ripe, mellow autumnal atmosphere, and the whole has the richness of heavy wine-and it is this same potation that the heroes of ancient Greece drank, which made them noble in character. We can see that Humboldt saw Grecian scenery with the fine phrenzy of the poet's eye, the comprehensive outline and the delicate tints of the picture are thrown in at a touch, and we do not see the poet's power until we are calm and conjure up the actuality of the picture to the imagination.

Schiller says of the Greek poet that "nature seems to interest his understanding more than his moral perceptions; he does not cling to her chasms with the fervor and the plaintive passion of the poet of modern times." The activity of the Greek intellect could not be thwarted, turned aside from its legitimate objects; still, in such a country as that which they possessed we would naturally look for a great predominance of feeling over thought. It is so with Humboldt; nature appeals to his understanding rather more than to his heart and moral powers; still he possesses much of the delicate sensibility of the child. His intellect, like a dry light, glimmers through his words, more than you can see the warm stream of feeling flowing through them. Under his pen nature is alive and active; he peoples her with animated and beautiful beings who show more symmetry of lineament than warmth of feeling in the countenances. The best imaginations have a moisture in their flumes; they are less dazzling and more inviting, more akin to the pleasing shapes that come and go over the embers of the hearth-stone. The modern poets have not the simple grandeur of the ancients in their descriptions of nature, the education of civilization habitually fills the mind with more objects that call for activity of thought, so that we now see it tortured into fanciful shapes and not left in all the forcible simplicity of nature. The modern heir is somewhat ailing with the St. Vitus' dance of the spasmodic school, and this imperfection is carried into its off-spring. In Cosmos, as much as in any great work of modern times, we find nature described as she is, with much of her grace and beauty left upon her, with the pure glow of her far-diffusing life and vitality left upon her, flushing every feature. Bassil the Great calls the stars "those everlasting blossoms of heaven," and speaks of the ocean as "gently moved by the breath of heaven, and in

roseate hues caressing the shores peaceful spent." Gregory of Nyssa writes.

"When I see every ledge of rock, every valley and plain, covered with new-born verdure, the varied beauty of the trees, and the lilies at my feet decked by nature with the double charms of perfume and of color; when in the distance I see the ocean, towards which the clouds are onward bound, my spirit is overpowered by a sadness not wholly devoid of enjoyment. When in Autumn the fruits have passed away, the leaves have fallen, and the branches of the trees, dried and shrivelled, are robbed of their leafy adornments, we are instinctively led, amid the everlasting and regular change in nature, to feel the harmony of the wondrous power pervading all things."

Plato tells us of the dark shade of the thickly leaved plane tree; the luxurience of plants and herbs in all the fragrance of their bloom; and the sweet summer breezes which fan the chirping swarms of grasshoppers. And Chrysostom thus:

"As the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would lead thy spirit astray, look upward to the vault of heaven, and around them on the open fields, in which herds graze by the water's side; who does not despise all the creations of art, when, in the stillness of his spirit, he watches with admiration the rising of the sun as it pours its golden light over the face of the earth; when, resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring spring, or beneath the sombre shades of a thick and leafy tree, the eye rests on the far-receding and hazy distance."

Such is the grand simplicity of poetic feeling, as drained through a translation, which we see in the old masters. As Humboldt tells us, "feelings ennoble thought," and without a full rounded flow of feeling, that which comes in the quiet of an active mind, we can not use noble language. This is the age of steam, of haste, of intense intellectual excitement and activity, and we have little time or disposition for the indulgence of the genial calms of nature. A sensation must be dallied with, indulged and nourished and kept in a state of perceptible existence until all its phases and depths can be measured and comprehended. But this age makes men who drown sensation, and ignore it, call

that man weak who yields to the imbecilities of its influence; so that one thing seems to be forgotten, that the great men of all ages have been men of feeling, eminent for sensuous and impressible natures. It was not weakness for Cicero to give himself up to the emotions inspired by nature within the solitude of his Italian villa; nor for Burke to seek the still country and pleasant waters of Beaconsfield for relief from the dust and din of the House of Commons; nor for Bacon, from the earliest period of his history to the latest, to dream continually for the pleasures of retirement and contentment. These men felt that the richness of their natures could best find nourishment and bloom and fruitage, in all their proud luxurience, in contemplative retirement. They, like the other great characters from whom we have quoted, were not charmed and caught up in every little whirl of excitement. They saw nothing ignoble in leisurely watching the calm placidity of nature, her multifarious unfoldings and her majestic beauties as they slept in forest solitude or moved in stormy grandeur. Now we leave these things to the poets and to women, to the heroes of the Pantasocracy, and to the sages of Concord. It is seldom now that the practical great men of this age, in England or America, turn aside from the chaotic sphere of their activities, into the green pastures and by the side of the still waters. Humboldt came to us, in his later days, as a lingering representative of the grand old masters-he stood original and alone, and like a great column from a mountain summit, faded into the warm precints above him.

Of modern writers in prosc, Hugh Miller was one of the most commanding and powerful-he possessed that wonderful charm that seized the heart and the brain of the reader and bore them irresistibly onward. His descriptions of nature in all her phases, in her progressive geological changes, in the simple element of sweeping force, are superior to those of any modern delineator, Humboldt not excepted. Miller had a great sympathy with mankind, and this gave him an interest in ethics as well as in physics. In this endowment of strong syn pathies with human nature, he was the superior of Humboldt. His activity of thought led him to labors in politics and religion; but he was not so calm, not so comprehensive, had not so much of the organizing mind, nor the wide and various experiences of his Prussian

contemporary, so that he will not occupy so large a place in the attention of mankind. In the theological tendencies of his thoughts, and in his deductions from nature, he proceeds with a firm confidence and a high hand, almost with a contemptuous facility, to sweep away the arguments of his adversaries. You discover the true fervor of the poet in his soul at every new step and developement, and that certain oneness of purpose, headlong impetuosity which the poet always possesses, and which neither sees nor regards the consequences. No matter whether an error is sustained by the University sanction, by Parliamentary law, by temporal law, by spiritual Bishop, or by the thinly spun speculations of antiquity, he controlled it with all the confidence and abandon of purpose that you see in the child; and yet you feel that his assertions are not dogmatism, but rather the confidence of one who knows that he is in the right.

As an illustration of his poetic power, we make a quotation from his Footprints of the Creator:

"Viewed simply in its picturesque aspects, this olive leaf of the Old Red seems not at all devoid of poetry. We sail upwards into the high geologic zones, passing from ancient to still more ancient scenes of being; and, as we voyage along, find ever in the surrounding prospect, as in the existing scene from which we have set out, a peaceful intermixture of land and water, continent, river, and sea. We first coast along the land of the Tertiary, inhabited by the strange quadrupeds of Cuvier, and wav ing with the reeds and palms of the Paris Basin, the land of the Wealden, with its gigantic iguendon rustling among its tree forms and its cycadæ, comes next; then comes the green land of the Oolite, with its little pouched insectivorous quadrupeds, its flying reptiles, its vast jungles of the brova equisetum, and its forests of the helmsdale pisee; and then, dimly as though a haze, we mark, as we speed on, the thinly-scattered islands of the new Red Sand Stone, and pick up in our course a large floating leaf, veined like that of the cabbage, which not a little puzzles the botanist of the expedition. And now we near the vast carboniferous continent, and see along the undulating outline, between us and the sky, the strange forms of a vegetation, compared with which that of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. We speed day after day along endless forests, in which gigantic club mosses wave in air a hundred feet overhead, and skirt interminable marshes, in which thickets of weeds overtop the mast-head, and where mighty rivers come rolling to the sea.

We mark, through the long retiring vistas which they open to the interior, the higher grounds of the country covered with coniferous trees, and see doddered trunks of vast size, like those of Cranton and Crigleith, reclining under the banks of deep muddy reaches, with their decaying tops turned adown the current. At length the furthermost promontory of this long range of coast comes full in view; we near; we have come up abreast of it; we see the shells of the mountain limestone glittering white along its farther shore, and the green depths under our keel lightened by the flash of innumerable corals; and then, bidding farewell to the land forever, we launch into the immeasured ocean of the Old Red, with its three consecutive zones of animal life. Not a single patch of land more do those geologic charts exhibit which we still regard as new. The zones of the Silurian and Cambian succeed the zones of the Old Red; and, darkly fringed by an obscure bank of cloud ranged along the last zone at the sides, a night that never dissipates settles down upon the deep. Our voyage, like that of old fabulists of five centuries ago, terminates on the sea in thick darkness, beyond which there lies no shore and there dawns no light; and it is in the middle of this vast ocean, just where the last zone of the Old Red leans against the first zone of the Silurian, that we have succeeded in discovering a solitary island unseen before, a shrub-bearing land, much enveloped in fog, but with hills that at least look green in the distance."

The poetry of this passage lies in its weighty melody, in the full resonance and smooth flow of the language, and in the gloom and grandeur of the objects conjured up to the imagination. Again he says: "There spreads all around a wild and desolate landscape of broken and shattered hills, separated by deep and gloomy ravines, that seem the rents and fissures of a planet in ruins, and that speak distinctly of a period of convulsions, when upheaving fires from the abyss, and ocean currents above, had contended in sublime antagonism, the one slowly elevating the entire tract, the other grinding it down and sweeping it away." He scatters through his books expressions like the following: "a broken and tumultuous sea of primary hills;" "a lofty promontory like a large spear thrust horizontally into the sea;" "the same billow that sends its long roll from the German Ocean to sweep the base of the Sater, and to leap up against its precipices to the height of eighty and a hundred feet, breaks in foam, only a minute after, over this stony tract;" "the