stirring; but, in general, they have been too imponderous to stamp themselves deeply into the public attention: and thus, as so many feathers of fancy, have been blown aloft only to be whistled down the wind. A remarkable instance of the effect of undue brevity in depressing a poem-in keeping it out of the popular view is afforded by the following exquisite little Serenade : I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, Has led me-who knows how ?— The wandering airs they faint On the dark, the silent stream— Like sweet thoughts in a dream; It dies upon her heart, O beloved as thou art! Oh, lift me from the grass! On my lips and eyelids pale. Very few, perhaps, are familiar with these lines; yet no less a poet than Shelley is their author. Their warm, yet delicate and ethereal imagination will be appreciated by all; but by none so thoroughly as by him who had himself arisen from sweet dreams of one beloved, to bathe in the aromatic air of a southern midsummer night. One of the finest poems by Willis-the very best, in my opinion, which he has ever written-has, no doubt through this same defect of undue brevity, been kept back from its proper position, not less in the critical than in the popular view: The shadows lay along Broadway, Walk'd spirits at her side. Peace charm'd the street beneath her feet, And all astir looked kind on her, And call'd her good as fair For all God ever gave to her She kept with care her beauties rare Now walking there was one more fair- And she had unseen company To make the spirit quail— 'Twixt Want and Scorn she walk'd forlorn, And nothing could avail. No mercy now can clear her brow For this world's peace to pray; For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air, But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven In this composition we find it difficult to recognize the Willis who has written so many mere (C verses of society." The lines are not only richly ideal, but full of energy; while they breathe an earnestness-an evident sincerity of sentiment-for which we lock in vain throughout all the other works of this author. While the epic mania-while the idea that, to merit in poetry, prolixity is indispensable-has, for some years past, been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corrup.. tion of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresy of The Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially, have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force: but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified-more supremely noble, than this very poem-this poem per se-this poem which is a poem and nothing more this poem written solely for the poem's sake. With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of a man, I would, nevertheless, limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I would not enfeeble them by dissipation. The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox, to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth, we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind indeed who does not perceive the radical and chasmal differences between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth. Dividing the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious distinctions, we have the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense. I place Taste in the middle, because it is just this position which, in the mind, it occupies. It holds intimate relations with either extreme; but from the Moral Sense is separated by so faint a difference that Aristotle has not hesitated to place some of its operations among the virtues themselves. Nevertheless, we find the offices of the trio marked with a sufficient distinction. Just as the intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful, while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity-her disproportion-her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious-in a word, to Beauty. : An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odours, and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colours, and odours, and sentiments, a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odours, and colours, and sentiments, which greet him in common with all mankind—he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us-but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry-or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moodswe find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then—not, as the Abbaté Gravina supposes, through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. The struggle to apprehend the supernal Lovelinessthis struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constitutedhas given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic. The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes-in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance-very especially in Music-and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the composition of the Landscape Garden. Our present theme, however, has regard only to its manifestation in words. And here let me speak briefly on the topic of rhythm. tenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so Con |