That ther n'is man that thinkin maie
What time that now present is,
Askith at these grete clerkis this;
For men thinken redily
Thre timis ben ypassed by
The time that maie not sojourn,
But goth and maie never returne,
As watir that doune runnith aie,
But never droppe returne maie."

How sublime is the allusion in 'NATURE' (natus, natura, to be born), the being born, or indeed the reference in Latin is to the future, as though it would indicate that she is no dead mass, but a living and ever-evolving Whole. And indeed she is our mother, too-nourishing us tenderly on her breast, shedding around us her balmy, balsamic influences, and gently at last rocking us to sleep with sphere-music and old eternal melodies. Shelley, her loveliest and lornest child, shall sing her pæan.

"Mother of this unfathomable world!

Favour my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale

Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,

When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist

Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears,
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge: and though ne'er yet
Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary;

Enough from incommunicable dream,

And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought,
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome

Of some mysterious and deserted fane

I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,

And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man!"

ALASTOR. RAMBLE FOURTH.

FOSSIL POETRIES.

"Language is fossil poetry. The Etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."

EMERSON.

ALL words are, more or less, poetry. For wordmaking is an organic creation of the mind and runs parallel with the processes of nature and is the crown and consummation of the world. The Hindûs, in their free and fluent mythology, conceived the second act of Brahma to have been the Naming: and it is reported of Pythagoras that he thought that of all wise men he was not only the most rational but also the most ancient who gave the names to things. The poet is by divine right the proper Namer. Through sympathy with the grand substantial Words of the world he imports into human speech the utterance of orphic Nature. Material forms-ocean, air, soil, fire, stars, life, growths-these are sublime primeval Words. These the Expressive passion dissolves into plastic ✓ symbols. And the poet gives voice to mankind.

O, shining trails of bards and builders! "Thinkest thou there were no poets till Dan Chaucer?" asks Thomas Carlyle-"No heart burning with a thought which it could not hold, and had no word for, and needed to shape and coin a word for,-what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor, and bold questionable originality. My very attention, does it not mean an attentio, a stretching-to? Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which none had yet named, when this new poet first felt bound and driven to name it! His questionable originality, and new glowing metaphor, was found adoptable, intelligible, and remains our name for it to this day."

Words are often the expressed essence of poetryredolent as flowers in spring. 'AURORA' comes to us a snatch of that flowing Grecian Mythus that idealized universal nature; and even to us is she the "rosy

fingered daughter of the morn"

And 'MORN,' too, is a sweet poem, coming to us from an old Gothic verb Mergan, to dissipate, to disperse: so that the meaning of 'morn' (as also 'morning' and 'morrow') is just the time when darkness is dissipated, dispersed :

"The nyght is passed, lo the morrowe graye,
The fresshe Aurora so fayre in apparance
Her lyght dawith, to voyde all offence
Of wynter nyghtes."

Lyfe of our Lady.

'LETHE' is another classicism: 'tis the river of forgetfulness "the oblivious pool." What a romance in 'Hyperborean '-that is, beyond the region of Boreaswhere dwelt a pious and happy race: said to be a Homeric creation. 'LEVANT,' 'ORIENT,' and 'OCCIDENT,' are all poems. And so is that noble Saxon 'MAIN,' that is the Mægen-strong one:

"A shepherd in the Hebrid isles Placed far amid the melancholy main."