witness to the fact that faith in the great realities of the unseen world is essential to man's highest well-being.

Unspeakably dreary would be our earthly pilgrimage were there no supreme Being, the Infinite source of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, the object of our profoundest reverence, our highest aspiration, and our deepest love; while man, "who looks before and after," with thoughts that wander through eternity," if doomed to annihilation, must be regarded, not as a little lower than the angels, but only as a little higher than the brutes.

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Hence the supreme importance of dissociating faith in these fundamental, I am inclined to say these indispensable religious truths, from faith in dogmas and doctrines which, being out of harmony with the spirit of the age, have lost their hold upon the more thoughtful minds of the present generation, and instead of ministering to the religious life, are a prolific source of perplexity and doubt.

This may be regarded as the important lesson enforced by the poems of Arthur Clough and Matthew Arnold, constituting a valuable contribution unconsciously made, by these two gifted poets, to the cause of human progress.

Deep interest, moreover, attaches to their productions as giving poetical expression, not only to their own religious doubts and perplexities, but also as reflecting, under one very important aspect, the intellectual tendencies of the age in which they lived.

They are also noteworthy as illustrating the truth embodied in Tennyson's familiar lines:

"There dwells more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."

CONCLUSION.

ROBERT BROWNING.

1812-1889.

LORD TENNYSON. 1809.

POETRY being the expression from generation to generation of the highest experiences of the highest minds, it is deeply interesting to find that, in each succeeding age, and under every variety of form, it has, with few exceptions, given expression to those high instincts in the human soul,

"Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing—
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence; truths that wake
To perish never.'

To the works of our distinguished living poets, excepting those of Lord Tennyson, it is not my intention to refer; he may truly be characterized as the patriarch of song; entering upon his poetical career in 1880, he has continued for upwards of sixty years

"To fling abroad

The winged shafts of truth;"

to denounce, with prophetic fire, our national sins; to pour forth, in impassioned strains, his enthusiasm for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and at the same time to delight his contemporaries with his stately music. With him I shall associate Robert Browning, whose

recent loss has been so deeply deplored, not only by England, but by all English-speaking peoples. To attempt any exposition of the works of these two great poets would be foreign to my purpose.

I shall merely appeal to them as bearing emphatic witness to the divine and immortal nature of the human soul and to the relation subsisting between it and the Infinite Mind.

I shall appeal to them also as indicating the higher level, moral and spiritual, which has been reached by humanity on its onward march.

In an earlier chapter I called attention to the inadequate conception entertained by Plato respecting the Moral Law, which, being inherent in the Divine Nature, is changeless and eternal, while man's recognition and interpretation of it, depending upon the progressive development of his higher nature, must, of necessity, be a slow and gradual process.

It is therefore satisfactory to find the voice of song, in Wordsworth's celebrated Ode, giving expression to this higher conception of Duty, as universal and everlasting law, thus bearing witness to the progress of humanity in this most important sphere of human culture.

This recognition of Law, as God's manifestation of himself, alike in the physical and the moral world, is the special characteristic of Lord Tennyson, and underlies many of his poems. Thus, in his noble "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," he glorifies allegiance to Duty as the divinely appointed means of bringing man into the immediate presence of God, thus enforcing the lesson taught by Wordsworth.

"Not once or twice in our fair island-story,
The path of duty was the way to glory;
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won
His path upward, and prevailed,

Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands

To which our God Himself is moon and sun."

We have, moreover, the highest authority for saying that "Love is the fulfilling of the Law;" Tennyson in his "Palace of Art," and other poems, bears witness to the truth embodied in these words, and inculcates the important lesson that the highest intellectual gifts, divorced from sympathy and helpfulness, cannot work efficiently, and that the richest treasures of Art, if possessed in selfish isolation, will eventually become a source of misery rather than of happiness to their possessors.

"And he that shuts love out, in turn shall be

Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie
Howling in outer darkness."

Very noble, also, as setting forth the true nature of Virtue, are the following lines, entitled "Wages:"

"Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,

Paid by a voice flying by to be lost in an endless sea— Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrongNay, but she aim'd not at glory, no lover of glory she: Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.

"The wages of sin is death; if the wages of Virtue be dust,

Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die."

In considering the progress of humanity, we must bear in mind another striking characteristic of the ancient Hellenes, to which history bears emphatic witness;—namely, the extremely narrow range of their altruistic sympathies; a limitation manifesting itself, down to the latest period of their national life, in the bitter hatred and antagonism which separated their several communities, and which led to the final subjugation of their country. The same spirit manifested itself, not only in the revolting system of slavery upon which their civilization was based, but also in the supreme contempt with which they regarded all who

could not claim affinity with their favoured race, and whom they stigmatized as barbarians.

In striking contrast to this feature of ancient civilization is the great christian principle of Human Brotherhood, the partial recognition of which, in spite of class distinctions and social prejudice, forms one of the most hopeful features of the nineteenth century.

It must, however, be confessed that the recognition of this principle has been a plant of exceedingly slow growth, while its practical realization, between nation and nation, when we look at the armed attitude of Europe, appears, even at the present time, like an utopian dream. All the more grateful should we feel to the poets who, in immortal song, have embodied their belief in the ultimate reign of righteousness and peace, the goal towards which humanity is making slow but steady progress.

Cowper was, I believe, the first English poet to realize in its full significance the principle of human brotherhood, based as it is upon the Fatherhood of God, and was, moreover, the first to anticipate the time when nations, as well as individuals, shall be united by the fraternal bond as members of the great human family.

Many grand utterances, embodying similar anticipations, might be quoted from subsequent poets, especially from Shelley and Victor Hugo; nowhere, however, has this larger conception of humanity, as one universal brotherhood, found nobler expression than in the following lines from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall." Discerning with prophetic eye,

"The one far-off divine event,

Towards which the whole creation moves,"

the poet summons his fellow-workers to labour for its realization. Having himself an assured belief in "the Being of infinite goodness and wisdom," who is guiding humanity on its onward march, he inspires that conviction of ultimate success which is one of the most powerful incentives to exertion.