went out in jeopardy of their lives; and Mary taking a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointing the feet of Jesus, and wiping His feet with her hair.

And as it is in Scripture, so it is in the church, which is, in a sense, the living Scripture of God, the word written on the tablet of the regenerate heart of man. As it was also with the saints of old, so is it now. Wherever divinity shows itself most confessed, as undoubtedly it does confess itself at some times more than at others, there is also seen a certain innate grace and dignity, beyond the calculations of reason, and in some sort a moral miracle. We cannot but see that sometimes the kingdom of heaven comes with manifest power. We look back to certain eras as turning points and new foundations; to certain men as having had a special work of edification; to certain deeds and incidents as blessed to the church in a large and special way. Well then, we ask, have not these been generally of a romantic character; less mundane, more divine than usual? The church, may be, was at that time in the wilderness, or in prison, or the streets and lanes, the highways, and the hedges; those men had something heroic about them, and acted by a holy instinct rather than by common rules of worldly wisdom; those deeds and incidents were sudden and strange, as though some awful vision had swiftly sped across our view. We see not the approach of such things, and know them not, except by hidden sympathy; but when they are gone we know what has passed, and what we have lost,-something so blessed that no fruits we that remain can ever enjoy of their labors can compensate for the absence. A heavenly odor and poetic grace attests their true character, and unerringly marks the saintliness of the time, the men and their doings:

ἴχνια γὰρ μετόπισθε ποδῶν ἠδὲ κνημάων

ῥεῖ ἔγνων ἀπιόντος, ἀρίγνωτοι δὲ θεοί περ.

And if people have but eyes to see it, we think they will generally find that the leading and cardinal points of their lives-the friend-the help in time of need-the important crisis-the wise advice-the fortunate change the angel unawares entertained-the happy deliverance-the important alternative, whatever the things be, for weal or for wo, has something romantic about it; something which marks it and sanctifies it; giving it a different light and hue from the tenor of life. The scenes that stand out from the monotony of the dullest and least diversified course, have commonly a sort of tragic dignity. Every now and then passion, or enthusiasm, or some such madcap intrudes on the most constant order of events, laughs at the prudence of men and the necessity of things, stems the ancient currents of cause and effect, and sets them to work in new directions. Every one's own experience will remind him of some poetic passages, which he would consider, if any, the places when Providence has most manifestly interfered. A friend or a stranger by some act of generosity, some uncalled-for kindness, some gratuitous labor, and selfdevoted zeal, by the patient toil of years, or the brave effort of a day, has given one's heart, or one's mind, or one's fortunes that direction which

now one most thanks heaven for. It was a step perhaps that fools might scoff at, and wiser men condemn; a chance throw, that missed many, but hit oneself; a labor of hope thrown away on tens, or hundreds, or thousands, but most happily productive in this solitary instance; an amiable fatuity of zeal or affection, in the face of all human calculations, and despite of common experience, but happening for once to be rewarded with success. That a person of ordinary goodness, and more than ordinary powers, may have been sustained through life by a succession of almost miraculous mercies and deliverances, and yet not recognize the fact, is as conceivable as the fact may be true; and when the blindness does exist, it is owing, as to other causes, so also to the want of a certain poetic gift of discerning the gracious hand of the Almighty.

Poetry is a universal element as much as any moral instinct. It is found as a ruling and moulding and active principle in every soul, from the most cherished child of art to the untaught orphans of nature; from city to village; from the grandsire to the stripling. The rule is proved by the exception. We miss poetry at once when we do not perceive it. As sure as we know life from death, so do we know the mind without poetry. What is that which is active, and energetic and clever, and in a manner good and commendable, but devoid of grace and brightness, uninteresting and dull; uninviting, unwinning, unattractive; which, though we cannot censure, yet we cannot love; which instinet forbids to embrace, though reason commands us to respect? It is a soul without poetry, that is, without its fair proportion; for there is always left some grace in humanity, else it would cease to be humanity. There is no outward form of man, without some faint vestige of loveliness or dignity. So is it with poetry, the beauty of the soul. Yet every now and then we meet with minds so utterly ungracious and forbidding, that we discover them to be comparatively without a something existent in the rest of their species. The hard man of business, the rigid utilitarian, the rationalist either in religion or morals, the logician, the pedant, the pedagogue and the proser, are unpalatable and indigestible to one's spiritual taste and appetency, not so much for any positive and discernible objections, but because they are dry, tasteless and unsavory. Their presence does not glow with promise. As we listen to their conversation, hope is quenched. They talk of the world, and it grows more substantial and heavy. They speak of human affairs, and mankind deteriorates; of heaven, and it recedes from the view. When they lay down the law and dogmatize, the mind shudders with the thoughts of an eternal bondage. They speak but to paralyze, to deaden and to stun. It is bad enough while they confine themselves to the subjects suited to their capacity; and it is tolerable to hear them declare the incompetency of the human intellect to apprehend or realize more than what the senses can attain to; but when they intrude on spiritual ground, on poetry and religion, on the objects of the great, and the motives of the good, one's blood runs cold.

The secret of this mystery of dulness we believe to be the want of poetry, which is thereby shown to be the rule not the exception; for assuredly but few minds are utterly dull and uninteresting. Many are dull

on first acquaintance, or dull in their manners, or in their readiest and most customary topics of converse; but have a place in your interest by the time you know a little more of them. Dulness-that deep, heavy, unimprovable sort, which seems to thicken and grow on a man the longer you contemplate him-has nothing to do with more or less degree of intellect and education. It is found in all ranks like any other natural characteristic of mind or body; and just as the expression" exceedingly plain" implies that the generality of the human species possess some degree of personal grace and favor, so does the universally recognized distinction of dulness imply that poetry is natural to man.

The universal existence of poetry, as a faculty of the soul, is most evident not from the facility with which it may be developed by cultivation, but from its breaking out previous to cultivation. It is a very dull cottage and a very dull nursery where one may not find the poet. Nay the simplicity of childishness or boyishness, or of uneducated life, unless it be under some vicious perversion, and is therefore no longer simplicity, is always poetic.

Thus the noble owner of the castle or the mansion might often envy his poorest laborers the kind of sacred light in which they see his rank and position. After all he is but the anxious and laborious actor in a scene of which they are the impressed and edified spectators. While he frets and dictates, and plans and strives, they see, obey and admire. Theirs is the truest fruit of all his toil. What to him are the fictions of man, to them are as an ordinance divine; the vulgar creations of wealth, which pall to the possessor ere they be thoroughly seen, and sicken the designer before they are finished, which to him are bricks and stones, the work of the planter or the architect, to them are so many visions of paradise. The titles and honors, the forms of respect and dignity, which, to the more immediate partakers, are but ill-disguised conventialities, utterly devoid of intrinsic force and beauty, are as the degrees and orders of an angelic hierarchy to many a humble soul, who feels them the more deeply and really, because it is his place to honor, not to be honored ;-so much more blessed is it even in this life to give honor than to receive it. Whatever raises a man in the life that is, and gives him a grander place and a higher interest in mortality, tends to destroy his poetry. Knowledge and power, experience, and even great deeds and great deservings, seem of themselves to have this fatal tendency.

Perhaps this view of the religious character of poetry affords some clue towards the solution of the painful fact of some considerable classes of our fellow creatures having a certain uniform gracelessness, and ill favor, a deficiency which we all feel, though we cannot describe, and that not by any means superficial, but deep in grain, and to the very core. What we refer to is in the soul, mind, and manner, as well as the outward man, but for the present, let us look to the latter only, being the sure index of the rest. Grace of person is, it may be said, a matter of degree; but they are not mere matters of degree we speak of. They are the characteristics of species; painfully obvious, and presenting broad intervals of difference, instead of any nice graduation. We may safely appeal to the

experience of church people, whether they do not observe at first sight, and without the smallest effort of taste or discernment, a certain uniform something, an absent pleasantness, or a present unpleasantness of air and countenance pervading the whole of such heretical communities, as have even for a few generations existed out of the communion of the Catholic church. Nay, so obviously distinct and peculiar is this expression, and so universally is it recognized, that the very mention will probably provoke a smile, though, for our own part, we feel that the whole English people is far too nearly concerned, and far too likely to have suffered a similar growth of matter to mind, that we are not disposed to treat it so lightly. It is superfluous to mention examples of what must occur to the reader only too readily, too vividly, and with too significant circumstance. Now what is it, that, in the course of so few transmissions from father to son, with so little peculiarity of social institutions and physical treatment, has in a century cast tens and hundreds of thousands in the same mould, and established an almost organic difference between members of the same state and country, partakers of the same laws, occupations, diet, and manners, nay, between members of the same families ?-A difference so great, that if it received two or three centuries further development, one might certainly predict that a Cuvier or a Pritchard would be able to infer the religious peculiarities of an Englishman, from a mere inspection of his mouldering bones, as easily as he could now tell the Caffrarian, the Tartar, or the Hindoo. What is this mysterious element, whose presence or whose absence is so soon, so universally betrayed? Though it does not seem to us a full account of the matter (for perhaps it is a subject for deeper and more serious inquiry than we are at present engaged upon), yet we think it true as far as it goes, that poetry, the natural gift of poetry, has to do with it. The Catholic system is the true development of that heavenly grace. As far as we depart from it, so far does the whole nature seem to deteriorate, and to become in course of time dull, dead, graceless, unimaginative, and unspiritual.

Is it not greatly to be apprehended that the church of England is comparatively not in a position favorable to poetry? We cannot pretend to a very extensive acquaintance with the works of the Reformers, and therefore will only venture to ask the question: Were they in general men of poetical minds? Prejudice may have blinded us, but we confess to an insurmountable impression of their dulness and unspirituality. The Homilies are not even eloquent, much less poetical. The selections from the "British Reformers," published by the Religious Tract Society, have been extensively sold, but very little read by their purchasers. The seriousminded neighbor, to whom we are indebted for the loan of the volumes now lying before us, including the works of Latimer, Ridley, Philpot, Cranmer, Rogers, Saunders, Taylor, and Careless, evidently thought he had done enough for the cause by purchasing these curiosities, and might be spared the more arduous operation of reading them. Though twelve years on his shelves, they are all but unopened: nay worse, opened here and there, longo intervallo, and no two openings consecutive. Wherever their possessor has dived, he has evidently found it easy to discontinue the VOL. III.-No. I.

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perusal. No wonder, therefore, that we, with our prejudices, should experience the same result. Our eyes never lighted on more unreadable matter. Again; the Tudor alterations in the Liturgy are not characterized by a poetical spirit. Various other minor features of the Reformation, such as the systematic spoliation and habitual neglect of churches, and the rejection of all the ancient rites and customary ornaments, were avowedly a sacrifice of imagination to so-called reason.

But the clearest proof of this painful circumstance of our condition, is to be found in the very little actual union and sympathy there has been between poetry and the church of England these three centuries. The history of this period too plainly betrays that some nerve has, so to speak, been separated; so that while vitality has remained, feeling has been destroyed. During all this time it would be hard to mention a poet whose writings have so identified him with our church that he is in popular estimation one of her faithful sons. Scarcely a poet has derived his inspiration from her. Shakspeare, if not quite a Catholic, was not much of a Protestant; and he bears far more testimony to the traditionary feelings and ways of thought derived from an elder age of the church, than to those of the new foundation. Milton, after a faint and transient glimpse of Catholic order and beauty, became a bitter enemy of the English Episcopate, and persecuted unto death its consecrated king. Pope and Dryden were Romanists after a fashion. Cowper, alas! found no home for his heart anywhere, least of all in the church of England. Of infidels and mere men of the world it is needless to speak. But there are two classes of poets not to be passed over,-those who have expressed the instinct of natural religion, and those few who have consecrated their gifts to the service of the altar. As for the former, how little is there distinctive or definite in Young, Goldsmith, or Gray? Thoroughly English and surpassingly sweet and beautiful as are the scanty remains of the two latter, how little can the church of England be proud of them! Nay, in the case of the last, she has reasons for shame, that one who was bred and spent his days in the very school of her prophets did not essay a still higher strain. Of the latter class referred to, it is perhaps enough to say, that so little are they beholden to the present state of our church, that they have not been able to serve her without suspicion of unfaithfulness, as if their eyes had been fixed the while on something still more ancient and heavenly.

Indeed, as a matter of fact, the church, for this two hundred years, that is, since Puritanism almost radically extirpated the last remains of ancient Catholic feeling, has had no poetry. Even in its most respectable aspect, the Establishment has been such and so situated as to forbid this development. What enthusiasm could be excited by that which vegetated in abject slavery to a succession of irreligious princes and ministers,-that had no sympathy with any age past or to come,-that looked on all the rest of Christendom as an abomination,-that dared not even to read and know, or be supposed to have heard about the ancient faith and practice, -that woke only to fold its arins for another slumber, and was only enthusiastic against enthusiasm. When Johnson said there could be no religious poetry, however painfully erroneous might be the sentiment, he