footprints dimly traced in language. It can not throw a shadow nor a trace upon the lineaments of flesh. That is too coarse a canvas upon which to limn lines from the regions of light.

The common topics upon which these men write have a nearness to our experience, and we understand them. But in their moments of inspiration they bound an infinite distance from us, and are beyond our comprehension. They cease to instruct us, and commence to please and astonish us. It is then that we cry wonderful, and admire what we can not understand. Humboldt, generalizing upon the relations between nature and its effect upon the mind, surprises us with a knowledge, a statement of facts and conclusions which can never be attained by the slow processes of induction. They must be leapt to across an impassable chasm from our position; and we see him standing there noble and serene, but can not divine the power by which he attained his position. When he touches nature he clothes and exalts her with all the royalty of his genius. However familiar her scenes may have become to us, when he speaks of her, the "charm and magic of her power" all come to her again-the field of corn is something more than bare stalks and yellow ears, it leaps into the mysteries of sylvan temple and gentle gloom, and comes into a close sympathy with the human breast: make the field, mountain, plain, by the creative touch of genius, a living personality, and they will move into human feeling and thought, will live with the sympathies of men, will warm and ennoble him, by the majesty of their outline, and the mellowness of their flowing surface.

Says Humboldt, "we find even in the most savage nations, (as my own travels enable me to attest,) a certain vague terror-stricken sense of the all powerful unity of natural forces, and of the existence of an invisible, spiritual essence manifested in these forces, whether in unfolding the flower and maturing the fruit of the nutrient tree, in upheaving the soil in the forest, or in rending the clouds in the night of the storm." In all these prose poets, as well as in Milton, or in Shakespere, or even in the delicate Keats, or that "wonderful boy" Shelley, we see this terrible pow er given to nature, which we can not understand in our common moods. They put eyes, wings, feet, hands, thought,

into her huge frame, and she becomes an animated nature, with feelings and purposes. We live, talk, dream with her, and with her thousands of high born souls find companionship that the misapprehending world denies them. In all these prose poets, we discover the same intelligent unity and companionship, that the savage discovers in the forces of nature. No matter of what tongue, or of what nationality, they have the same eye of genius to see with, the same tongue of genius with which to give their utterances. The surprising power of Channing and of Goethe, of Ruskin and of Humboldt, is a something beyond our reach, a something that has a brotherhood under all circumstances of manifestation.

Poetic power shows itself in two departments of thought, in the descriptions of nature and in the higher abstractions of moral philosophy. No man has lived who has possessed pre-eminent power in both departments. Humboldt and Hugh Miller have great apprehension and force in descriptions of nature. Burke and Ruskin are surpassingly pow erful in the more solitary and sublime abstractions of philosophy. Humboldt and Miller are essentially different in their studies and the fruits of their genius, from those of Burke and Ruskin. Kingsley has some power of that kind distinguishing Humboldt and Miller, but it is weakened by his too great specification of facts, so that the feeling is lost in the actuality. Dickens has much of this power in his labored, yet easy, minute descriptions of social scenes; and all the time he shows the passiveness of the self-assured magician, who knows his work, and proceeds easily to the task. But Dickens never lifts the eyes to the horizon circle, much less to the zenith. He shows you the kindness of this gentleman, and the gentleness of that defenceless woman, as the sweet effect of a sunbeam that struggles into that court or into that humble window. He deals in particulars, in the pleasing, amiable weakness or virtues of the human heart, and not in the concrete or universal.

In weighing the calibre of our prose poets, we shall take no absolute standard of measurement. We shall call him a poet who has the power of moving us, of lifting us from passiveness into turbulence of feeling, from a feeling of imbecility to conscious dignity and strength. The use of the poet is to give dignity and refinement to life; when he does that, the purposes of his genius are fulfilled.

Rising from over their speculations, we will introduce the reader to the genius of those who illustrate over them. We have Humboldt, not with all the power of his original life upon him, but disfigured and transformed under the clothing of a foreign hand-still he is Humboldt.

In his introduction to Cosmos, he rises into something superior to didactic description, into the expression of poetry in the regions of abstraction. He says:

"In the uniform plain, bounded only by a different horizon, where the lowly heather, the cistus, or waiving grasses, deck the soil; on the ocean shore, where the waves, softly rippling over the beach, leave a track green with the weeds of the sea; everywhere the mind is penetrated with the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercises a soothing yet strengthening influence on the wearied spirit, calms the storm of passion, and softens the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths. Everywhere, in every region of the globe, in every stage of intellectual culture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouchsafed to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentment of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side, whether we look upward to the starry vault of heaven, scan the far stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim horizon across the vast expanse of the ocean.'

This passage rises above the special into the universal. We leave the "long heather, the cistus," as the bird leaves the twig and plunges into the infinity above, and as we move we feel the silent yet potent influence of laws that move in harmony for some great end. He brings the solemnity of nature individually before us, as she lives in all zones. The luxurience of the tropics, the silence of the polar night, the storm of the sea, and the mountain daisy, all seen and felt, quiets, softens, enlarges, and lifts any soul that so feels them. We feel them to be the most sacred messengers of God to man. The poetry of the passage is in the loftiness of the sentiment is not in the particular objects brought to the at

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tention, but in the elevating flow of the feeling. The old poets sought activity; sought too much to give active life to the objects brought to the mind. But this age dwells more in the regions of sentiment, verges towards oriental quietism. The old poetry excited the baser feelings, the new informs the understanding and enobles the feelings.

Here is a passage from Humboldt, suggestive of the Homeric school:

"If I might be allowed to abandon myself to the recollections of my own distant travels, I would instance among the most striking scenes of nature, the calm sublimity of a tropical night, when the stars, not sparkling as in our northern skies, shed their soft and planetary light over the gently heaving ocean; or I would recall the deep vallies of the Cordilleras, where the tall and slender palms pierce the leafy veil around them, and waving on high their feathery and arrow-like branches, form, as it were, 'a forest above a forest;' or I would describe the summit of the peak of Teneriffe, when a horizontal layer of clouds, dazzling in whiteness, has separated the cone of einders from the plain below, and suddenly the ascending current pierces the cloudy veil, so that the eye of the traveller may range from the brink of the crater, along the vine clad slopes of Ovotara, to the orange gardens and banana groves that skirt the shore.”

The poetry of the passage lies in the quick movement of a panorama of great objects, so that, for the moment, you are transported to a pleasing dream, wherein the hollow dome of the "tropical night," the soft "planetary stars," the ocean, the Cordilleras, the feathery hands of the palm, and the over-topping peak of Teneriffe move magical and serene, endowed with life and human sympathy.

Again:

"A knowledge of the laws of nature, whether we can trace them in the alternate ebb and flow of the ocean, in the measured path of comets, or in the mutual attractions of multiple stars, alike increases our sense of the calm of nature."

The poetry of this is not in the expression, not in dignified and sounding words. It lies deeper; it lies in the thought, in its truthfulness and sublimity. Yet the words are quiet and commanding; they have none of the imbecility

of affectation. The ceaseless and eccentric movement of the comet, the most untamed of celestial bodies, the stars held in their maze of movement by the leash of gravitation, all call the thought to rise from the contemplation of individual objects towards the inextricable confusion of a first comprehensive glance upon them ;-then, suddenly, as by a flash, a sun-beam, suspending no motion, all are reduced to the calm of perfect obedience to law, not the passionless uninviting calm of inert matter, but a calm with life beating strong and full, where each particle moves in confused maze, yet endless harmony. The finger of the Creator suddenly appears and writes harmony upon the clouded front of nature. First we have confusion, then the domestication of rest; one sits by the law-bound comet, and ocean, as quietly as by his fireside-the great law makes them powerless for harm. To agitate, and then to give rest, is the greatest power of the imagination. That poet is not true to his genius who makes all things tend to peace; he must arouse the emotions, plunge us into confusion, send us, momentarily, wondering and distracted, as unable to find the rock of rest, and then speak peace from all this confusion; this is poetic power.

Again, says Humboldt of Grecian scenery :

"It presents the peculiar charm of an intimate association of land and sea, of shores adorned with vegetation, or picturesquely girt round by rocks glancing in the light of arial tints, and of an ocean beautiful in the play of the ever-changing brightness of its deep-toned moving waves."

The delicacy of the thought, and the multitude of the figures here, tend to obscure the poetic power of the observer. Still, the passage evidences poetic power, and that delicate in apprehension and strong in conception. Greece may be called, most eminently, the mellow land, ripe and rounded with a sensuous, various and suggestive reality. Nature always gives its tone to its inhabitants. And we can see that she has imparted her delicate powers to the character of the Grecian. Under favoring political institutions his nature developes; and the same nobility, boldness, and multiformed beauty are in the character, that you see in the scenery. Over the hills and vales of Greece, is found the