those that magnify the highest nature of man, that move the feelings and convince the judgment by an attraction and a force that presents no defined point of approach, and yet is felt as commanding and irresistable, that always ap peal to the very fountains of animated being, and move them to greater purity and strength, that put the beaded diamond drop where muddy impurity threaded its thick foam before, that shake the imprisoning shell from the chrysalis and let it free, for these he had a boundless attraction, and the power to reproduce them in the most exalted manner, and with the purest of purposes. His was above the mere material sphere, above the sphere of sentiment and feeling which could be dissected and annalyzed by the cold blades of thought; he was in that sphere of moral forces that harmonizes the ways of man to the eternal laws which, like beams from the sun, emanate from the forehead of the Creator. His spiritual grasp of thought may be seen in his article on Napoleon. Standing above, and superior to the mailed conquorer, he pronounces the judgment of an indignant history upon him. You feel the warmth of his indignation move you, until the monarch stands before you, shorn of his grandeur and his terrors, and with hands dripping with the blood of Europe, a criminal at the bar of mankind. He stands convicted, as having been bereft of all thought, aim, all feeling of tenderness and sympathy with his race, as endowed with the will of a demon and with his power of destruction, let lose for the ruin of nations. His thoughts of Christ, of Christianity, of society, were all ennobled by the same dignity of movement and comprehension. Under the light of his genius all things blushed with a warm life. He shows few of those suddenly illuminating flashes of eloquence, passages which you may cull out of the mass, as flowers from an over-shadowing wilderness of gloom. He goes here and there, inspiring the intellect, and warming the heart, and elevating the thoughts. In Milton, he comprehended the majestic beauty of his thoughts, and the unbending pride of his character; in Napoleon, he saw the selfishness of his aims, the subtlety of his intellect, and the ruinous grandeur of his enterprises; he saw the purity and nobility of an earnest self-culture that would elevate the man to the full stature of his development. He was a poet, as well as a spiritual

man, and a man of able intellect. The fire of his poetic genius still warms and long will warm cold embers into living flames.

Milton was the poet in his prose as well as in his poetry. You do not find in that all his mellowness of versification and language, but you do find the lofty spirit and powerful indignation of the strong old Puritan. In his attacks upon prelacy and royalty, you see the burning words of a quiet and yet a blazing anger that would consume all in its path. He says, in his "Reformation in England," "But what greater debasement can there be to regal dignity, whose towering and steadfast height rests upon the immoveable foundations of justice, and heroic virtues, than to chain it in a dependence of subsistency, or ruining, to the painted battlements and gaudy rottenness of prelatry, which want but one puff of the kings to blow them down like a pasteboard house built of court cards." Again he says, in the lofty spirit in which he was wont to speak, "Thou, therefore, that sits in light and glory unapproachable, parent of angels and men! Next, then, I implore, Omnipotent King, Redeemer of that last remnant whose nature thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting love! And thou, the third subsistence of divine infinitude, illuming Spirit, the joy and solace of created things! One Tri-personal God-head! Look upon this thy poor and almost spent and expiring church, leave her not thus a prey to these unfortunate wolves, that wait and think long till they devour thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broke into thy vineyard, and left the prints of their polluting hoof on the souls of thy servants. Oh let them not bring about their damned designs, that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watch-word to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions, to re-involve us in that pitchy cloud of internal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing." In the Areopogitica occurs the following passage: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never rallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

The poetry of Milton's prose lies not so much in fre

quent and felicitious images running like blazing lines of fire through the whole; not in a fanciful activity that went, touching here, touching there, with sweet verdured thought springing from each footprint, musical and redolent as rare creations; nor in the still Dantean heat, intensifying thought rather than making it rotund with dignity; but in that lofty indignation, that sweeping anathema, that proud assumption of superiority, that hurled defiance against the oppressors of the church, or of the people, against the corruptions of courts, the cupidity of rulers, and the moral degredation of states. The fires of his soul rolled deep, like the swell of the sea in the storm; there was a wide undulation in the movement, there was no rising, narrowing, and then breaking into fringing and confused lines of foam. The shadows upon his brow hung low and dark, and the light of his intelligence gleamed on the edges like a November sunset upon the evening cloud. The veins of prose and poetry were in different strata in his brain, not that one was higher than the other, but in latral strata, having wide regions between them. That of poetry was high and tuneful with all Saxon symphonies of language, the breathing of a sad, calm spirit chastened and humbled by a keen sense of its mortal short-comings, and its immortal destiny; a spirit, that goes, inevitably probing to your deeper feelings. The vein of prose ran hurling here and there the thunderbolts of his wrath, without compromise, without cessation, until the citadels of his enemies were demolished. He was domesticated within the fortress of his own power, and, sitting there conscious of the weapons within his wielding, he flung strong epithet and bitter scorn, where and at whom he pleased. The map of England, and all classical antiquity, all ocean currents and mountain lines, the flowers and grasses of distant fields, the creations of classical genius, the people of tropic heats and polar snows, all were domesticated with him, and added each of its kind to the power and the beauty of his thoughts. So great were his resources, so great were his abilities to use them!

Among the great poet-novilists is Dickens, with his wizard genius. He is eminently genial and melancholy. He goes, quietly stealing about touching everything with sombre shades and mellow tones; and he puts the heart in sympathy and good nature with all the flowers of the field

and with all birds of the air; with all spiders' webs woven in forgotten chambers; with oaken posts standing stiff in shady corners, which, under his touch, show a sly sensation and knowledge of queer things lurking in their odd carvings; with the broken and patched windows of poverty; with the paving stones squeezing each other and blazing in the sultry city sun; with the gruff lion and dog faces staring at you so bravely from gate-posts and door-steps; with everything scattered about us in our common life. He puts you in kindly sympathy with the poverty-stricken, and teaches you to respect their little world of hopes, loves, hates, ambitions, despairs; teaches you to brush as carefully by a ragged gown as a silken robe; to be as careful in intruding upon their meagre miniature kingdoms of treasure, as upon those that embrace continents and seas; he teaches you to respect the legitimate feelings and possessions of all human nature without regard to their magnitude or their position. He informs the feelings rather than the understanding-yet keeps the understanding continually upon a stretch of wonder that he can find find so many dramatic positions in these little lives of ours, and give interest to them all. In his descriptions of artificial or of natural scenes he endows the most inanimate with the most animated intelligence; not an artificial and unnatural life, distorting everything out of its proper aim, but with that life which is the most appropriate movement, and expression of the highest aim of its being. He is not strong, not deep, never intense in his passions; we can see him after writing one of his warmest passages, quietly drop his pen, with placid composure, smell of the rose at the window, throw a careless look at the sky, or, with folded arms, walk quietly about at peace with all disturbing emotions and unruly passions. His muse is like a warm sunbeam that goes running into all the forsaken corners of the earth, and leaves a green verdure where it goes.

In these times the world seems bereft of those grand old masters of thought and feeling, whose footsteps go sounding through the "corridors of time." Poetry has gone a-Maying, is loitering and sentimentalizing in the fields, when it should be setting on and nerving strong men in the great battles of the age. Tender sentiment has usurped the place of epic feeling-those who should be heroes are

dallying with the little things of the parlor and the boudoir. The excessively polite culture, and the harmonies of society, those delighting ears refined, and sweet to lips speaking in classic accents, has diluted and effeminated those strong tides of passion that come from the free man, from one who has not subdued and conquered himself into weakness from excessive self-control. Nature, left to herself, is luxuriant in her growths, multifarious in her suggestions, impulsive and rapid in her movements. When she attains one height she is not content without attempting the superior. At the first suggestion of wrong, her hatred and indignation grow, accumulate and burn to demolish the antagonism. Instinct teaches her to seize upon and use the most forcible and pointed forms of expression-she is intent only on force and effect, and does not see the delicate and secondary side consequences. In art she tends to power rather than to delicacy, she would see with the telescopic rather than the microscopic eye, would court the solitude of the mountains and the solemnity of the sea, rather than the flowers and multiformed grasses and weeds of the field; she seems to retreat into the recesses of the forests rather than become familiar in the haunts of men. In these piping times of peace from which we have just emerged, the large, terrible, comprehensive, strong, the paraphernalia of the epic element of song, have all been abandoned for our Mauds, Aurora Leighs, and Hiawathas; Jupiter and his Olympus, Michael and Satan, and Lear, and Macbeth, stand up as the demi-gods of a remote antiquity, the impersonation of ungovernable forces, daring ambitions, and dauntless courage. The modern muse, brooding over her quiet nest, gives life to the sweet, orderly, to those things that please people of quiet feelings, refined culture, and dignified deportment. This speaks a nation at ease by the fireside, a nation whose tranquillity is disturbed only by the incomings of the new to take the place of the old. Our refined poets, with their tender sentiments have stolen the march of the old heroes, and put them into the back ground, while they play in winsome measures to popular audiences. There must be brave men to write heroic poetry, poetry that crystalizes the great idea of the age, that sounds out the heart of the nations. Fear of creeds, of old policies, of honorable distinctions and customs, of old reasons which