power was bestowed for no other than the pitiful offices often deemed its distinctive functions. It has more

precious trusts than the production of tawdry romances or sentimental novels. The very existence of imagination is a proof that it is an agency which may be improved to our good or neglected and abused to our harm. Even if it were beyond our comprehension to conceive how it may be auxiliary to humanity, it would be no more than a simple impulse of faith to feel that, so surely as it is an element implanted in our nature, it is there to be nurtured and strengthened by thoughtful exercise. But we are not left to the strenuous effort of implicit faith; for the purposes of the endowment are manifest and multifarious. It has been well demanded, "To what end have we been endowed with the creative faculty of the imagination, which, glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, vivifies what to the eye seems lifeless and actuates what to the eye seems torpid, combines and harmonizes what to the eye seems broken and disjointed, and infuses a soul with thought and feeling into the multitudinous fleeting phantasmagoria of the senses? To what end have we been so richly endowed, unless-as the prime object and appointed task of the reason is to detect and apprehend the laws by which the almighty Lawgiver upholds and ordains the world he has created-it be in like manner the province and the duty of the imagination to employ itself diligently in perusing and studying the symbolical characters wherewith God has engraven the revelations of his goodness on the interminable scroll of the visible universe?"

But it is important to cite the highest possible authority; and I know not where I can better look for

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it than in that almost superhuman survey of human knowledge contained in the philosophy of Lord Bacon. Words of wisdom are there which cast their light on almost all the paths of mental inquiry; and on the present occasion I seek them with special earnestness, because of the superficial notion that the Baconian philosophy took thought of the domains of only physical investigation. It can, however, be shown that among the objects of inquiry to which he pointed attention was, how the imagination may be fortified and exalted; and his brief but celebrated passage on Poetry may be aptly repeated:-"The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being, in proportion, inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical; because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merit of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution and more according to revealed providence; because history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness and more unexpected variations: so, as it appeareth, that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity and delectation; and, therefore, it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind

by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."

In these pregnant sentences, worthy of deep reflection, may be discovered the germs of the whole philosophy of poetry; and he who will follow as far as they light him in the paths of truth will leave far behind the questions and the cavils respecting the endowments of imagination. I have no desire to lead you into the tangles of metaphysics; but I beg your reflection on the passage cited, because it is the highest authority to be found in philosophy. The leading thought in this profound meditation of Bacon's, as I understand it, is that there dwells in the human soul a sense-a faculty-a power of some kind, call it by what name you may-which craves more than this world affords, and which gives birth to aspirations after something better than the events of our common life; and that the poet's function is to minister to this want. From the earliest records of literature, the creations of poetry in all ages have found a congeniality in the breast of man, though the world might be searched in vain for the archetypes of those creations. A great modern poet boldly tells us of

"The gleam,

The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream."

and yet the heart takes those dreams home to itself for realities. Humanly speaking, this is mysterious in our nature. When a mind like Bacon's is brought to the contemplation, it penetrates to the centre of the mystery, and intimates that the solution is to be found only in the inspired record of the history of the human soul; that its

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mingled majesty and poverty, its aspiration and its destitution, are to be traced to the fall from primeval purity. There was a time when the human soul and the world in which it was dwelling were better mated; when the discord and incongruity described by Bacon had not begun :

"Upon the breast of new-created earth

Man walked; and when and wheresoe'er he moved,
Alone, or mated, solitude was not.

He heard upon the wind the articulate voice
Of God; and angels to his sight appeared,
Crowning the glorious hills of Paradise,

Or through the groves gliding, like morning mist
Enkindled by the sun. He sat and talked
With wingéd messengers, who daily brought
To his small island in the ethereal deep
Tidings of joy and love."

The loss of innocence was the beginning of a new era in the history of our race. I have no desire to indulge in speculation on a subject which has perplexed theology; enough is it to believe what we are taught by God's own word:—that the fall was a moral and physical revolution. But we are not taught, either by that oracle or by the study of the mind, that the primal glory was wholly quenched. The faculties of man, fearfully disordered and corrupted, had still some remnant of their original endowments; and, to the mind of the great English sage, the aspirations of poetry appeared as the struggles of a once pure but fallen humanity, the strife of the mingled elements of our nature, the image of the Deity in which man was created, and the dust into which his soul was breathed.

From Lord Bacon's magnificent exposition I must pass on to another great tribute paid to poetry. His was 4

VOL. I.

the thought of the philosopher calmly looking (as Cowley said of him) "from the mountain-top of his exalted wit." Let me, in the next place, offer to your consideration some of the expressions of the lofty ideas of a poet upon his own art. I do not wish to anticipate what I shall have to say hereafter in the course respecting the great English epic poet; but I need his authority for the worth of poetic wisdom, coming as it does with such weight from one who realized so gloriously his own high conceptions of his calling.

In the spirit of Milton, imagination brought an instinctive sense of its majesty, which bursts forth in its own sublime vindication,-probably the most eloquent annunciation of the functions of the imagination ever uttered.

"These abilities, (by which the grandest poetry is produced,) wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God, and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit to unbind and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of pious nations doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God's true worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave,—whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtilities and refluxes of man's thought from within,-all these things, with a solid and treatable smoothness, to point out and describe."