Though bright are the waters of Sing-su-hay,
And the golden floods that thitherward stray,
Yet-oh 'tis only the Blest can say

How the waters of Heaven outshine them all
'Go, wing thy flight from star to star,
From world to luminous world, as far

As the universe spreads its flaming wall:
Take all the pleasures of all the spheres,
And multiply each through endless years,

One minute of Heaven is worth them all!'
The glorious Angel, who was keeping
The gates of Light, beheld her weeping;
And, as he nearer drew and listened
To her sad song, a tear-drop, glistened
Within his eyelids, like the spray

From Eden's fountain, when it lies
On the blue flower, which-Bramins say-
Blooms nowhere but in Paradise!
'Nymph of a fair but erring line!'
Gently he said-'One hope is thine.
"Tis written in the Book of Fate,

The Peri yet may be forgiven

Who brings to this Eternal gate

The Gift that is most dear to Heaven!

Go seek it, and redeem thy sin"Tis sweet to let the Pardoned in !'

But the trail of the serpent is over them all.

Lallah Rookh.

1b., Paradise and Peri.

The narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future, two Eternities.

Ib., The Veiled Prophet, etc.

Anacreontic,

Weep on, and as thy sorrows flow
I'll taste the luxury of woe.

To live with them is far less sweet
Than to remember thee!

I saw thy form.

And the tribute most high to a head that is royal
Is the love of a heart that loves liberty too!

227. Leigh Hunt, 1784-1859. (Handbook, par. 235.)

What is Poetry?

If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the best way of knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so on? the answer is, the only and twofold way; first, the perusal of the best poets with the greatest attention; and second, the cultivation of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every true reader of poetry partakes of a more than ordinary portion of the poetic nature; and no one can be completely such, who does not love, or take an interest in everything that interests the poet, from the firmament to the daisyfrom the highest heart of man, to the most pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand, marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, realises the greatest amount of enjoyment, and facilitates reference. It enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he makes with his own mind, and how it grows up to the stature of its exalter.

If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest? I should say, undoubtedly, the Epic; for it includes the drama, with narration besides; or the speaking and action of the characters, with the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to relate all well for so long a time, particularly in the passages least sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest poet, is another question still under trial; for Shakespeare perplexes all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though if a judgment may be drawn from his early narratives (Venus and Adonis,' and the 'Rape of Lucrece '), it is to be doubted whether even Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant activity and superfœtation of thought, a little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;-if it were possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to Homer and Shakespeare come such narrators as the less universal but intenser Dante; Milton, with his dignified imagination; the universal profoundly simple Chaucer; and luxuriant remote Spenser -immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes: then the great second-rate dramatists; unless those who are better acquainted with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer: then the airy yet robust universality of

Ariosto; the hearty out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a un1versalist; the finest lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination, teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last.

What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth;-what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be 'in earnest at the moment.' His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. 'I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings,' says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems; and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.'

'Poetry,' says Shelley, lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not fumiliar. It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.'-Essays and Letters.

Selections from the English Poets. Imagination and Fancy, 1847.

An Angel in the House.

How sweet it were if without feeble fright,
Or dying of the dreadful beauteous sight,
An angel came to us, and we could bear
To see him issue from the silent air

At evening in our room, and bend on ours
His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers
News of dear friends and children who have never
Been dead indeed-as we shall know for ever.
Alas! we think not what we daily see
About our hearths—angels that are to be,
Or may be if they will, and we prepare
Their souls and ours to meet in happy air—
A child, a friend, a wife, whose soft heart sings
In unison with ours, breeding its future wings.

And all the landscape-earth and sky and sea-
Breathes like a bright-eyed face that laughs out openly.
The Story of Rimini, cant. i.

With spots of sunny openings, and with nooks

To lie and read in, sloping into brooks.

Sleep breathes at last from out thee,

My little patient boy.

Oh, Friend, whom glad or grave we seek,

Heaven-holding shrine!

I ope thee, touch thee, hear thee speak,

And peace is mine.

Ibid.

To T. L. H.

The Lover of Music.

228. Henry Kirke White, 1785-1806. (Handbook, par. 235.)

To an Early Primrose.

Mild offspring of a dark and sullen sire!
Whose modest form, so delicately fine,
Was nursed in whirling storms

And cradled on the winds.

l'hee, when young Spring first questioned Winter's sway, And dared the sturdy blusterer to the fight,

Thee on this bank he threw

To mark his victory.

In this lone vale, the promise of the year,
Serene thou openest to the nipping gale,
Unnoticed and alone,

Thy tender elegance.

So virtue blooms, brought forth amid the storms
Of chill adversity; in some lone walk

Of life she rears her head,

Obscure and unobserved:

While every bleaching breeze that on her blows
Chastens her spotless purity of breast,

And hardens her to bear,

Serene, the ills of life.

229. John Wilson, 1785-1854. (Handbook, par. 235.)

A master of language, and displaying in his prose great liveliness of fancy, shrewd humour, and much earnestness of feeling. His poetry and tales abound in passages of gentle meditative sweetness.' To Wilson, Blackwood's Magazine owes much of its celebrity.

The Poetry of Wordsworth.

With all the great and essential faculties of the poet, Wordsworth possesses the calm and self-commanding powers of the philosopher. He looks over human life with a steady and serene eye: he listens with a fine ear to the still sad music of humanity. His faith is unshaken in the prevalence of virtue over vice, and of happiness over misery, and in the existence of a heavenly law operating on earth, and, in spite of transitory defects, always visibly triumphant in the grand field of human warfare. Hence he looks over the world of life and man with a sublime benignity; and hence, delighting in all the gracious dispensations of God, his great mind can wholly deliver itself up to the love of a flower budding in the field, or of a child asleep in its cradle; nor, in doing so, feels that poetry can be said to stoop or to descend, much less to be degraded, when she embodies, in words of music, the purest and most delightful fancies and affections of the human heart. This love of the nature to which he belongs, and which is in him the fruit of wisdom and experience, gives to all his poetry a very peculiar, a very endearing, and, at the same time, a very lofty character. His poetry is little