the emotions; because they are thrice removed from the ideal truth."

In that respect, as in some others, few would accept Plato's Republic as being an ideal Commonwealth, and most would agree with Sir Philip Sidney that "if you cannot bear the planet-like music of poetry I must send you in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth, for want of an epitaph."

Poetry has often been compared with painting and sculpture. Simonides long ago said that Poetry is a speaking picture, and painting is mute Poetry.

Poetry," says Cousin, "is the first of the Arts because it best represents the infinite."

And again, "Though the arts are in some respects isolated, yet there is one which seems to profit by the resources of

all, and that is Poetry. With words, Poetry can paint and sculpture; she can build edifices like an architect; she unites, to some extent, melody and music. is, so to say, the centre in which all arts unite."

A true poem is a gallery of pictures.

She

It must, I think, be admitted that painting and sculpture can give us a clearer and more vivid idea of an object we have never seen than any description can convey. But when we have once seen it, then on the contrary there are many points which the poet brings before us, and which perhaps neither in the representation, nor even in nature, should we perceive for ourselves. Objects can be most vividly brought before us by the artist, actions by the poet; space is the domain of Art, time of Poetry.1

Take, for instance, as a typical instance, female beauty. How laboured and how

1 See Lessing's Laocoon.

cold any description appears. The greatest poets recognise this; as, for instance, when Scott wishes us to realise the Lady of the Lake he does not attempt any description, but just mentions her attitude and then adds

"And ne'er did Grecian chisel trace
A Nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace,
Of finer form or lovelier face!"

A great poet must be inspired; he must possess an exquisite sense of beauty, with feelings deeper than those of most men, and yet well under control. "The Milton of poetry is the man, in his own magnificent phrase, of devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." And if from one point of view Poetry brings home to us the immeasurable inequalities of different

1

1 Arnold.

minds, on the other hand it teaches us that genius is no affair of rank or wealth.

"I think of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul, that perish'd in his pride; Of Burns, that walk'd in glory and in joy Behind his plough upon the mountain-side.”1

A man may be a poet and yet write no verse, but not if he writes bad or poor

ones.

"Mediocribus esse poetis

Non homines, non Di, non concessere columnæ.”2

Poetry will not live unless it be alive, "that which comes from the head goes to the heart;" and Milton truly said that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem.

For "he who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the

1 Wordsworth.

2 Horace.

3 Coleridge.

temple by the help of Art-he, I say, and his Poetry are not admitted.'

Secondrate poets, like secondrate writers generally, fade gradually into dreamland ; but the work of the true poet is immortal. "For have not the verses of Homer continued 2500 years or more without the loss of a syllable or a letter, during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, or Cæsar; no, nor of the kings or great personages of much later years; for the originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still and cast their seeds

1 Plato.