Exchange THE COLISEUM 127 cruel. They were engaged restlessly in prosecuting schemes of ambition and self-indulgence. That might is right was the "summune jus." Hence Jupiter, that he may rule, dethrones father Saturn. Hence the Titans attempt to hurl from power brother Jupiter. Had the Gods been men, they would have incurred every penalty in our codes of criminal law. They would have been hanged by the neck until they were dead. They would have illustrated a richer romance of crime, than the chronicles of the "Old Bailey." But they were Gods, and therefore not amenable to human codes. How should not such notions, when sanctioned by religion itself, react on the masses? It was natural that they should, and there is the best evidence that they did. The people became like to their Gods, cruel, licentious, ambitious, groveling. They thirsted after blood for an amusement, and raised the lofty walls of the Coliseum. They carried thither their children to laugh at the groans of the dying gladiator, and to invert their thumbs when he supplicated for life. The pagan religion has been superseded by another, essentially differing in spirit. It does not destroy, but it almost raises the dead. It has no slaughter-houses for men, but hospitals for the sick. It does not exult over the agonies of expiring nature, but it sympathizes, and points at the balm of Gilead. The one is fiend-like, the other god-like. The one makes us brutes, the other men. Moreover, there is hallowed ground about that old Coliseum. It is stained with richer blood than that of beasts and gladiators. There Christians gave the seal of martyrdom to the cause of their Master. There they illustrated the intolerance of the ancient religion. We prize the Christian dead of the Coliseum, more than the dead of Smithfield or of St. Bartholomew. In making their profession, they took their lives in their hands. They were promised no pleasure on earth, but that of a good conscience. They were to wait for their "recompense of reward." The world was against them, but they were stronger than the world. Atlas-like, their shoulders supported the pillars of the infant Church. Hence we would not wish to see the stones crumble away from the massive arches of the Coliseum. We would wish them to commemorate a great truth, that Rome was in need of a better religion. We would wish them to illustrate the comparative tolerance of Christianity. Let the wind and the rain fall lightly on the old ruins! Let man remove not a stone from its place! Let the cooing of the dove answer back to the bay of the watch-dog beyond the Tiber, and to the hooting of the owl from the palace of the Cæsars! Let the hermit steal along like to a ghost in the dark! Let the moonbeams still fall, until we exclaim this is Ut rideret nitebar; "Ne" dixit "stultum se praesta !" Uli-ali-ola-e— Ambiens in Tennessee, Uli-ali-ola-e Sub "bananâ" arbore. 4. Nihil valet. Desperant. Ad bustum sequar rogant. Uli-ali-ola-e Manum suam capio, Vixque frigore respiro; Maestas lacrymas vidit, oh! Dixit-que "ne stultus sis, Joe!" Uli-ali-ola-e— Moriens in Tennessee, Uli-ali-ola-e— Sub cupressâ arbore. S. M. C. The Mission of Modern Poetry. THE most important task which now claims the labor of philosophical criticism, is a just estimate of the poetry bequeathed to us by the last generation. Many held their hearts as altars sacred to the muses, among those whose graves are green. Artists reveled in the pictures and the power of Southey; poets loved Shelley as the wide world loved them; philosophers looked at men through the deep gray eyes of Wordsworth's angel pedlar; true lovers heard the truest echo to their sighs in the melodies of Coleridge; worshipers of beauty found the soul of their goddess breathed through the gossamer words of Keats; and wounded hearts were cauterized by the red misanthropy of Byron. Each of these bards has had scores of critics, but, if we make a partial exception in favor of Macaulay's Essay on Byron, no one of them has been judged with great ability and entire candor. Much less can we find any thorough and comprehensive view of them as a class; of the part which they acted in the history of mind; of the influence which they wielded, and the principles which they represented. I wish to consider these master spirits of the past only as explaining the wants of the present. If we can clearly perceive their true glory, then, by taking in imagination one upward and onward step, we shall reach that which ought to be the glory of their successors. And this ideal will be the best test of the actual. There was a period in English history when "The Vision and the Faculty divine" seemed to have been extinguished, and it became a matter of doubt whether the world was not too old for poetry. The language of action had driven from men's lips the language of the heart; and the spirit of the age seemed to be undergoing a change not unlike that which took place when civilization removed her capital from Athens to Rome. The shrines of religion were neglected in common with those of the muses; moral precepts were supplanting Christian charity; human love was valued at its weight in gold; and taste was degenerating into shrewdness. The ascendency of a practical spirit, the omnipotence of expediency, was far more seriously threatened eighty years ago than it is now. Yet even then mistaken Science had not subdued, she had only silenced the soul. The political philosopher turned his aching eyes from the long and dry tables of his master to the clear skies, where the works of his master's Master stood in grandeur, and he felt a burden on his soul. The peasant gazed on the green meadows, and heard that they were made for Norman blood; but he saw that in their velvet beauty which Norman blood could never see; and Robert Burns felt himself a poet. And still they came. By a silent revolution, than which none more sudden and thorough was ever effected in a people's mind, Shakspeare, hitherto the nation's pride, became the object of its worship, and hearts began to yearn for a new revelation from the world where he is monarch. So the revelation came, and poetry achieved her most glorious triumphs over men in an age immediately succeeding that in which her noblest works had been neglected. What, then, was the great fact thus accomplished, and what was the mission of those who accomplished it? It was the rebellion of soul against the tyranny of mind; the triumph of man, the immortal over man, the machine. Their mission was to turn the thoughts of men into new channels; to spiritualize their ideas; and enable them to feel the limited grasp of science, the unsatisfying nature of human knowledge. And it would seem that while the pulpit was often venal and sycophantic, the press corrupt, and rulers licentious, the cause of Religion received the impulse it so much needed, partly through the influence of Poetry; so that it would be only an exaggeration to assert that the Christianity of that age could better have spared its orthodox divines than its infidel poets. For all the great poets of the last generation, however widely they differed in other respects, had something in common, which marked them as belonging to the age in which they lived, and constituted them a distinct class. It was the realization of the supernatural; bringing a world whose causes and effects are unexplored, into union with the world of every-day life; and familiarizing the mind with objects as real which are unknown to the senses. Some men are naturally prone to a belief in that which defies their faculties; while others instinctively reject as false every statement of fact or principle, which does not appeal directly to their understanding. And this difference is entirely independent of their intellectual powers; for some of the greatest minds have been, in this respect, the weakest. Each of the two great representatives, of thought and action, in the last generation, Coleridge and Napoleon, believed himself to be guided by superhuman influence. And the many similar facts which History has accumulated can only be explained by supposing that there is an innate principle, which we may term Spirituality, in the mind of man; a primary faculty for perceiving supernatural truths. Just as the reasoning powers may be perverted to the defense of falsehood, so this faculty for the spiritual may lead to Superstition. But it is not therefore to be rejected or despised. It is the tendency of a practical age, an age of progress in Science and Art, to stifle this power, and to turn the thoughts of men into other channels. Those who resist this tendency, then, are benefactors of the race; in awakening a dormant faculty, and giving it that influence over the man, which his Creator intended it to wield. This is a duty of the Christian minister, of the philosopher, and of every philanthropist. But it is especially the duty of the poet. For no other faculty seems so closely associated with this of Spirituality as the Imagination. Every one knows from experience that an associating principle does exist between pairs and classes of faculties and sensibilities. It may be implanted at birth, or it may be the result of Education; but we cannot doubt the fact of its existence. None would assert that the love of beauty is the same with the love of society, and yet we find that the latter feeling is often and easily aroused through the former. So it is with the Imagination and the spiritual faculty. In every people, in nearly every person, we find them so associated that the one is most easily excited to action through the medium of the other. Hence a great poet has over the mind of his age a power for good or evil which is seldom appreciated. And it was the mission of that constellation of genius |