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agonies of Macbeth,—the blood-stained hauntings of remorse pursuing its victim as he is plunged lower and lower in the depths of crime. What actual incidents are more true than the tumultuous heart-breaking of King Lear? "Facts are fleeting, perishable things; but the spiritual creations of a true poet's imagination are truths that wake to perish never!”

The prime virtue of all the imitative arts-painting and sculpture as well as poetry—is the representation of their archetypes imaginatively. The characteristic of the productions of a genuine artist is the predominance of imagination, without which they sink into servile and mechanical copying; and it can scarcely escape the observation of any one who will examine the style of a portrait from a master's hand, and that of an inferior artist, that the exactness of a likeness mechanically identical with its original does not make the same impression of truth as those indescribable touches which appeal through the eye to the imagination. But I beg you also to observe that it is part of the very nature of each one of the Fine Arts to pause in the process of imitation at a point beyond which the beholder's imagination, aroused by what is given, moves on unconsciously to the completion of the work. It is the painter's part so to combine imaginatively light and shade and colour, that we gaze on the canvas without a thought that the imitation of form is supplied by the instinctive action of imagination. Again, the sculptor's part is the imitation of form; and he works in marble because its purity is the fit material for his abstractions from colour. Thus it is that painting and sculpture have their respective purposes, beyond which they do not aspire, each attaining what the other omits; and the pleasure derived from each is made up of what the eye beholds and the imagination supplies, the impression thus gained from a true work of art being that of truth in its full integrity. This is imaginative imitation. Now, there is another species of work more ambitious than either sculpture or painting; for it disdains the bounds of each; and it might be thought that if there was any mode of representing the human countenance so that there should be at the same time resemblance of form as in bust or statue, and also of colour as in painting, this would be the most excellent imitation. There seems to be a good deal of reason in this: the likeness would be so complete there would be no need for the help of the imagination and no danger of its leading astray. This would be what might be called matter-of-fact imitation. And if any one is disposed to think that it must be more true because more exact, let him compare the impression made by a piece of sculpture or of painting with that of a figure or bust in wax

POETRY AN IMITATIVE ART.

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work. The imaginative delight awakened by the former is changed into disgust increasing with the closeness of resemblance, producing a kind of indignation at what seems like a device to cheat the senses.

The affinity between poetry and the other Fine Arts-painting and sculpture-lies in the principle common to them all, and which is the very essence of imaginative imitation, the blending, in all genuine 2, C, works of art, likeness and unlikeness, sameness and difference. This, when first suggested, seems paradoxical. But, to show how essential an element difference is in such imitation, I need only remind you of the stony and colourless imitation in sculpture, and that there could be no greater outrage upon taste and the principles of the art than any attempt to remove that difference by superadding to the likeness of form the likeness of colour. Now, in poetry, the medium of imitation is the more subtle one of language, and the imagination and the feelings are to be moved by means of words as the painter moves them by the visible tints upon the canvas or the sculptor by marble. The impression made by a great poem and a great painting or statue are kindred and analogous; having a common origin in the creative energy of genius, they are addressed to the same faculty of imagination, and therefore the spiritual agency of all of them is alike. How close is this affinity may be shown by the compositions in which poets convey the impressions made on them by the other arts. A picture, for instance, of two females, by Leonardo da Vinci, has occasioned these lines, in which a woman's imagination has made words subserve the purpose of the canvas :—

"The lady Blanche, regardless of all her lover's fears,

:

To the Ursuline convent hastens, and long the abbess hears :-
'Oh, Blanche, my child, repent ye of the courtly life ye lead!'
Blanche looked on a rose-bud, and little seem'd to heed.
She looked on the rose-bud, she looked round, and thought
On all her heart had whisper'd and all the nun had taught:-
'I am worshipped by lovers, and brightly shines my fame;
All Christendom resoundeth the noble Blanche's name!
Nor shall I quickly wither, like the rose-bud from the tree,
My queen-like graces shining when my beauty 's gone from me.
But, when the sculptured marble is raised o'er my head,
And the matchless Blanche lies lifeless among the noble dead,
This saintly Lady Abbess hath made me justly fear

It nothing will avail me that I was worshipp'd here.""

Within the last two hours I have had the gratification of viewing an exquisite piece of art, which has presented to my mind the finest illustration I have ever met with of the affinity between poetry and other

imitative arts. The work alluded to, I am proud to say, graces the home of a Philadelphia gentleman, one to whose enlightened patronage the cause of the Fine Arts is greatly indebted. It is a piece of statuary embodying a sculptor's happy imagination who probably had no thought that the same conception had been embodied by a poet's words,—a passage in the "Excursion " presenting the same image :

"I have seen

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to her ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipp'd shell,
To which, in silence hush'd, her very soul
Listen'd intensely, and her countenance soon
Brighten'd with joy; for, murmuring from within,
Were heard sonorous cadences, whereby,
To her belief, the monitor express'd
Mysterious union with its native sea."

Nor can I omit the fine description, by Landor, of the

"Sinuous shells of pearly hue

Within, and they that lustre have imbibed
In the sun's palace-porch, where, when unyoked,
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave.
Shake one, and it awakens; then apply

Its polish'd lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs, as the ocean murmurs there."

I have spoken of the necessity of some element of difference in all the arts; and before dismissing this part of the subject, it is proper to inquire what constitutes that difference in poetic imitation. Poetry is separated by a bright distinguishing-line from ordinary language, inasmuch as it not only appropriates to itself the choicest forms of speech, but also the additional graces of metrical harmony. There is thus acquired a power peculiar to poetry in comparison with other compositions; for it is enabled to address itself to man's natural susceptibility to the beauty of a regular succession of harmonious sounds, and thus music is brought into alliance. It has been frequently suggested that the most ancient poets were led to adopt a metrical form, to enable their hearers, in a barbarous age, more easily to recollect their compositions. If poetry were like the familiar rhymes employed to recall the number of days in each month, the theory might be true; but, otherwise, it seems to me rather a shallow one. The truth lies deeper,

in the influences exercised over the heart by sound, when controlled

Not Col,

by principles of harmony, and consequently concurrent and subsidiary to the aims of true poetry. Besides, the poet, speaking better thoughts and better feelings than are passing commonly through the minds of men, instinctively seeks, as their appropriate garb, a better language and a better music. The pure heart of poetry needs the voice of the purest and most graceful forms of language. I shall have occasion hereafter to illustrate the admirable adaptation of the English metres to the expression of various passions and feelings and moods of imagination at present I can only cite a poet's tribute to the influence of melodious though unintelligible sounds,- -a tribute in strains as musical as the music they celebrated:

"Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland lass,
Reaping and singing by herself:
Stop here, or gently pass.
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain.
Oh, listen! for the vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

"No nightingale did ever chant

More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers, in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands;

Such thrilling voice was never heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

"Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.

Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of the day,-
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

"Whate'er the theme, the maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending
I saw her singing at her work,

And o'er the sickle bending:
I listen'd, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.'

Again, inasmuch as one great duty and labour of the human mind is the attainment of truth by the logical and analytical processes of science, it is apt to become an habitual opinion that there is no other truth than scientific truth, forgetting that it belongs to the imagination and the feelings as well as the understanding. Let not my words be perverted for a moment into a disparagement of scientific research; but earnestly do I protest that it is not all. The man of science, wedded to his analytical processes, may bring himself to look on nature with only a scientific eye; and at length the intellectual part of his being may become wholly divorced from the moral. There have been astronomers whose intellects have reached the distant spheres of the material universe and become familiar with the courses of orbs millions of miles on high, whose hearts at the same time grovelled in the most pitiable weakness of infidelity and atheism. The study of nature may be made too exclusively scientific,-the intellect sharpened while the sensibilities and the imagination are deadened. The human form, and the countenance beaming with intelligence and feeling, may to the eye of the anatomist be no more than the flesh and blood clothing a ghastly skeleton. The botanist may walk abroad with his thoughts so busied with processes of classification that the brightest verdure shall not touch his heart. To the mere man of science the rainbow may bring a train of thought on the laws of reflection and refraction, the prismatic colours and their arrangement: it may bring all this; and, if he has cultivated only the analytical powers of his mind, it may bring nothing more. But all the truth is not in the books of Optics. From childhood we are taught that the bow was set in the clouds to inspire confidence and hope in the breasts of those who had witnessed the terrors of the Deluge, and as a perpetual emblem of divine mercy and protection. Knowing by what hand it was placed there, and for what purpose, it is no great stretch of faith to believe that there is in it-we know not how an intrinsic power to stir in the breast of each descendant of Noah somewhat of the same emotion as it awakened when first resting on the heights of Ararat. With all this, science does not purport to have anything to do; and, accordingly, all that it teaches respecting that phenomenon cannot touch the feeblest sympathy. But there are probably few minds so dull as not to recognise an expression of a feeling of their own in the simple exclamation bursting from a poet's lips :