from images of nameless tumuli on white sea shores, and of the heap of reedy clay into which chambered cities melt in their mortality."

Mr. Ruskin is a poet, an artist, and a philosopher. He is not pre-eminently great in either department, but he is superior in all. He has the patience to become a learned man, a patience that is an indispensable adjunct of genius, without which genius is only a transient meteor. His labor does not harden him, and destroy the flexibility of his genius, nor dry up its fountains. He can unbend himself from that study that gives him an accurate knowledge of the flower, or the column grown old in its position, and sport easily in the regions of imagination. He can stoop from his reasoning, and permit his imagination to take possession of all his faculties, and limber them into a surprising activity. It is then that the deep scrutiny which he has given to the forms of nature, to her innumerable delicate tints and colorings becomes available. He seizes nature by her deepest, quietest, strongest points of power, and by an epithet puts one in perfect possession of that point. He does not pause with seeing simply the fall of the water, nor its motion, nor its arch over the precipice, but he looks deeper, and discovers that "pure, polished velocity" which is the most delicate point of approach. This is one of the elements of his power, the power to give the products of reason into the hands of imagination, to make the results of laborious learning the swift imaginative arrows of truth, and to invest their beauties with the fire of his own soul.

It may be objected that as a pure poet, he is elaborate, that his passages are labored, so much so that the pure, hard pressing stream of earnestness is shattered and lost by the force of its own volume, from the want of the power of reason to control it. To some he appears to have the effeminacy of affectation, of a serene dogmatism. But we think that we always discover a basis of philosophy in what he writes, a reason in the wildest flight of his imagination. He has not the large, calm mind of that class to which Humboldt, Milton, and Miller belong. They were more familiar than he with the grander relations of life; they had more sympathy than he with the institutions of mankind. He is not the deep philosopher, nor the organizer. He is the poet-art

critic, whose greatest power lies in the active imagination, more than in the deep and still one. Still, his thoughts have a long reaching philosophy in them, inasmuch as they have utility in their aim. His eye is better formed for seeing the exact beauty of everything in nature, he is more of a student of nature in her minor teachings, rather than of those greater lessons that are engraved on the frontlets of the mountains.

Enthusiasm is the first element of the poet, the first and most essential element of greatness. He who has a large reason and permits its legitimate operation, cannot move rapidly to a result. He sees all the collateral consequences and they check his impetuosity. The man of quick impulses and intense thought, conceives his purposes quickly, and bends all his being to their accomplishment. This is the element, the stream, the power of poetry in the man-it is the quick and lofty generalization, the fire of execution. Nelson upon his ship in battle, Napoleon upon the field, Burke on the floor of the Commons, and the blind Milton dictating to his daughter in his study, all were nerved and inspired in their moments of action by their poetic power, warmth and intensity of feeling, and impetuosity and oneness of purpose, in this capacity was their greatness.

In this enthusiasm, Jeremy Taylor was a poet. He has no passage in which the still, strong fires of Milton burn. He never moves the procession of his thoughts with that heavy and irresistible force that distinguished the polemical old Puritan-his thoughts move with impetuosity rather than with dignity, and naturally clothe themselves in good language. His style is eminently racy. His learning is great, almost as ready as that of Bacon. It was always too ready and obtrusive; it broke the unity of his discourses, and abated the warmth of his intellectual fires. His multiplicity of images tax our scientific knowledge too closely to trace their analogy. An object of nature or a historical fact brought in to enliven a discourse should be so pointed as to suggest its real purpose at a flash; the moment the mind labors to comprehend the reason of its use, its effectiveness is destroyed. Taylor had much of the poetic power, enthusiasm and concentration. His imagination had greater facility than strength, greater freedom than accuracy. Its point of weakness lay in its fertility.

It flows, leaps, plunges, glides, is uneasy continually. It had so many views for each object with which it came in contact, that his writings became much more voluminous than weighty. Not possessing the power of concentration of feeling, he never seems on the rack of exertion—a quick, continuous, and lofty movement of thought was most natural to him. Consequently you find few of those passages in his writings that are powerful and striking, that give a more rapid movement to the blood, and drowns thought in the quick-sprung flood of feeling. He had not the power of reserving his forces, then letting them slip upon occasions, like the quick bolt from the cloud. In one respect he was like Dryden, and wrote too copiously to write well; he was prone to multiply expression rather than thought; had he written less he would have been more.read.

In one of his funeral discourses he says, "We are as water, weak, and of no consistence, always descending, abiding in no certain place, unless when we are detained with violence; and every little breath of wind makes us rough and tempestuous, and troubles our faces; every trifling accident discomposes us; and, as the face of the waters wafting in the storm, so wrinkles itself, that it makes upon its forehead furrows deep and hollow like a grave; so do our great and little cares and trifles first make the wrinkles of old age, and then they dig a grave for us; and there is in nature nothing so contemptible, but it may meet with us in such circumstances, that it may be too hard for us in our weakness; and the sting of a bee is a weapon sharp enough to pierce the finger of a child or the lip of a man; and these creatures which nature hath left without weapons, yet they are armed sufficiently to vex those parts of men which are left defenceless and obnoxious to a sunbeam, to the roughness of a sour grape, to the unevenness of a gravel stone, to the dust of a wheel, or the unwholesome breath of a star looking awry upon a sinner."

The poetry of Taylor lies in the rapid and versatile movement of the thought; not in the concentration of feeling; in the isolated yet frequent recurrence of smooth and beautiful expressions, which have all the original and fresh impulse of a child in them. The great poet has a power and shows his genius in his choice of epithets. An epithet, like one skilful blow upon a stringed instrument, strikes

out the latent music in the soul of the reader, as well as that in the instrument; and the vibration will continue according to the strength of the blow. Taylor has ease and grace in his expression, but has not great skill in the use of epithets. Milton had this skill and his epithets sometimes move you like the deep sounding winds in a forest of pines. Shakespeare had this skill; they come from him like the notes warbled from a bird too full to be still. Ruskin has this skill; as an art-critic he possesses it in an eminent degree, and with his epithets he will touch the subtlest springs of human feelings, and put the painter and the architect, or the great Architect and Painter of nature, through their completed works, into close communion with the observer. Dickens possesses this power; especially in his descriptions of quiet scenes will be thrown out two or three words which crystalize the brooding spirit as it sits still and thoughtful, like a conscious being, over the scene.

It was not in Taylor's condensed epithets nor in the strong fires of his imagination, nor in the quiet energy of his pas sion that he so interested the world; it was in the extent of his learning, of his observation, the freshness of his mind, and the versatility of his fancy, in the meteoric showers of rhetoric which always accompanied the procession of his thoughts, as in the following:

"Jesus did infinitely prevail; a religion that taught men to be meek and humble, apt to receive injuries, but inapt to do any; a religion that gave countenance to the poor and pitiful, in a time when riches were adored, and ambition and pleasure had possessed the hearts of all mankind; a religion that would change the face of things and the hearts of men, and break vile habits into gentleness and counsel; that such a religion, in such a time, by the sermons and conduct of fishermen, men of mean breeding and illiberal arts, should so splendidly triumph over the philosophy of the world, and the arguments of the subtle, and the sermons of the eloquent, the power of princes and the interests of the state, the inclinations of nature and the blindness of zeal, the force of custom and the solicitations of passion, the pleasures of sin and the busy arts of the devil; that is, against wit and power, superstition and wilfulness, fame and money, nature and empire, which are all the causes in this world that can make a thing impossible; this, this is to be ascribed to the power of God, and is the great demonstration of the resurrection of Jesus."

Again, in his funeral discourse on the demise of the Countess of Carberry, he says,

"Death is natural, and therefore necessary; it is become a punishment unto us, and therefore it is unavoidable; and God hath bound the evil upon us by bands of natural and inseparable propriety, and by a supervening unalterable decree of heaven; and we are fallen from our privilege, and are returned to the condition of beasts, and buildings, and common things; and we see temples defiled into the ground, and they die by sociellage; and great empires die by their own plenty and ease, full humors, and factious subjects; and huge buildings fall by their own weight, and the violence of many winters eating and consuming the cement, which is the marrow of their bones; and princes die like the meanest of their servants; and everything finds a grave and a tomb; and the very tomb itself dies by the bigness of its pompousness and luxury, and becomes as friable and uncombined dust, as the ashes of the sinner or of the saint that lay under it, and is now forgotten in his bed of darkness."

Description is not always the province of poetry, it is not always in the seizure and the disposal of material beauties with tenderness and with power; in shaking "hell's concave," nor in "smoothing the raven down of night till it smiles." Shelley possessed a wonderful power in poetry unconnected with the material world, in the world of moral powers and ideas; he saw the beauty and harmony of moral forces, of eternal principles, and toyed with them, or shook them, as tangible as the spear of Ithureal against the tyrannies of mankind. It was thus with Channing, though his was purely a devotional mind, while Shelley's was not. Channing's was the poetry of intangibility. It lay in the moral grandeur of his thought, in the delicate sensibility of his feelings. He said little of the eternal mountains, little of the far-sounding sea, little of those shadowy graces that are always half eluding the detection of man in the finer beauties and forms of nature. His nice sensibilities were open, like the face of still waters, to the shadows of the green blade of grass, and the tender flower bending over them; but, unlike the water, they were not reproduced again to the eye of the observer; they were rather absorbed, and incorporated with the spirit of his genius, to give it tone and subtlety of power. But for those influences more nearly allied to the heart of man, and which ally man to his God,