warp and its woof. These rich coinages of the imagination, instinct with passion, the great masters have incarnated in language, felicitous and mellifluous, gemmed with imagery, musical with the melody of rhythm—fit body for the indwelling soul,-and on the shelves of all our libraries stand these productions possessing a power to charm which is denied to the paintings of Raphael or the statues of Phidias.

And this inheritance of ours never wastes. Poetry, ministering to that part of us which never changes, does not grow old and unserviceable. What satisfies our æsthetic nature completely will continue to satisfy it—we can no more outgrow it than our lungs can outgrow air. Poetry is immortal. Its immortality it does not share with the bald facts and truths of science, this does not belong even to the thought which is the staple of poetry. The feeling, the sentiment, which floods the thought is what preserves it-this is the spices and the aloes that embalm it, the amber which envelops it, and keeps it forever from decay. Nay, poetry, which haunts the memory as prose never does, and, bidden or unbidden, is ever coming down out of it into consciousness, and singing itself on our tongues, is not only a "joy forever," but is forever becoming more and more a joy. For poems grow, grow richer and better by use; and this not by what they lose but by what they gain, for out of us there goes, at every reading of them, something which enters into them, and sweetens them as sunbeams sweeten grapes. Not only do their words grow into place and grow together, from frequent repetition of them, but, little by little, poems fill their pores and color through and through with the emotions which they awaken in us, and which pass out of us and enter into

them until they become redolent, and exhale a fragrance which makes their very atmosphere aromatic.

Let us substitute Read for Not in a stanza of Longfe!low's, and conclude these remarks by quoting

"[Read] from the grand old masters,

[Read] from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo

Through the corridors of time;

Read from some humbler poet
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer
Or tears from the eyelids start;—

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day

Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away."

LESSON 83.

EXTRACTS FOR THE STUDY OF POETRY.

Direction.-Classify these extracts, scan them, give their metre, and note their beauty of thought, words, and imagery:

1. A brook came stealing from the ground;
You scarcely saw its silvery gleam

Among the herbs that hung around
The borders of that winding stream,-
A pretty stream, a placid stream,
A softly gliding, bashful stream.

A breeze came wandering from the sky,
Light as the whispers of a dream;
He put the o'erhanging grasses by,

And gayly stooped to kiss the stream,—
The pretty stream, the flattered stream,
Theshy, yet unreluctant stream.

The water, as the wind passed o'er,
Shot upward many a glancing beam,
Dimpled and quivered more and more,
And tripped along a livelier stream,—
The flattered stream, the simpering stream, \
The fond, delighted, silly stream.

Away the airy wanderer flew

To where the fields with blossoms teem,

To sparkling springs and rivers blue,

And left alone that little stream,

The flattered stream, the cheated stream,

The sad, forsaken, lonely stream.

2.

That careless wind no more came back;
He wanders yet the fields, I deem;
But on its melancholy track

Complaining went that little stream,—
The cheated stream, the hopeless stream,
The ever murmuring, moaning stream.

The Wind and the Stream.-BRYANT.

DUKE. Now, my co-mates, and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,—
The seasons' difference--as, the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the Winter's wind—
Which when it bites, and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say,
This is no flattery-these are the counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything:

I would not change it.

AMIENS. Happy is your Grace,

That can translate the stubbornness of fortune

Into so quiet and so sweet a style.

DUKE. Come, shall we go and kill us venison?

And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,

Being native burghers of this desert city,

Should, in their own confines, with forked heads
Have their round haunches gored.

The melancholy Jaques grieves at that;

And, in that kind, swears you do more usurp

Than doth your brother that hath banished you.