POETRY. A writer in Blackwood defines poetry, "man's thoughts tinged by his feelings." POETRY. Poetry is the expression of the beautiful by words-the beautiful of the outer and of the inner world; whatever is delectable to the eye or the ear, the every sense of the body and of the soul-it presides over veras dulcedines rerum. It implies at once a vision and a faculty, a gift and an art. There must be the vivid conception of the beautiful, and its fit manifestation in language. A thought may be poetical, and yet not poetry; it may be a sort of mother liquor, holding in solution the poetical element, but waiting and wanting its precipitation,-its concentration into the bright and compacted crystal. It is the very blossom and fragrancy and bloom of all human thoughts, passions, emotions, language; having for its immediate object—its very essence-pleasure and delectation rather than truth; but springing from truth, as the flower from its fixed and unseen root. POETRY. Dr. John Brown. A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection and trust more to your imagination than to your memory. Coleridge. MUSIC. Music is the only sensual gratification which mankind may indulge in to excess without injury to their moral or religious feelings. Addison. MUSICAL WORDING OF SENTENCES. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here, as everywhere. Carlyle. RHETORIC AND ELOQUENCE. How well Cicero, who defines Eloquence "motus animæ continuus."* designates the mere rhetoricians of his time,-" Non oratores, sed operarios lingua celeri et exercitata." + PICTURES. A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts. Sir Joshua Reynolds. LOVE. L'amour n'est qu'un épisode dans la vie de l'homme, c'est l'histoire tout entière de la vie de la femme. Madame de Staël. *A continuous movement of the soul. + Not orators, but artisans with voluble and well-drilled tongues. LOVE BEFORE MARRIAGE. L'amour avant l'hymen ressemble à une préface trop courte en tête d'un livre sans fin. Petit-Senn. SOCIETY NOTHING WITHOUT LOVE. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. Bacon. INGRATITUDE. Ingratus est, qui beneficium se accepisse negat quod accepit; ingratus, qui dissimulat; ingratus qui non reddit; ingratissimus omnium qui oblitus est. INGRATITUDE. Cicero. Ingratitude is the abridgment of all baseness -a fault never found unattended with other viciousness. Fuller. DISINGENUOUS EXPRESSION OF GRATITUDE. Quand nous exagérons la tendresse que nos amis ont pour nous, c'est souvent moins par reconnaissance que par le désir de faire juger de notre mérite. La Rochefoucauld. GRATITUDE. There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction, that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance. It is not, like the practice of many other virtues, difficult and painful, but attended with so much pleasure that were there no positive command which enjoined it, nor any recompense laid up for it hereafter, a generous mind would indulge in it for the gratification which accompanies it. Addison. BRILLIANT THOUGHTS IN ORATORY. Ego vero lumina orationis velut oculos quosdam esse eloquentiæ credo; sed neque oculos |