the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit." Lamartine, when he complains so often at not being able to give to the world an epic embodying the present development of the heroic character, seems not to have dreamed that, unless he could represent objectively the action of one mind on another, he was, by the expression of his feelings, giving us the only epic poem the mind in its present stage is capable of giving.

The truth of the principles, we have laid down, may be still farther tested by their application to the projected epic of Coleridge on the destruction of Jerusalem, of which he said that it " was the only subject now remaining for an epic poem, a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric war of Troy interested all Greece.' He farther observes, that "the subject with all its great capabilities has this one grand defect, that whereas a poem to be epic must have a personal interest in the destruction of Jerusalem, no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event." We will not touch upon other objections which he himself has urged, such as mythology and manners, to which what we have already said on other poems, will as well apply; but will only remark, that the subject itself is incapa

ble of exhibiting the present development of the heroic character, and cannot therefore be made the great epic of this age, or of any to come. This may be seen from what has already been said. What made Milton's subject great, and what can now alone make any subject for epic interest great, was the action made visible of a superior intellect on an inferior. Could intellectual power be represented with the same objectiveness as physical power, there might be as many epics now as there are great minds. The reason is obvious. It is this manner of representing power which alone possesses a corresponding interest with tragedy, by which alone there can be a hero capable of sustaining the interest. The poem of Coleridge, even if feasible, must have been more similar to Tasso's than Milton's, and consequently when compared with the latter, not great.

Schiller's plan of an epic poem, founded on Frederick the Great of Prussia as the hero, must, if the principles advanced are correct, have proved far more futile than the one last mentioned; and it strongly confirms, as we think, the remarks before made on the hostility of the dramatic to the epic interest, that two of the greatest poets of our age should each have schemed an epic, yet neither completed one.

Of such attempts at the epic, as Monti's in Italian,

and Pollok's in our own language, we will only say, that they are as much wanting in the spirit of an epic as in its true form, and that they are as remote from the merit of Dante, whom they have taken as their model, as near him in plan. Their poems resemble those Spanish epics which suddenly appeared in the reign of Philip the Second, the whole series of which were nothing but chronicles, and differed but little from histories. Of Wilkie, and a host of others, we might say as Giraldi Cinto said of Trissino, who employed twenty years on his “Italia Liberata," that they do but select the refuse from the gold of Homer, imitate his vices, and gather together all that which good judges would wish to be rid of, by which they show little wisdom.

We have thus endeavored to show the inability of the human mind, at the present day, to represent objectively its own action on another mind, and that the power to do this could alone enable the poet to embody in his hero the present development of the heroic character, and give to his poem a universal interest. We rejoice at this inability; it is the high privilege of our age, the greatest proof of the progress of the soul, and of its approach to that state of being where its thought is action, its word power.

SHAKSPEARE.

It is pleasing to frequent the places from which the feet of those whom this world calls great have passed away, to see the same groves and streams that they saw, to hear the same sabbath bells, to linger beneath the roof under which they lived, and be shaded by the same tree which shaded them. It is pleasant, for it makes us, as it were, companions of their earthly presence; the same heaven is above us, and the same earth is beneath us, and we feel ourselves sharers, for a time, in the same earthly heritage. But for the soul this is not enough. We feel unsatisfied until we know ourselves akin even with that greatness which made the spots on which it rested hallowed; and until, by our own lives, and by converse with the thoughts they have bequeathed us, we feel that union and relationship of the spirit which we seek. We may frequent the same shades,