there is none, but increasing sameness; for it is no transcript from the infinite variety of Nature, but the selfsame coat of motley which the writer casts upon everything, and through which it is impossible to see it as it is.

It may not be inappropriate here to say a word or two on the relation of poetry and external nature, especially landscape, as regards the ancients and ourselves. The poetry of a people should be in harmony with the people. The poetry of the Greeks was pre-eminently so from the earliest dawn through their best times until they began to imitate themselves. The English poetry, in its early days, was pretty much so, less the allegories that rose, perhaps, out of the Mysteries. Our greatest poets have always been in harmony with our people; but, in later times, much of our poetry, and especially the descriptive, is not so, and mainly from the writers indulging in sentiment, with which the crowd have no sympathy, and which they themselves, at bottom, do not feel. Ancient poetry, in that respect, is more uniformly true, and modern poetry often exceedingly false in its fine impassioned moods.

The ancient Greeks did not much indulge in landscapepoetry, partly from their greater bent for human interests to which it was mere back-ground, and partly, I think, for another reason which has not, that I know of, been adverted to, viz. that, peopling the woods, and all inanimate nature, with appropriate divinities, they shrank from too familiar discussion of what to them were subjects of awe. The epithets in Homer, which are applied to natural objects in the abstract, have this tone, and always imply a something akin to dread. And it is somewhat confirmatory of this view that Theocritus, who lived at a time when the Greeks had thrown off much of the simple lief of the early ages, seems most at home and free in

ecount of external nature. To sum the difference

between the Greek poetry and the English, ay, from Shakespeare's time, I should say that all Greek poetry was to the taste of all Greeks generally, from the prince to the peasant, and that much of English poetry is not only distasteful, but absolutely unintelligible, to the bulk of our countrymen.

Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark" furnishes an illustration; for, beautiful as it is, it yet lacks the truth that finds expression in the popular exclamation, "Ah! that is just what I felt!" On the contrary, the Shelleyan mental vesture of the skylark is exclusively Shelleyan, and never occurred to other than himself, and might, as to the moral utterance of the matter, have been attributed to the nightingale, or throstle, or blackbird, and equally inapplicable to either.

An ancient Greek could not have done it with our modern belief. The rise of the lark, and its song, and return to the nest, beautiful in themselves, yet yield no more scope for philosophical and moral wonderment and mystery than a paterfamilias going up to town regularly to business and returning to his nest to dinner. The bird is about its business, and everybody knows it. So wonderment, at the profundity of its thoughts, and its notions of good and ill, will find no place in the minds of those who think no higher of the skylark than the bulk of our people do.

One difference between a poet of the age of Homer and one of modern times is that the ancient believed the marvellous he puts in his poem-believed it in kind—and the modern does not. In Shelley's "Skylark" the false philosophy of that part which speaks of the bird's superior notions of matters that trouble us would have been impossible to a Greek, because, not believing it, he would have no idea of saying it for poetic ornament. Shelley did not believe it either; but poetic ornament, poetic enthusiasm, and what not, which is so familiar to modern ideas of

poetry, led to its expression, and pleases a majority of readers, while to a Greek it would have been as incongruous as to have made the dog Argus instead of expressing recognition of Odysseus in canine way by wagging his tail and so forth, address him in human speech, and bid him welcome in excellent Greek, without direct and express agency of the gods.

Their latitude of fiction was indeed large-large as their belief, but no larger. The ancient poetry contained no fiction that was impossible in the eyes of the people of those days; nothing that passed their limits of likelihood more than the fictions of De Foe, as "Robinson Crusoe," for example, transcend ours. The value of noting this is the historic bearing of very ancient poetry in testifying to the belief of the people. The "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were believed in by the ancient Greek.* In striking contrast with such credence is modern fiction, which neither narrator nor audience believe. And the more ancient fiction, however extravagant, which is believed by both, is presented in sharp contrast, because, in pari materiâ, in the “ Tales of the Genii," by Morell, which none ever believed, with the “ Arabian Nights," implicitly believed in by the Arabs, though some few of the more sceptical might look on them as we regard De Foe's stories, as natural narratives of probable incidents. The legendary stories of natives and the tales in our annuals are differenced in the precise point of faith in the one case in narrator and his audience, and the absence of it in the other.

Something akin to this will account also for the lack of the fervid in ancient, as compared with modern poetry. The same amount of philosophy, and pathos, and poetic utterance, could not be wrung out of inanimate nature by the ancient poet as by the modern, because the poetry of

* Horace and Virgil were very modern in this point of view, and as little as ourselves, perhaps, believed in their mythology.

the former was limited by his belief, and his belief ascribed nothing of that kind to those objects when they were not supposed to be bodily turned out of their ordinary condition by the presence of some deity, and their reverential feelings towards the gods, their very fear of them, kept them from multiplying the legendary instances of such interference. A modern, on the contrary, is not limited by his belief, and has therefore the whole range of invention for the imagination to revel in.

XXVIII.

WHAT IS POETRY?

DO not purpose elaborate answer to this question. The subject, indeed, eludes definition, and, yet, may yield clear notion of itself without one. The aim of poesy is to please and ennoble; its means representation; its form metre. But poesy, like virtue, hath parts, and one or other may be wanting in a production that yet may claim to be poetry in respect of what it has. Virtue, in the absolute, includes all the virtues; and yet he is not necessarily a bad man who is deficient in one of them, nor virtuous because of possessing some, while glaringly wanting in the rest. In character there is much balancing required, and so of a poem: perfection can be expected in neither, but each must be judged of as it recedes from, or approaches the highest ideal.

Of the various notions carelessly entertained on the matter the greater part will range under two classes-viz. 1st, Those which regard poesy as a something divine, that, disdaining all rule and law, shines out by its autonomy, and

affects us without our being able to explain the why. 2nd, Those which regard it as a thing of rules, to be done by line and measure, like house-building. Both are right, and neither, as usual with extremes. There is a shape and fashion in it—yea, line and rule, if you will—and there is also that which transcends them. It were nothing without both. To use a figure, on a subject not alien to figure, and of a breadth and subtlety above definition, we may take the Promethean myth as a fair account of the matter. The corpus of poetry is the curiously-fashioned man-frame, with all its parts of consummate perfection, dainty and intricate, and yet not above the skill of man to note somewhat, and describe. Yet this is but the body, and all, indeed, that is open to the scalpel of the critic; but the subtle something, that is the life of it, baffles search, and escapes in the attempt. Poesy, like man, whose reflex it is, hath body and soul, and it is killing it to part them.

Poesy is man so far that it reflects him in his being, doings, feelings, and relations; reflecting him as water reflects hill, tree, and sky, where all these, to the fluttering leaves and sailing clouds, are not verily, but seem as perfectly as if they were; for poetry is imitation, its essence is there. It shows not the thing where it is; for that were needless, as the thing would show itself, but shows you the likeness of the thing in its absence as vividly as if it were present before you; and this of all objects of man's vision, bodily or mental. And, free and boundless as seemeth its range, its wonder-working creative faculty is yet all within the circle of human vision, and employed on objects clear to human eye, bodily or mental.

It is imitation: it is not the actual, but reflects it; and, ugh it take up the actual, it is only as material to work as clay to the potter. Thus narrative poetry may tory, but it will transcend it, or fall short of its