such things are elevated above all earthly control. Man must consider them as an unexpected gift from above, as the pure efflux of divine grace which he must receive and venerate with joyful thanks. They are akin to the daípov, or genius of life, which does with him what it pleases, and to which he unconsciously resigns himself, whilst he believes he is acting from his own impulse. In such cases, man may best be considered as an instrument in the higher government of the world, as a vessel found worthy for the reception of a divine influence. I say this while I consider how often a single thought has given a different form to whole centuries; and how individual men have, by their expressions, imprinted a stamp upon their age, which has remained uneffaced, and has operated beneficially upon many succeeding generations." But against this must be alleged evidence tending to correct such an impression (Letter to Schiller, April 19, 1797): "Some verses in Homer, which are pronounced to be certainly not genuine and quite new, are of the same kind as some which I myself interpolated into my poem, after it was finished, in order to make the whole clearer and more intelligible, and to prepare betimes future events. I am very curious to see what I shall be inclined to add to or take from my poem, when I shall have got through with my present studies."

Of Schiller, Goethe says (Eckermann, Nov. 14, 1823): "Schiller produced nothing instinctively or unconsciously; he must reflect upon every step; therefore he always wished to talk over his literary plans, and has conversed with me about all his later works, piece by piece, as he was writing them." And Schiller describes his own procedure when engaged upon the Song of the Bell (Letter to Goethe, July 7, 1797): "I have now gone to work at my bell-founder's song, and since yesterday I have been studying in Kruenitz's Encyclopædia, out of which I get a great deal of profit. This poem I have much at heart, but it will cost me several

weeks, because I need for it so many varieties of moods, and there is a great bulk to be worked up."

In a bookseller's catalogue of manuscripts I find a quotation in point from an alleged autograph letter of Burns, said to bear date of Jan. 22, 1788, which, however, does not appear in any of the published collections in that place. The quotation is: "I have no great faith in the boasted pretensions to intuitive propriety and unlabored elegance. The rough material of fine writing is certainly the gift of genius. But I as firmly believe that the workmanship is the united effort of pains, attention, and repeated trial."

The principle of composition, as distinguished from direct inspiration, was certainly recognized by Shelley, for he avows that he acted upon it in the writing of Adonais (Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, June 5, 1821): “I have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which will shortly be finished. . . . It is a highly wrought piece of art, and perhaps better, in point of composition, than anything I have written."

Perhaps as good a summary as is required may be found in Saintsbury's note on the passage which has called forth. this comment (Specimens of English Prose, p. 346): “There is an obvious fallacy here. The finest passages are not originally inspired by labor and study, but in their finest shape they are the result of labor and study spent on the immediate result of inspiration."

A DEFENSE OF POETRY.

ΙΟ

ACCORDING to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and the 5 latter as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the Tò Toleîv, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its object those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the rò λoyíÇew, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as relations; considering thoughts 15 not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and 201 as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the sub

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THE ELEMENTARY POETIC FACULTY.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination'; and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and inter5 nal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts 10 otherwise than in a lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds and motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of 15 that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflection of tone and every 20 gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds. after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, 25 by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration.

of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to 30 ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become