THERE is an interregnum in the monarchy of song. The harps are hung upon the willows; the laurels are sere; the fingers, whose cunning called sweet magic from the one are wearied and unrelieved; the brows that sustain the other are wrinkled with an honourable age, and find no cause to smooth in smiles upon the vigour and daring of a young and lusty generation of suc

cessors.

And yet nature is the same as ever. Her majestic harmony, her minute perfection, her colours, her sounds, her fragrance, are all as unchanged in their exquisite adaptation to the sense of Beauty which lies treasured in the heart of man, are all as prompt to woo his enthusiasm and win him to musings that soar above the atmosphere of earth, and invade infinity, as they have ever yet been, when, from age to age, the master spirits of our race have embalmed contemplation in immortal words, bequeathing an incorruptible inheritance of pure and perfect thoughts to mankind, and confirming the holy alliance of the beautiful and the true, till imagination is only reason arrayed in smiles, and wreathed with a chaplet of roses.

If, then, nature, with her priceless dower of beauty and wisdom, be still as worthy of the ardour of poesy as she has ever been, why has she no suitors, why have we no poet? For the truth is lamentably undeniable, that the light has gradually expired, and the glory hath passed away; that the swans of the Lakes are no longer metaphorical, nor the dainty meads of Sloperton vocal with song; and that, in short, almost every glorious home of verse in the land is tenanted by occupants weary of the toil of composition, and anxious to resign its honours to candidates of less experience and more active energies. But wherefore have none appeared? Is the cause to be wholly sought in the accidental and temporary deficiency of genius, or are there causes collateral and coefficient, operating to aid the unkindness of na

ture, and to confirm the decrees of a fortune unjust to the muse?

Doubtless there are; and as unquestionably they are difficult to analyse and specify. Amid the vast variety of minds, how few causes will be found so universal as to act similarly on all, and how many obstacles to some energies, will be found the strongest incentives of others; while, on the other hand, how many of those combinations of circumstances which stimulate the exertions of one class of intellectual operatives, hang with dull and oppressive weight upon the stupor-stricken efforts of their fellows, till the philosophic inquirer is lost in perplexity, and humiliated by finding his predictions continually falsified, his generalizations constantly erroneous! Nay, so unmanageable a subject is human nature, even in those more stable conditions in which it would seem to present an invariable aspect, and to be easily detained in the grasp of speculation, that even the solid architecture of civil constitutions presents no definite material of inquiry as to possible results, and that even political prophesy, which ventures to trace the shadows of the past projected into the future, is, perhaps, more frequently mistaken than any, though it has the known character of a people, and the known form of their government among the data on which it builds its cautious conclusions. Harrington, as every one knows, deduced from general principles and after a protracted consideration, the impossibility of re-establishing a monarchy in England; and the restoration of the king confuted his book almost before it was read. But if the experienced tendencies of a national character and a national government are found to supply but a wavering and deceptive index of their future history: and if, after all that has been demonstrated with mathematical cogency on all sides, political wisdom is felt to consist rather in the fine discrimination of a practical tact than in any application of infallible principles of general truth-what shal!

we say of literary history? how shall we dare to collect its universal characteristics, or with what confidence can we pronounce the causes of its present phenomena or the means of its future alteration? For our concern in this department is not with the common mind of humanity-our travels are not over the level plain, where no ambitious eminence disturbs the uniformity of the prospect, and where an impartial light is equably diffused upon the whole. No; we have to explore the heights and hollows, bleak or verdurous, where the light by which we endeavour to guide our steps, is broken into masses and crossed by depths of shade-where, 66 now in glimmer and now in gloom," the path is obscure, perilous, and unsteady. In a word, we have to do with Genius-that mysterious essence which it seems so impracticable to fix or analyse; for, inscrutable as is the power that directs the train of ideas on all occasions, still more transcending our comprehension is the nature, and even the subordinate laws of this commanding energy which perpetually directs it, with the certainty of an instinct, through the loftiest regions of conception. The laws of the common intellect are, perhaps, easily assignable but criticism has regard to the Miracles of mind; and the general laws of such extraordinary instances are as secret, and, from the poverty of those instances, as impossible to be pronounced, as the similar laws which have been thought so to bind together the divine interferences with the course of material nature that its very deviations are a system. It

is not for us—it is not for any speculator to presume to pronounce maxims and draw logical inferences upon a

subject so elusive: it is for the candid examiner to suggest general views, which may be modified in innumerable ways--nay, which may never come into unmingled efficiency, but which, nevertheless, are likely to be found, on the whole, influential upon the character or direction of the poetical genius of the country. As in material, so in moral science--we can calculate with more certainty the motions of huge aggregates than of the minor masses which compose them; we can state with precision the paths of the bodies that march the heavens, while we ascribe to chance the direction of the pebble that falls from the cliff-we can tell the laws of the tides, yet cannot conjecture the restless evolutions of the innumerable waves that form them; because the latter are the results of endless, intricate, interfering, and unobservable influences, while the former are those of a few ascertained ones. And thus it is, likewise, that we know more of society than of any part of it--that we may mark with strict justice the character of a community, and find it contradicted in every one of our acquaintance. So true is the acute remark of the inimitable Rochefoucauld, that "it is easier to know man in general than any man in particular." The result of the whole is, that we may discourse learnedly of universal maxims, but that genius is born to break them. Hence the inglorious conclusion, that those cautious generalities which avoid precision, and address the feelings more than the understanding, can alone protect the critic from the shame of an unfulfilled prophesy, and the fatal necessity of gracing the triumph of some coming genius, who is to turn the stream of

public taste into some desert wild now unthought of, or condemned as irreclaimable by human skill.

Let us return once more to the topic from which we started. Let us dwell upon the divine form of nature; so truly divine that we can almost pardon the dreamers of old, who mistook the work for the artist, and called the world itself a god. Let us behold her animate and her inanimate realms, all alive with ever-changing forms of unchanging loveliness, and again ask ourselves why she hath found no interpreter of her beauty—no deep-sighted inquisitor of her secret charms-none who have obtained more than a public audience of the fascinator, in the undistinguishing courtesy of her drawing-room smiles-none who have been admitted to share the truth of her hidden feelings in the tenderer communion of those private hours when she may be won to whisper her special revelations. Picture the soft ardours of a summer's day, (such as that on which we write those lines,) and wonder that we have none who can teach us to feel them even deeper!

our

The fact is, that the spirit of the age is not poetic, nor formed to encourage poesy by its admiring sympathies. We have declared that we meant to deal in generalities, and will admit no private experiences to impugn this truth. Our readers are, doubtless, poetic-their taste is, indeed, unquestionable, inasmuch as they are readers-but, unfortunately, they do not constitute all society, though we are free to admit they form the most distinguished part of it. Again-we may not deny that there is much vagrant poesy hovering, during those sweet days of rural idlesse, among the lakes of Cumberland and Killarney, by the mystic shores of Glendalough, where the spirit of hoar antiquity and lingering religion still haunts the reverend silence of the everlasting hills, or disporting in nature's loveliest dimple-the leafy dells of the Dargle. Sonnets, too, have been found fluttering among the breezy ravines of North Wales, and attesting the potent spell of its cliffs and waving woods. But this power, which thus unlocks the hearts of the young, has but a temporary and local reign; he pervades not the dead mass of society-his bow

of peace is not set among the clouds of toil, and weariness, and distressand are not these the burden that deeply depresses the loaded atmosphere of British intellect for this year, and for years past? Who does not see that the spirit of poetic abstraction is alien from our land? Where is the man who has received on his mind the impression of present society, by becoming part of the moving mass, and entering into the membership of its feelings and excitements, and who has been able to preserve the virgin simplicity of the poetic taste? It will be said that we have asked a question, to which the same answer may be given in all ages-we partially admit it. But there is an especial pertinency in that answer, as we are now circumstanced. The immense spread of commercial and manufacturing interests, has lowered the fancy of the people, and confined it within the meanest circle of conceptions-the energy of political disquisition has agitated the universal mind in the most profitless of all regions of excitement-the diffusion of " useful knowledge," which is usually the courteous title for a heartless Utilitarianism in philosophy, and a discontented Utopianism in government, have, with other causes, of a more limited and peculiar nature, contributed to augment a distaste for the perusal or encouragement of poetry. What is poetry but the history of beauty and of passion. We have no interest in the former, and we are more concerned with the reality than with the analysis of the passions of our nature. How, then, did Byron first win his rude but majestic course among us, and what was that conjuration by which his first great production at once arrested the hearts of mankind in such an age? It was by addressing those very impulses which have most sway in society, as society is now constituted-by appealing not to our sense of beauty, not to our love of peace, not to the slumbering divinity of our souls-no, but by talking to us in that matchless eloquence, which duskily burns along his gloomy stanzas, of our interests, and our vices, and our corrupted nature, and suiting his sarcastic inferences to the hardened votary of the world, and to the victim of disappointment, to whom disap

pointment has brought no instruction. It was never by the man of soaring imagination, so much as by the man of morbid reflection, that Byron was truly felt and fostered-it was less for his poetry than his eloquence-less for his eloquence than his philosophy, that the world, in spite of the indignation of all who valued the moral progress of mankind, cherished and idolized him. He had touched the key-note of the age. Men enslaved to ambitious intrigue, yet unconsciously weary of that unhappy servitude, felt a secret something which they could not express, and Byron gave them words. Men driven by the misfortunes of war or commerce, (then daily casualties,) into that disgust of the world, which so many imagine to be philosophy, wanted a system of opinions, and Byron became their bible. The country-the world-began to loathe the noise of battles, and to sicken at the folly that had entangled it in the ceaseless quarrels of imperial rapine-“ There let them rot, ambition's honoured fools," said Byron. Finally, untaught and unteachable, surrounded by scenes of blood and confusion, which seemed to make earth a Tartarus, and wholly to cloud the moral government of God, many had no heart for religion, and were wont, with a sneer of supreme contempt, to annihilate the pretensions of every creed and system; but these pithy aphorisms which condense reprobation in a line, and pack philosophy in portable parcels, were grievously needed-they consulted the new apostle, found that "Even gods must yield, religions take their turn, &c.," and the passage became a proverb. Thus at once, creator and created, Byron was alike the offspring and the director of his age!

And it is true that from every state of society, in which human passion can find play, there may be poetry derived, which shall elevate or depress, as the genius that extracts the precious essence shall please in his power to will. Mr. Elliot has interested us with the effects of the corn laws, and

it is needless to cite the domestic portraits of Crabbe. Yet these are special cases, which prove not the tendency of our present society either to produce poetry or to peruse it. We could almost say that it is their proximity to prose, in the absence of imaginative appeals, which has recommended the tales of Crabbe to our age; and Mr. Elliott's popularity, though it seems to be deserved, can be accounted for on other grounds than the excellence of his effusions. Try the age by a surer test of its poetical appreciation. How few are the readers of Milton! How forced is the applause that hails Wordsworth, the Plato of verse! How small is the number that can separate Shakspeare from Kean or Macready, and can read him because he wrote the noblest works of imagination which the world has ever seen, not because he wrote the stock pieces of "the acting drama!" The exclusive selfishness, which is termed common sense, and which is the rankest growth of a commercial race, has overrun the domains of sensibility, without being able to stifle the cries of imagination for her food; and that fair faculty, thus neglected and thus vigorous, is too often reduced to snatch her hasty meal from banquets unwholesome and unsatisfying. And hence the Novel has assumed an importance so unprecedented in our literature. We must have excitement, and we must have it on the cheapest terms, and in the most abbreviated form. It must be prepared for our indolence, in a shape which shall leave no trouble to the pre-occupied reader-it must appeal less to our fancy, and our exalted moods, than to the coarser interest of complicated narrative and characteristic dialogue. The principle of utilitarianism has extended even to the pleasures of imagination, and we bargain for our quantum of excitement at a cheap cost of time and toil, with the same elevated feeling as that which actuates the honest mechanic who complains of the extravagant expense of the shilling gallery, and the unreason

It is curious that