged, or that duty can best be performed where it is only moderately active. There are some isolated cases, in which imagination, unchecked, unregulated, becomes prejudicial, and conducts to a prostration of vigour and resolution. But such cases are few, and their very fewness makes them the more observed. One of the greatest defects in the majority of men is unquestionably the undevelopement of the poetical faculty. This is specially notable in this country. The English are remarkable for the weakness of the poetical faculty. It is a singular fact, that England, which has produced the greatest poets that the world has ever seen, is the least poetical of countries in the character of its inhabitants. The effect of this unpoetical character is, that the English, who have many noble qualities, have a less continued and a less elevated range of happiness than other nations in many respects far inferior. Everything here is done too much as a matter of business. Religion is mechanical; morality a catalogue of details, instead of a fortress of principles; social relations hard and angular; friendship a habit instead of a sympathy; conversation a petty gossip about the news of the day, instead of a discursive grasp of the most suggestive and instructive topics of human thought: and this is what renders the education of the English people so difficult. They are quick enough in comprehension, disposed enough to receive information; but then it is a comprehension that is exercised not many-sidedly, but one-sidedly. Religious people read only religious books, and political reformers read only political productions, and scientific investiga