age that it stimulated to high exploits kings and barons. It is to these men and their lays that we owe the great poem of Ariosto, much of that of Tasso, many of the best tales of Boccaccio; from these drew strength and inspiration, Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser; and greater still, Shakspeare and Milton, the crowned kings of the land of poetry. Several of Shakspeare's finest dramas are restorations and amplifications of the lays of those old minstrels; and what does Milton say in recounting the studies of his youth? — the preparations for that great fame he afterwards achieved! Having imbued himself with classical knowledge"Next," he adds, " I betook me amongst those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood, so that even those books proved to me so many enticements to the love and steadfast observation of virtue." And his knowledge of these furnished him with many beau tiful allusions, as

And again,

what resounds

In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptized or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond;
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabbia,

Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp,
When Agrican, with all his northern powers,
Besieged Albracca, as romances tell,
The city of Gallaphrone, from thence to win
The fairest of her sex, Angelica,

His daughter, sought by many prowest knights,
Both Paynim, and the peers of Charlemagne.

slaves to the duties of

Such were the fruits of the poetic feeling kindled in this country by our old minstrels. The spirit they awakened has grown and spread on every side; and if any one says we might have had the same sages, heroes, and men of science, without poetry, I say no. Without our poetry, we had been a nation of Dutchmen the day-drudges of accumulation - blind-worms of the earth, fattening in darkness, seeing nothing of the sun in the heavens ascending not to the mountain-tops of thought and feeling, whence only the earth itself can be seen in its breath and true loveliness.

For what is poetry? It is not merely the melody of verse, or the spirit of passion and emotion embodied in verse. It is a revelation from heaven of its own beauty and gloryan atmosphere of heaven, breathed down and diffused through our grosser one, by which we become sensible of the strength of joy in the heart, of the moral greatness of our better nature; of the treasures of past intellect, and the full grandeur and rainbow splendour of human hopes. It is this spirit that is continually lifting us out of the clay of the earth-out of the grossness of our animal condition; to a perception of wider views, intenser being; more generous, glowing and ethereal aspirations. It is like that suffusion of purple and violet light cast down from the evening sun over the mountains, which, however beautiful in themselves, derive a tenfold and heavenly beauty from it. It is not so much a part of ourselves, as the spirit of an eternal and divine world, which moulds and incorporates us into itself, and changes us from what we are to what we are to be.

Let no man fall into the grievous mistake that poetry only lives in verse-nor that it is confined to language at all. It is a far and widely diffused spirit, and lives in all human hearts, more or less, and often in greater affluence than we imagine. It cannot always throw itself into language. Mr. Wordsworth truly says

Oh! many are the poets that are sown

By nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.

And another great poet of our time says, that even he could not express all the poetry that lived within him.

I would speak,

But as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.

But we hear a great deal of the philosophy of life -- the poetry of life is equally real, and far more generally diffused. It is that spirit which mingles itself with all our hopes, affections, sorrows, and even death, and beautifies them all. It mingles itself with the ambition of aspirants in every honourable track with the emotions of the lover, with the ardour of the hero, till it covers the battle-field pit from his eyes, and shows him only a halo of glory — with the patriotism of the righteous statesman with all our social attachments and intercourse, and spreads the roses of heaven on the beaten path of our daily life. No human speculation, no human pursuit, no human feeling, which is not utterly selfish and base, but draws fire and force from this spirit and is borne by its elating influence towards its legitimate end. It is impossible to point out any nation that has become great, or even successful for a time, without it. Of the ancient nations we need not speak in all, of which we know anything but the barest facts, poetry, and the intense desire of glory, which cannot exist totally distinct from poetical feeling, were found. From some of them, what have we not received! The very Saracens, when, under Mahomet, they suddenly overflowed Asia, Africa, and part of Europe, were set on fire by the poetic charms of his new paradise; -the Teutons, who extin

guished the last sparks of the Roman empire, and laid the foundations of the present European kingdoms, were not led hither merely for food—it was Valhalla, and the poetic legends of their Scalds, that armed and animated them. We cannot take away poetry from life, without reducing it to the level of animal stupidity. In our days, stupendous events have passed on the face of the civilized world, and equally extraordinary has been the development of poetic power. A host of great names will be left to posterity, and with them a host of new impulses, that will fill futurity with increase of light and happiness; and as Christianity becomes better understood, as our natures become better understood, as the spirit of love begins to predominate over the spirit of selfishness, the true poetry of life, and its power, shall be more and more acknowledged. Men will feel, that in aspiring after true honour — in desiring to become benefactors of men- to spread knowledge and intellectual beauty, they are but giving exercise to the divine spirit of poetry which is sent from heaven to warm and embellish every human heart, though often unseen and unacknowledged; and they will work in the spirit of love and in its enjoyment.

I rose from my rocky seat. The nakedness of the seaworn hill, the masses of crumbling ruins, seemed to me to be just as they ought they have an aspect of antiquity which separates them from every-day things, and leads us back to a point in human history whence we look down to the present times with wonder and joy. For myself, rejoicing in the past, and confident of the future, I went on refreshed by my Day-dream at Tintagel.

VISIT TO STAFFA AND IONA.

IN the days of Sam Johnson and of Pennant, it was deemed a vast and adventurous undertaking to reach the

Hebrid Isles,

Placed far amid the melancholy main.

It was then only one or two zealous travellers in an age, who accomplished so great and dangerous a voyage. In our boyhood, we read Johnson's "Tour to the Hebrides," and the poetic allusions of Collins and Thomson to the Western Isles, with a feeling that those regions of poetical wildness were only to be reached by a few fortunate mortals. What a change have commercial wealth and steam produced! The turbulent ocean of the west is laid open — the mists that hang about the shores and mountains of its once mysterious isles are not cleared away, but they are daily penetrated by the barks of our summer tourists; and Staffa and Iona are as familiar to thousands, as St. Paul's or the Tower. So many are the accounts of trips to these places already published, that I am not intending to add another to them; and for the history, natural or unnatural, or supernatural, civil or uncivil, I shall content myself with the knowledge that there are such works as those of Martyn, Macculloch, and Gregory. I propose only to note down a few such impressions on my visit to these celebrated spots, as I imagine are the most common to those who generally go thither. What, indeed, is the great object of a voyage to the Western Isles ? Without doubt, in nine