felt, according to the same law, in the workings of the poetic faculty; a power the most eminently passive to the great influences of substantial truth. For Poetry is the synthesis of our other perceptions, the universalization of our common thoughts, the midway hospice in ungenial times for the way worn traveller from the religion of the past to the religion of the future. When church and state, theology and philosophy, forsake the universal verities of existence, then poetry takes them up. In such times, it becomes the church, the provisional spouse of the Father of the fatherless. It is the only faculty to which all facts are welcome in all times. Place the most pinched sectary in the seat of the Muses, and you see his puckered lips expand into round and flowing smiles; and "his eye, in a fine frenzy rolling," communes manifestly with superior beings from all the quarters of the opened heavens. Unwittingly he transcends his creed, and all the creeds of his generation, and utters profundities which perplex his own understanding the moment the spiritual wine has ceased to work upon him. As the prisoner of doctrine, he pusillanimously wrings his hands over the problems of existence, of which his own doctrines are the difficulty; but in his poetic enfranchisement, by the clue of unfearing love and harmony, he easily and gaily perambulates the open gardens of virtue and beauty, where feeling and delight are all-sufficient expositors of the unity of creation. Obsequious to the guidance of the spirit of nature, he submits himself unconsciously, naturally, to the principles and laws whereby nature issues into satisfaction. The first of these conditions for poetry is, that all things in the world shall be capable of an application to the human heart,—that objects seemingly dead shall still be fitly the objects of love or dislike, from relevancy, whether of harmony or discord, to the affections of mankind. Thus poetry is the complement of our social instincts, as it proclaims that the connection of the soul with nature is not limited to correspondence with the head or the body, or the works of the hands or the inventions of the thought, but extends to the kingdoms of the earth and the entire fabric of the universe; and that every form, great or small, breathes out life, and aspires to personality and animation. In this
