Shakspeare was the inspired tongue of humanity. He was priest at the altar not of the Celestials, but of Mortals. His kingdom was of this world, and the message he was sent to do he delivered unembarrassed, unimplicated. He gave voice to the finest, curiousest, boldest philosophical speculations; he chanted the eternal laws of morals; but it was as they were facts in the consciousness, and so a part of humanity. He gives no pledge, breathes no prayer, and religion is mirrored no otherwise than debauchery. In his sonnets we behold him appropriating his gifts to his own use, but never in the plays. Hamlet and Othello, as he counted them not his creatures, but selfsubsistent, too highborn to be propertied, so he tampers not with their individuality, nor obtrudes himself on us as their prompter. If they lived, he lived.

BURKE.

It is not true what Goldsmith says of Burke; he did not give up to party any more than Shakspeare gave up to conspiracy, madness, or lust. His was not the nature of the partisan, but of the poet, who is quite other than the partisan. With the faculty proper to genius, he threw himself into the cause he espoused; and the Reflections on the French Revolution and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings were his Othello and Julius Cæsar, wherein himself was lost and the truth of things only observed.

The poet, it is said, has in him all the arts and letters. of his time. The Iliad is a panorama of Greek civilization in the Homeric age. So Burke in his speeches comprises his era. Hence he could no more be a Radical than a Courtier. The spirit by which he was wedded to what was venerable was one with the spirit in which he welcomed the new births of reformation and liberty. He was consistent with himself. He had no sympathy with those who, like George Fox, would clothe themselves in a suit of leather, and nakedly renounce the riches together with the restraints of social life. He did not chafe under the splendid harness of old institutions. Herein appeared not the servility but the greatness of the man; and his homage to the English Constitution was like the chivalrous courtesy which man pays to woman, as beautiful in him to yield, as in her to accept.

THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY.

THE devout mind is a lover of nature. Where there is beauty it feels at home. It has not then to shut the windows of the senses, and take refuge from the world within its own thoughts, to find eternal life. Beauty never limits us, never degrades us. We are free spirits when with nature. The outward scenery of our life, when we feel it to be beautiful, is always commensurate with the grandeur of our inward ideal aspiration; it reflects encouragingly the heart's highest, brightest dreams; it does not contradict the soul's convictions of a higher life; it tells us that we are safe in believing the thought, which to us seems noblest. If we have no sense of beauty, the world is nothing more than a place to keep us in. But when the skies and woods reveal their loveliness, then nature seems a glorious picture, of which our own inmost soul is the painter, and our own loves and longings the subject. It is the apt accompaniment to the silent song of the beholder's heart.

The greatest blessing, which could be bestowed on the weary multitude, would be to give them the sense of beauty; to open their eyes for them, and let them see how richly we are here surrounded, what a glorious temple we inhabit, how every part of it is eloquent of God. The love of nature grows with the growth of the soul. Religion makes man sensible to beauty; and beauty in its turn disposes to religion. Beauty is the revelation of the soul to the senses. In all this outward beauty, these soft swells and curves of the landscape, which seem to be the earth's smile; this inexhaustible variety of form and colors and motion, not promiscuous, but woven together in as natural a harmony as the thoughts in a poem; this mysterious hieroglyphic of the flowers; this running alphabet of tangled vine and bending grass studded with golden paints; this all-embracing perspective of distance rounding altogether into one rainbow-colored sphere, so perfect that the senses and the soul roam abroad over it unsated, feeling the presence and perfection of the whole in each part; this perfect accord of sights, sounds, motions, and fra

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grance, all tuned to one harmony, out of which run melodies inexhaustible of every mood and measure; — in all this, man first feels that God is without him, as well as within him, that nature too is holy; and can he bear to find himself the sole exception?

Does not the season, then, does not nature, does not the spontaneous impulse of an open heart, which has held such sublime worship through its senses, more than justify an attempt to show how the religious sentiments may be nourished by a cultivation of the sense of duty?

This should be a part of our religious education. The heart pines and sickens, or grows hard and contracted and unbelieving, when it cannot have beauty. The love of nature ends in the love of God. It is impossible to feel beauty, and not feel that there is a spirit there. The sensualist, the materialist, the worshipper of chance, is cheated of his doubts, the moment this mystery overtakes him in his walks. This surrounding presence of beautiful nature keeps the soul buoyed up forever into its element of freedom, where its action is cheerful, healthful, and unwearied; where duty becomes lovely, and the call to worship, either by prayer or by self-sacrifice, is music to it. He, in whom this sense is open, is put, as it were, in a magnetic communication with a life like his own, which flows in around him, go where he may. In nature we forget our loneliness. In nature we feel the same Spirit, who made it and pervades it, holding us up also. Through the open sense of beauty, all we see preaches and prophesies to us. Without it, when no such sensibility exists, how hard a task is faith! how hard to feel that God is here! how unlovely looks religion! As without the air, the body could not breathe; so without beauty, the heart and religious nature seem to want an element to live in. Beauty is the moral atmosphere. The close, unseemly schoolhouse, in which our infancy was cramped, of how much natural faith did it not rob us! In how unlovely a garb did we first see Knowledge and Virtue! How uninteresting seemed Truth, how unfriendly looked Instruction; with what mean associations were the names of God and Wisdom connected in our memory! What a violation of nature's peace seemed Duty! what an intrusion upon the mind's rights! What rebellion has been nurtured within

us by the ugly confinements to which artificial life and education have accustomed us! How insensible and cold it has made us to the expressive features of God's works, always around us, always inviting us to high refreshing converse!

I hold, then, that without a cultivation of the sense of beauty, chiefly to be drunken from the open fountains of nature, there can be no healthy and sound moral development. The man so educated lacks something most essential. He is one-sided, not of a piece with nature; and however correct, however much master of himself, he will be uninteresting, unencouraging, and uninviting. To the student of ancient history, the warm-hearted, graceful Greek, all alive to nature, who made beauty almost his religion, is a more refreshing object, than the cold, formal Jew. And here around us, resist it as we may, our hearts are always drawn towards the open, graceful children of impulse, in preference to the stiff, insensible patterns of virtue. The latter may be very unexceptionable, but at the same time very unreal. The former, though purposeless and careless they play through life, yet have trusted themselves to nature, and been ravished by her beauty, and nature will not let them become very bad.

Consider a few of the practical effects upon the whole character of a growing love of beauty in the young mind.

It disposes to order. It gives birth in the mind to an instinct of propriety. It suggests imperceptibly, it inclines gently, but irresistibly, to the fit action, to the word in season. The beauty which we see and feel plants its seeds in us. Gazing with delight on nature, our will imperceptibly becomes attuned to the same harmony. The sense of beauty is attended with a certain reverence; we dare not mar what looks so perfect. This sense, too, has a something like conscience contained in it; we feel bound to do and be ourselves something worthy of the beauty we are permitted to admire. This feeling, while it makes alive and quickens, yet is eminently conservative, in the best sense. He, who has it, is always interested on the side of order, and of all dear and hallowed associations. He, who wants it, is as destructive as a Goth. The presence of beauty, like that of nature, as soon as we feel it at all, overcomes us with respect, and a certain sensitive dread of all violence, mischief, or

discord. The beautiful ideal piece of architecture bears no mark of wanton pen-knife. The handsome school-room makes the children neat. The instinct of obedience, of conciliation, of decorum, reverence, and harmony, flows into the soul with beauty. The calm spirit of the landscape takes possession of the humble, yet soul-exalted admirer. Its harmony compels the jangling chords within himself into smoother undulations. Therefore "walk out," like Isaac, "at even-tide to meditate," and let nature, with her divine stillness, take possession of thee. She shall give thee back to thyself better, more spiritual, more sensible of thy relationship with all things, and that in wronging any, thou but woundest thyself.

Another grace of character, which the sense of beauty gives the mind, is freedom-the freedom of fond obedience, not of loose desire. The man, whose eyes and soul are open to the beauty there is around him, sees everywhere encouragement. To him the touch of nature's hand is warm and genial. The air does not seem to pinch him, as it does most narrow-minded ones, who can see no good in anything but gain; to whose utilitarian vision most that is natural looks hostile. He is not contracted into himself by cautious fear and suspicion, afraid to let his words flow freely, or his face relax in confidence, or his limbs move gracefully, or his actions come out whole and hearty. He trusts nature; for he has kissed her loveliness; he knows that she smiles encouragement to him. Now think what it is that makes virtue so much shunned. Partly, our depravity, if you please. But partly, also, her numerous ungraceful specimens. For it is the instinctive expectation of all minds, that what is excellent shall also be beautiful, lovely, natural, and free. Most of the piety, we see about us, is more or less the product of restraint and fear. It stands there in spectral contrast with nature. Approve it we may; but we cannot love it. It does not bear the divine stamp; it chills, not converts. The love of nature makes in us an ideal of moral beauty, of an elevation of character which shall look free and lovely, something that shall take its place naturally and as matter of course in the centre of nature, as the life of Jesus did.

Again, the love of beauty awakens higher aspirations