and reach out their imploring hands towards the mighty spirit whose influence is supposed to extend beyond the boundaries of this world and control the destines of the future.

It is just to consider poetry as the servant of religion, bending its vivid perceptions of beauty and the melody of its song to the service of a better one than itself. Miriam, on the farther shore of the Red Sea, could not praise the author of her country's deliverance without calling to her aid the triumphant measures of the Hebrew verse-and, throughout the volume of inspiration, the higher emotions of devotional triumph are poured forth by different writers through the language of impassioned song. An analysis of the pleasurable sensations created in the cultivated mind by poetic imagery will at once detect the difference between religion and poetry.— Montgomery, who is an excellent authority on both subjects, spurns the idea advanced by Dr. Johnson in his life of Waller, and subsequently in his life of Watts, that sacred subjects are unfit for poetry, nay, incapable of being combined with it. He considers the native majesty and grace of religious emotions far above the reach of human embellishment, yet would advocate the propriety of pressing into the service of religion the noblest powers of men-and remarks that a poet of christian character can find no more difficulty in blending beauty, simplicity, and sublimity with heavenly aspirations, than in combining the same qualities of song with the dreamy flights of fancy or the pictorial descriptions of nature and the human passions.

Montgomery has given examples from authors of the last generation of pure simplicity and pathetic expression which would have been most admirably suited to sacred themes. We give two of his quotations in his own language:

'See the wretch, that long has tost

On the thorny bed of pain,

At length repair his vigor lost,
And breathe and walk again :
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simple note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.'

Gray's Fragment on Vicissitude.

It cannot be questioned that this is genuine poetry; and the beautiful, but not obvious thought, in the last couplet, elevates it far above all common-place. Yet there is nothing in the style, nor the cast of the sentiment, which might not be employed with corresponding effect on a sacred theme.

The following stanzas are almost unrivalled in the combination of poetry with painting, pathos with fancy, grandeur with simplicity, and romance with reality :

'How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest!
When spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallowed mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than fancy's feet have ever trod.

By fairy-hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;

There honor comes, a pilgrim gray,

To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And freedom shall awhile repair,

To dwell a weeping hermit there.'— Collins.

The unfortunate author of these inimitable lines, a little before his death-in a lucid interval of that madness to which a wounded spirit had driven him—was found by a visitor with the bible in his hand. 'You see,' said the poor sufferer, 'I have only one book left; but it is the best.'

It is too late in the age of mental philosophy to make the assertion that poetry has no power to pour its notes of sweet and transporting melody into the quiet recesses of a deeply humbled heart. The genius of poetry comes at the call of the holy affections. The most enduring monuments of mind on earth are the productions of the Homer, embalmed in his own immortal verse, survives his country; Maro is destined to a longer remembrance than the 'eternal city'--and later poets have exerted an influence over the hearts of men and the manners of generations, other than those in whose time they wrote, far mightier than regal authority or the patronage of governments could command. But, if a stranger to the poetry of the world from Hesiod to Byron should inquire in what other poetry than that found in the bible is the purity, the sublimity, the pathos, the elevating and spirit sustaining themes of our holy religion best illustrated and most invitingly presented to the eye of taste and genius,-we must, with a few reservations, say-it is yet unwritten.

SAUL OF TARSUS.-A SONNET.

On, Saul of Tarsus! spear and shield upraise-
Thy heart beats high with persecuting ire,
Upon thy brow ambition's lightning plays,

Thou breathest threat'nings, rocks, and chains, and fire;
Thou art all haste and stirring hot to do

The bidding of the bloody priests, and break
Their thunders o'er the sainted band; but rue
Thy pride! above, around thee, voices wake-
More than the noon-day light from heaven descends,
And Saul, the persecutor, trails the dust;
Prostrate he lies-his iron spirit bends

Subdued by Him he dared to call accurst;

But now he owns the voice, the light, the power,
Of ONE whose word will make the mightiest cower.

CENTENNIAL ODE.- -BY CHARLES SPRAGUE.

THE two hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Boston was distinguished by the efforts of genius worthy to notch the centuries' in their course. We have, from the importance of the occasion and the established reputations of the orator and the poet, noticed their respective productions separately-as things not of every day occurrence; and here, if criticism is most at home with burning eye and iron pen when rending into tatters the webb of an author's thoughts, there will be little chance for critical display in the subject before us. It is preposterous for any one to think of melting by the

warmth of his hand the glittering diamonds. While the icicles which hold the rainbow in their brilliant transparence may dissolve, the true diamonds will still shine on unchanged by contact, collision, bright ever in storm and sunshine.

If one should ask what was the machinery of Sprague's poem-what its plot? We answer—it has none. His poem is the lofty discoursings of the muse as she stood on the elevation of two centuries, looked over the past, and kindled in prospect of the future. On such an occasion it was meet that the poet should commence in the spirit of sacred invocation :

Not to the Pagan's mount I turn,

For inspiration now:

Olympus and its gods I spurn

Pure One, be with me, Thou!

After one of the most philosophically correct delineations of the character of the pilgrim fathers, Mr. Sprague calls up from the silence of death

those fated bands,

Whose monarch tread was on these broad, green lands,'

and follows the retiring trail of the mighty forest hunters until the frail grass is now scarcely bowed by their step. How cheerless was the extinction of the Indian !

Cold, with the beast he slew, he sleeps;

O'er him no filial spirit weeps;

No crowds throng round, no anthem-notes ascend,

To bless his coming and embalm his end;
Even that he lived, is for his conqueror's tongue,

By foes alone his death-song must be sung;