energic power, falsehood and concealment extinct,—every face clear and bright as a crystal wave,-the planet around them a smiling garden, where it was not a magnificent wilderness. Each morning shone the Bright Sun, no longer fitful and angry at times, but with his red ray evanished, and his power and mercy both increased. Each evening appeared, in its calm beauty, the Beautiful Star, so near and so bright, that it seemed to rest on the mountain-tops; that men lifted up their hands as if to touch it, and that the Spirit inhabiting it might be seen, at certain favoured states of the atmosphere, looking down with eyes of love on that planet which he had ransomed by such an unparalleled contest. No more vain inquiries why and how was that black and baleful orb produced, and why allowed so long to reign, and what has become of its votaries and victims; enough that the people of the planet, looking up, behold it no more in their sky-know themselves to be freed for ever from its power— and feel themselves more closely knit to their two glorious luminaries, because they once worshipped another, from whose dominion the Beautiful Star delivered them. While gazing at these happy beings in my mind's eye, like good old John Bunyan, "I wished myself among them." I wished still more, "Oh! that this were to be the destiny of our earth!” when a voice seemed to pass through me, sweet and strong as an organ-blast, "Be not faithless, but believing." And with that, like "the baseless fabric of a vision," the reverie passed, but HAS left something behind it.

Ir is singular to notice how many of our modern works, in poetry or in prose, infidel and Christian, blossom, ere they close, into some form or other of the anticipatory or prophetic. Shelley, for instance, closes both his "Queen Mab” and his "Prometheus Unbound" with long poetical prophecies about the future. Carlyle closes his "French Revolution" with a strain of mystical prediction. Isaac Taylor is continually prophesying. In short, you seldom find even a thoughtful novel, or a treatise on the Hebrew Bards, or a book of travels, or a volume of high and serious song, ending without a flight forward into the abyss of futurity—a flight in which you sometimes entirely lose sight of the adventurous aspirant, and seldom do more than catch glimpses of his white wing ploughing through the darkness. Why is this? Is it from mere ambition?—or is it from the imitation of others or is it, rather, because our age is peculiarly the age of hope and expectancy, and may be fitly described as in that glorious picture in "Balder,"

"With backward streaming hair, and eyes of haste,"

to be careering onward, not passively to meet, but actively to encounter its destinies? Hence poets aspire to be, as in old times, prophets. None of their separate predictions may, indeed, be considered infallible; but when many minds are

directed at once to the future, there is likely to be some portion of truth in their poetical vaticinations.

Let me, too, throw out (in addition to what I have hinted in the two preceding chapters), ere I close this volume, a very few half-poetic, half-prophetic anticipations.

And first, as to literature and poetry. We are nearing a point in which poetry shall have much to sing; and the great event generally begets the great singer, and "the large utterance of the early gods" wherewith to sing it. Think of the one theme of war, which many had thought exhausted! It has suddenly shot up into a Brobdignagian size, and has organized a machinery on a scale of magnificence of which even the oriental genius of the First Napoleon never dreamed. Men are now fighting the wars of the Titans over again: shells are flying like rocks, mortars like mountains, and the storms and tempests of fire let loose by man upon his fellows, almost vie with the tornadoes, the thunders, and the lightnings of Tropical nature. Never, too, did pathos, moral grandeur, disinterested affection, and the other scarce and difficult flowers sometimes found on the murky rocks of warfare, bloom more beautifully than in the present war. What a stern and silent fund of incidents and images these battles of Balaklava, Alma, Inkerman, and that gallant siege of Sebastopol have accumulated for the purposes of poets-were the poets but come! We are engaged in a war which resembles that of Troy in grandeur-which threatens to resemble it in length-and which, like that ten years' struggle, ere it close, may draw superior intelligences into its vortex, and become the Armageddon of the earth. May it not, like the Trojan war, be expected to produce a Homer and an Iliad? Undoubtedly its tendency is to infuse greater force, condensation, and manhood into the somewhat morbid, sickly and voluptuous poetry which at present abounds. Then, in the manifold phenomena of this "wondrous mother age"-its restless excitement, an excitement so great that it would sometimes seem as if, in man's mysterious composition, the brain and

nervous-system were becoming sole and supreme-fast budding into a higher organization-or else about to explode and to be extinguished; in its sudden revelation of enormous wealth, as if the earth were hurrying to display her most secret collection of treasure, and to open all her doors, that the race, ere too late, may enter in; in its rapid revolutions of opinion; in the railway-rate at which the powers of death and destruction themselves are going on ("there are no deathbeds now-a-days"); and in its eager, listening attitude—there is much deserving, nay, demanding, the highest poetical treatment, whether didactically, or satirically, or dramatically, or lyrically. The discoveries, too, in astronomy, chemistry, and geology, while, as hinted before, casting little light upon the great questions connected with theology, are eminently adapted for the purposes of poetry. Before the First Advent of Christ, the voice of earthly song fell silent; before His Second, we expect it to revive in strains holier than the lyre of Amphion, more powerful than the hymnings of Orpheus, sweeter than the pipings of Arcadian shepherds,comparable only to that music which, when earth first swam into the sky, welcomed the stranger, as the "morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

We have already denounced the false unity sought after, and said to be already found, in the universe, considered morally and religiously. But, in point of secular knowledge, there is a certain tendency to unity, which shall probably increase till a spectacle, thousands saw seven years ago in the heavens, shall find its antitype on earth. On a clear, starry, October night, in the year 1848, there began to stream up certain rills of electric light, not from the north merely, as usual, but simultaneously from north, south, east, and west, till meeting in the zenith, they seemed to pause, to mingle, and to form together a great, white quivering tent of light, covering the whole face of the sky, and under which it was an awful joy for men to stand and wondering to look up. So truth may soon be expected

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more fully and irresistibly to break forth from every point, and to hurry on to some centrical meeting-place-to the formation of some wider, more complete, and more magnificent system. Till this happen, the encyclopædia of human knowledge will only be in scattered sheets, not bound in a goodly volume, far less reduced to a brilliant essence.

We see a far more remarkable phenomenon beginning to manifest itself. Closer bonds are drawing all nations and every portion of society together, and must produce a greater unity of feeling and interest throughout the globe. Previous to the great discoveries and changes of this century, what insulation there was in the various countries of the world! What great gulphs, like the nine foldings of Styx,—such as diversity of language, vast interspaces of distance, commercial restrictions, religious prejudice, barbarian ignorance,-separated nation from nation! But how rapidly are these gulphs filling up, and how soon may we expect the sphere to be as thoroughly one, in many moral and intellectual respects, as it is in physical! Innumerable causes are, so to speak, drawing the bands of the globe more tightly together, and bringing it into narrower compass. Europeans have ridden in triumph through all the hundred-gated cities of barbaric tongues ; commercial restrictions are melting away, like barriers of morning mist before the rising sun; and religious castes and narrow creeds must follow. Ignorance is, as ashamed, hiding its face. Meanwhile, Steam and Electricity are wafting thought, and feeling, and opinion, and burning passion, with far more than the swiftness of the eagle's pinion, from the Indus to the Pole; from California to Japan. There is no disguising the fact, the earth is fast becoming one; it is shrivelling up, like a palace reduced by the might of an Arabian magician, to the size of a shepherd's hut; it is, through various and resistless influences, shrinking down from a scene of wide unpeopled wastes, from a vast house of empty and unknown mansions, into a spot or dwelling, where all shall know all and everything within the earth's compass; where mountains