such as we are accustomed to it at present, is an additional engine in the hands of the poet; that it has extended the sphere of poetical imagery, without depriving us of painting the manners and the passions, such as those pictures existed for the ancients."

In short, M. Michaud thinks that the species of poetry which we call descriptive, such as is fixed at this day, has only begun to be a species since the last century. But is this the essential part of the question? Will that prove that descriptive poetry has emanated from the Christian: religion alone. Is it, in fact, very certain that this species of poetry is properly to be considered as having had its rise only in the last century. In our chapter entitled, The historic part of Descriptive Poetry among the Mo. derns, we have traced the progress of this poetry; we have seen it commence with the writings of the Fathers in the desert; from thence spread itself into history, pass among the romance-writers and poets of the Lower Empire, soon mingle itself with the genius of the Moors, and attain under the pencils of Ariosto and Tasso, a species of perfection too remote from the truth. Our great writers of the age of Louis XIV. rejected this sort of Italian descriptive poetry which celebrated nothing but roses, clear fountains and tufted woods. The English, in adopting it, stripped it of its affectation, but carried into it another species of excess in overloading it with detail. At length returning into France, in the last century, it grew to perfection under the pens of Messrs. Delille, St. Lambert, and Fontaine, and acquired in the prose of Messrs. de Buffon and Bernardin de St. Pierre, a beauty unknown to it before.

We do not pronounce this judgment from ourselves alone, for our own opinion is of too little weight, we have not even like Chaulieu, for the morrow,

A little knowledge and a deal of hope,

but we appeal to M. Michaud himself. Would he have dispersed over his verses so many agreeable descriptions of nature, if christianity had not disencumbered the woods of the ancient Dryads and the eternal Zephyrs? Has not the author of the Poem of Spring been deluded by his own success? He has made a delightful use of fable in his Letters upon the Sentiment of Pity, and we know that Pygmalion adored the statue which his own hands had formed. "Psyche," says M. Michaud, "was desirous of seeing Love, she approached the fatal lamp and Love disappeared for ever. Psyche, signifies the soul in the Greek language, and the ancients intended to prove by the allegory that the soul finds its most tender sentiments vanish in proportion as it seeks to penetrate the object of them." This explanation is ingenious; but did the ancients really see all this in the fable of Psyche? We have endeavoured to prove that the charm of mystery in those things which may be called the sentimental part of life is one of the benefits which we owe to the delicacy of our religion. If Pagan antiquity conceived the fable of Psyche, it appears to us that it is here a Christian who interprets it.

Still farther: Christianity, in banishing fable from nature, has not only restored grandeur to the deserts, it has even introduced another species of mythology full of charms for the poet, in the personification of plants. When the Heliotrope was always Clytia, the mulberrytree always Thisbe, &c. the imagination of the poet was necessarily confined; he could not animate nature by any other fictions than the consecrated fictions, without being guilty of impiety; but the modern muse transforms at its pleasure all the plants into nymphs without any injury to the angels and the celestial spirits which it may spread over

the mountains, along the rivers, and in the forests. Undoubtedly it is possible to carry this personification to excess and M. Michaud has reason to ridicule the poet Darwin who in the Loves of the Plants, represents Genista as walking tranquilly under the shade of arbours of myrtle. But if the English author be one of those poets of whom Horace speaks who are condemned to make verses, for having dishonoured the ashes of their fathers, that proves nothing as to the fundamental good or ill of the thing. Let another poet, endowed with more taste and judgment, describe the Loves of the Plants, they will offer only pleasing pictures.

When in the chapters which M. Michaud attacks we have said; "see in a profound calm, at the breaking of dawn, all the flowers of this valley; immovable upon their stalks they incline themselves in a variety of attitudes, and seem to look towards every point in the horizon; even at this moment when to you all appears tranquil, a great mystery is in operation, nature conceives, and these plants are so many young mothers turned towards the mysterious region whence they are to imbibe fecundity. The sylphs have sympathies less aerial, communications less invisible. The narcissus confides to the rivulet her virgin race, the violet trusts her modest posterity to the care of the Zephyr, a bee gathers honey from flower to flower, and without knowing it fertilizes a whole meadow, a butterfly carries an intire nation under her wing, a world descends in a drop of dew. All the Loves of the Plants. are not however equally tranquil, some are tempestuous, like those of mankind. Tempests are necessary to marry the cedar of Sinaï upon inaccessible heights, while at the foot of the mountain the gentlest breeze suffices to establish an interchange of voluptuousness among the flowers. Is it not thus that the breath of the passions agi

tates the kings of the earth on their thrones, while the shepherds live happily at their feet.

This is very imperfect undoubtedly, but from this. feeble essay it is easy to see how much might be made of such a subject by a skilful poet.

It is indeed this relationship between animate and inanimate objects, which furnished one of the primary sources whence was derived the ancient mythology. When man, yet wild, wandering among the woods had satisfied the first wants of life, he felt another want in his heart, that of a supernatural power, to support his weakness. The breaking of a wave, the murmur of a solitary wind, all the noises which arise out of nature, all the movements that animate the deserts, appeared to him as if combined with this hidden cause. Chance united these local effects to some fortunate or unfortunate circumstances in his pursuit of the animals on which he was to prey; a particular colour, a new and singular object perhaps struck him at that moment: thence the Manitou of the Canadian, and the Fetiche of the Negro, the first of all the mythologies.

Thus elementary principles of a false belief being once unfolded, a vast career was opened for human superstitions. The affections of the heart were soon changed into divinities more dangerous than they were amiable. The savage who had raised a mound over the tomb of his friend, the mother who had given her darling infant to the earth, came every year at the fall of the leaf, the former to shed his tears, the latter to drop her milk over the hallowed turf; both believed that the absent objects so regretted, and always living in their remembrance, could not have wholly ceased to exist. It was without doubt friendship weeping over a monument which inspired the dogma of the immortality of the soul, and proclaimed the religion of the tombs.

But man, at length, quitting the forests, formed himself into a society with his fellow-creatures. Soon, the gratitude or the fears of the people raised legislators, heroes, and kings to the rank of deities. At the same time, some geniuses cherished by heaven, as an Orpheus or a Homer, increased the numbers that inhabited Olym. pus under their creative pencils, all the accidents of nature were transformed into celestial spirits. These new gods reigned for a long time over the enchanted imaginations of mankind; Anaxagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, all essayed to raise the standard against the religion of their country. But, oh sad infatuation of human errors! Jupiter was a detestable god, such an one that moving atoms, an eternal matter was preferable to this deity, armed with thunder, and the avenger of crimes.

It was reserved for the Christian religion to overthrow the altars of all these false gods, without plunging the people into atheism, and without destroying the charms of nature. For, even though it were as certain as it is doubtful, that Christianity could not furnish to the poet a vein of the marvellous as rich as that furnished by fable, yet it is true, and to this M. Michaud himself must assent, that there is a certain poetry of the soul, we will say almost an imagination of the heart, of which no trace can be found in mythology. The affecting beauties that emanate from this source, would alone amply compensate the ingenious falsehoods of antiquity. In the pictures of paganism, every thing is a machine and a spring, all is external, all is made for the eyes; in the pictures of the Christian religion, all is sentiment and thought, all is internal, all is created for the soul. What charm of meditation, what scope for sensibility! there is more enchantment in one of those divine tears which Christianity excites, than in all the pleasing errors of mythology. With Our Lady of Sorrows, a Mother of Pity, some