but it combines and blends these into new forms and according to new affinities; breaks down, if we may so say, the distinctions and bounds of nature; imparts to material objects life, and sentiment, and emotion, and invests the mind with the powers and splendours of the outward creation; describes the surrounding universe in the colours which the passions throw over it, and depicts the mind in those modes of repose or agitation, of tenderness or sublime emotion, which manifest its thirst for a more powerful and joyful existence, To a man of literal and prosaic character, the mind may seem lawless in these workings; but it observes higher laws than it transgresses-the laws of the immortal intellect; it is trying and developing its best faculties; and, in the objects which it describes, or in the emotions which it awakens, anticipates those states of progressive power, splendour, beauty, and happiness, for which it was created.

We accordingly believe that poetry, far from injuring society, is one of the great instruments of its refinement and exaltation. It lifts the mind above ordinary life, gives it a respite from depressing cares, and awakens the consciousness of its affinity with what is pure and noble. In its legitimate and highest efforts, it has the same tendency and aim with Christianity; that is, to spiritualize our nature. True, poetry has been made the instrument of vice, the pander of bad passions; but, when genius thus stoops, it dims its fires, and parts with much of its power; and, even when poetry is enslaved to licentiousness or misanthropy, she cannot wholly forget her true vocation. Strains of pure feeling, touches of tenderness, images of innocent happiness, sympathies with

what is good in our nature, bursts of scorn or indignation at the hollowness of the world, passages true to our moral nature, often escape in an immoral work, and show us how hard it is for a gifted spirit to divorce itself wholly from what is good.

Poetry has a natural alliance with our best affections. It delights in the beauty and sublimity of outward nature and of the soul. It indeed portrays, with terrible energy, the excesses of the passions; but they are passions which show a mighty nature, which are full of power, which command awe, and excite a deep, though shuddering sympathy. Its great tendency and purpose is to carry the mind beyond and above the beaten, dusty, weary walks of ordinary life;-to lift it into a purer element, and to breathe into it more profound and generous emotion. It reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the spring time of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid delineations of its tenderest and loftiest feelings, spreads our sympathies over all classes of society, knits us by new ties with universal being, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life

We are aware that it is objected to poetry, that it gives wrong views, and excites false expectations of life, peoples the mind with shadows and illusions, and builds up imagination on the ruins of wisdom. That there is a wisdom, against which poetry wars, the wisdom of the senses, which makes physical comfort and gratification the su

preme good, and wealth the chief interest of life, we do not deny; nor do we deem it the least service, which poetry renders to mankind, that it redeems them from the thraldom of this earthborn prudence. But, passing over this topic, we would observe, that the complaint against poetry, as abounding in illusion and deception, is in the main groundless. In many poems there is more of truth than in many histories and philosophic theories. The fictions of genius are often the vehicles of the sublimest verities, and its flashes often open new regions of thought, and throw new light on the mysteries of our being.

In poetry the letter is falsehood, but the spirit is often profoundest wisdom. And, if truth thus dwells in the boldest fictions of the poet, much more may it be expected in his delineations of life; for the present life, which is the first stage of the immortal mind, abounds in the materials of poetry, and it is the high office of the bard to detect this divine element among the grosser labours and pleasures of our earthly being. The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise, tame, and finite. To the gifted eye, it abounds in the poetic. The affections which spread beyond ourselves and stretch far into futurity; the workings of mighty passions, which seem to arm the soul with an almost superhuman energy; the innocent and irrepressible joy of infancy; the bloom, and buoyancy, and dazzling hopes of youth; the throbbings of the heart, when it first wakes to love, and dreams of a happiness too vast for earth; woman, with her beauty, and grace, and gentleness, and fullness of feeling, and depth of affection, and her blushes of purity, and the tones and looks which only a mother's heart can inspire;-these are all poetical.

It is not true that the poet paints a life which does not exist. He only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys; and in this he does well; for it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratifications, but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher being.

CHANNING.

SECOND APPROACH OF CORTES TO THE CITY OF MEXICO.

PASSING the night in a little hamlet on the mountain side, the army was prepared, at the dawn of the following day, to resume its march. But the events of this march being varied by nothing but the change of prospect, and the wonder of those by whom the valley was seen for the first time, we will not imitate the prolixity of our authority, the worthy Don Cristobal, but dispatch, in a word, the increasing delight and astonishment with which Don Amador de Leste, after having satiated his appetite with views of lake and garden, surveyed the countless villages and towns of hewn stone that rose, almost at every moment, among them. A neck of land now separates the lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco; and the retreat of the waters has left their banks deformed with fens and morasses, wherein the wild-duck screams among waving * reeds and bulrushes. Originally, these basins were united in one long and lovely sheet of water, divi

ded indeed, yet only by a causey built by the hands of man, which is now lost in the before-mentioned neck, together with its sluices and bridges, as well as a beautiful little city, that lay midway between the two shores, called by the Spaniards Venezuela, (because rising, like its aristocratic godmother, from among the waters), until they discovered that this was a peculiarity presented by dozens of other cities in the valley. Here was enjoyed the spectacle of innumerable canoes, paddled, with corn and merchandise, from distant towns, or parting with a freight of flowers from the chinampas, or floating gardens. But this was a spectacle disclosed by other cities of greater magnitude and beauty; and when, from the streets of the royal city Iztapalapan, the army issued at once upon the broad and straight dike that stretched for more than two leagues in length, a noble highway, through the salt floods of Tezcuco; when the neophyte beheld islands rocking like anchored ships in the water, the face of the lake thronged with little piraguas, and the air alive with snowy gulls; when he perceived the banks of this great sheet, as far as they could be seen, lined with villages and towns; and especially when he traced far away in the distance, in the line of the causeway, such a multitude of high towers and shadowy pyramids looming over the waters, as denoted the presence of a vast city,-he was seized with a species of awe at the thought of the marvellous ways of God, who had raised up that mighty empire, all unknown to the men of his own hemisphere, and now revealed it, for the accomplishment of a destiny which he trembled to imagine. He rode at the head of the army, in a post of distinction, by the side of Cortes, and felt moved to express some of the strange ideas which