Grief and gladness, such as may Christmas snow, for maiden's bloom Who that grave's stern seal has broken: 'Twas a fast, that eve of sorrow, Speechless we sat; and watched, to know Then came the Feast, and we were told Myrrh and frankincense and gold, As our tribute to our King. Dearest, gentlest, purest, best! Now thy trial hours are over, Thinkest of us, dearest, ever? From the rude clay shaped His child. *"A sort of meadow in which souls suffered nothing, but remained, as not yet being fit for the Blessed Vision." St. Bede's Hist. Fiery trial, anguish chill, Served not here His secret will; Loveliest, meekest, blithest, kindest! I this monument would raise Distant from the public gaze: Few will see it; few e'er knew thee, DALETH. Literature in its Social Aspects. PART II. WE are thus brought to the less agreeable part of our theme; but were we merely to "pronounce the panegyric" of literature, we should do it less than justice while we flattered it. It can afford to discard exaggerated pretensions, and need not conceal its aberrations or shortcomings. Partial views often lead to deeper delusion than statements wholly false. Literature does not require their aid. It is the first to proclaim that its part in human affairs, though great, is subordinate. Many of the charges brought against it will be found to be such as ought to have been brought only against those who abuse its gifts, usurp its functions, or claim for it what it never claims for itself. It is, as before, in connexion with the relations that exist between Literature and Society that we propose to consider the subject. In restricting our remarks to this theme, we must pass by much that would well reward attention, and occasionally make statements which may appear disjointed, because, instead of following the track of Literature in its continuity, we are obliged to cross the stream where its windings pass beyond our bound. What are the censures commonly directed against literature by thoughtful men who fear its attractions and distrust its aids? It is not on the corruptions of letters that they descant; for these are accidental. They do not deny that literature has amassed "much goods," and is as skilful in dispersing them as in collecting. Their charge is of an opposite sort. They regard literature as a siren, whose shore is strewn with dead bones; as a witch, whose gold is an illusion. Her wealth, they say, is our poverty; and the strength she bestows is but weakness disguised. Her spoils are fine, and brought from afar the silk-worm has woven the texture, and the sea-cave added the purple dye. But are these the stores, they demand, which moth and rust cannot corrupt? Might they not rather be called the sum-total of all that virtue has dispensed with often, and wisdom not seldom despised? The heroes who founded or who restored states were men not of arts, but of arms. They were not poets: poets but crept up and fed upon their work, as the caterpillar on the green leaf it destroys. They were not philosophers; but they supplied subjects for philosophy. First nations achieve great things: when that energy is gone, they sing them. Heroism thinks, and acts, and : suffers virtue is silent, or sings but like that bird whose song is its dirge. The Apostles were not, with one exception, men of learning. The highest sanctity is probably most often reached by illiterate peasants of whom nothing is heard-men who needed no illusory realms of Fancy, but deemed themselves sufficiently provided for by a world of Duty and a world of Hope. Religion is an abstinent thing: her loftiest temples have often ascended after the devotion that created them was on the wane-the monuments of a faith extinct, not the shrines of a living one. There is a truth in such statements; but it is not the whole truth, and it is capable of very different applications. The hero comes before the poet, and is the greater poet of the two; for he is the poet in act, not in word alone. He does not lift up his voice, but he lifts up his being; it is his life, not his song, that ascends and draws up with it so much. The legislator comes before the philosopher. It is not intellectual systems that he builds up, but human polities, social fabrics, the homes of a people, the fortresses of successive generations. The deliverer who leads forth a rescued nation is nobler than the minstrel who takes the timbrel, one day perhaps to celebrate its deliverance, and the next to lead idolatrous rites. Great deeds are more than great words, because inclusively they are great words—the select and perdurable speech of great nations. Great men are more than great writers; for their greatness is more inwardly theirs, and more diffused throughout the whole of their being. The poet projects himself forward through the power of imagination, and for the time leaves behind him the meaner part of his nature: the hero retains the full integrity of his being, and in an unbroken unity of soul is that which the other aspires to be. The martyrs came before the doctors, and the highest heroism precedes even the heroic age of bard and seer. The order of merit coincides with that of Time. These truths are humiliating to letters, and literature has not always acknowledged them, disposed as she has sometimes been to identify civilisation with that which is, in fact, its offspring and its record. The successive periods of literature correspond with analogous periods in the growth of society; but it by no means follows that any particular period of literature, even the earliest and loftiest, corresponds with the highest period of true civilisation, virtue, and refinement. The tendency of literature in every nation has been to decline after a certain and early period. An important light is thrown on this fact, if we believe that even at the first growth of a nation's literature there had already commenced a decline in some of a nation's moral characteristics. Observing that the earlier period of literature is the nobler, we are tempted not unnaturally to infer that the period of social development of which it is the exponent is likely to be that one in which morals have been purest and sentiment most sound, however defective may have been the more conventional parts of its civilisation. But the inference is a hasty one. Such a social period must have been a noble one: but it may easily be that an earlier one was, in some vital respects, a nobler one still. We often fall into the illusion of counting that age the primitive one in a nation's history, which was the first to speak of itself and leave records behind. Yet it too had a past as well as a future; and of that silent past the earliest literature is the memorial. The same ascending literature that heralded a new era of society commemorated an earlier one; as the same planet is the morning and the evening star. It is not merely the instinct alluded to in the old adage, Omne ignotum pro magnifico, which makes us attribute a high moral condition to that social period in each nation which immediately preceded its literary development. The single circumstance that the villagers who gathered round Homer appreciated the most perfect poetry ever composed, and, except Shakespeare's, the most thoroughly human, proves that at a very early period there existed in Greece a state of society high as regards refinement of taste, and of which, but for that one memorial of it, we should have known little or nothing. That the same period was in its moral relations comparatively a good one, is implied by the many natural virtues illustrated by Homer's poetry— by its simplicity and kindliness, by a general purity the more striking from its unguardedness, and, above all, by the absence of all allusion to vices common in the subsequent ages of Greek poetry. Something like this is to be found in the earliest literature of most countries. A character both of greatness and of unconventional purity commonly belongs to it, the mere appreciation of which by contemporaries indicated a magnanimity and a majestic simplicity not possessed by later ages, however enriched and developed in other respects. Later ages, indeed, have often not retained enough of these moral qualities to enjoy the literature of the earlier period. Their critical discernment may have been clear enough to recognise its greatness, so far as verbal acknowledgments go; but the many, while they acquiesced in the traditionary verdict of Fame, were in practical harmony with those later and inferior works which their sympathy indirectly produced. If, then, the earlier period of society illustrated by literature was morally the nobler, it seems difficult to sever it from an age earlier still, which gave it birth, and the greatness of which by necessity found expression in its offspring. The earlier writers of each nation, moreover, generally extol an earlier age, as one compared with which |