which is best. The infancy of the life poetic, like that of all life, learns much by unconscious imitation; but it can only so learn when the poet possesses those high faculties which seek, through imitation, only to work out their own development. True genius will soon cast aside whatever is alien to its individual nature; while, on the other hand, incorporating into its proper substance all poetic elements that are truly congenial, it will blend them also with each other, and stamp upon them a unity of its own. The poet will be original when he wields collectively the powers that once were his only alternately; and versatility will then have been exalted into a higher gift, that of comprehensiveness. It is not in the instance of Mr. Tennyson alone that the faculty of versatility has recently shown itself, not only in a dramatic illustration of character, nature, and life, but also in the manifold power with which the same poet has produced the most dissimilar species of poetry. We need hardly name Byron, Shelley, and Keats. In these cases, and especially in the latter two, the character of the poetry produced by the same person was wholly different at different times. But in cases too numerous to be named, poetic versatility has also shown itself in a very different manner. All regions of the earth have been ransacked for the materials of poetry-Persia, Arabia, Hindostan, Iceland: it has been the ambition of the poet to reproduce the forms and manners, if not the mind, of the remotest lands; and even where his imagination has been content to tread on English soil, it has commonly taken refuge in some remote period of our history, and recounted the Saxon legend, the chivalrous exploit, or the feuds of border warfare. Our poets may have been impelled to this practice, in part by the fact that the age in which we live is not eminently poetical, and that the unknown has always a charm. This circumstance, however, can but have supplied the external occasion for their course. Its cause is to be found within, and may be referred to the versatile powers and instincts of the imagination. Indeed, it is in a qualified sense that we can admit our age to be unpoetical. That any age not too late for virtue, too late for religion, and too late for the human affections, should be really too late for poetry we cannot believe, though it may easily be unpoetical in its outward features. The Roman Empire during its decline was probably unable to produce any better poetry than those snatches of sacred song, in which, protesting against the illusive vision of corrupt sense that surrounded it, the early Christain intelligence expressd its aspirations after the realities of the world unseen. The Greek empire, during its long and mummied existence, was as incapable as modern China is of producing anything great in poetry or in the kindred arts. Surrounded by the noblest monuments of ancient genius, the best of her degenerate children could do little more than lecture on them; and gratify with them, not a generous pride, but a narrow and sectarian vanity. In neither of these cases was it tyranny which had subdued the human mind, however tyranny may have assisted in keeping it prostrate. The positive and negative evil proceeded from the same cause. decay of all rational and manly sentiment which connived at a despotism unsupported by the moral sense, and sustained only by arms and the superstition of custom, was inconsistent with the instincts and aspirations which incite to poetry. That Except, however, at periods of barbarism, of thoroughly corrupt morals, or of utter effeminacy, the poetic instinct will ever assert itself. For the imagination at all times pervades the whole of our nature; and is sure to work its way up into the light, no matter through what obstructions. If the age be a poetical one, the imagination will embody its sentiment, and illustrate its tendencies. If it be unpoetical, the imagination will not therefore be repressed. It will then create a world for itself-or revert to some historic period, the memorials of which it will invest with a rad ance not their own. Unquestionably those. ages are the most favorable to poetry in which the imagination can pluck the ears of corn as it passes through the field, and is not obliged to seek its food afar. At those periods in which life retains much of the adventurous, in which no political conventions can supply the place of valor and wisdom in rulers and of a generous loyalty in subjects, in which moral refinement coexists with an imperfect civilization, in which the first great triumphs of patriotism are won, and in which temples rise from the ground at the bidding of a zeal which has not learned to measure itself or its efforts; -at such periods it is that poetry is most genial, most real, and most authentic. Such were the periods at which Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare wrote. The heroic age of Greece, the theology and philosophy of medieval Europe, and the manners and history of his country furnished these men respectively with the main materials of their verse. These are the great National poets of the world. They belong, indeed, to all ages; but they belonged especially each to his own. The materials of each were supplied by the objects surrounding him, or the traditions which had descended to him by inherit nce. hall endeavor to show, the points of resemblance between him and them are not more marked than those of dissimilarity. The imagination, then, as we have observed, has ever recognized two great offices, distinct though allied-the one, that of representing the actual world; the other, that of creating an ideal region, into which spirits whom this world has wearied may retire. The former function, which is chiefly discharged by the "historia spectabilis" of dramatic poetry, is that to which Bacon refers when he speaks of poetry as 'submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind." The latter belongs for the most part to poets lyrical or mythic, who, in the enchanted islands" or "snowy cloisters" of ideal poetry, have provided retreats in which spirits "Assoiled from all encumbrance of the time," might rest and be thankful. "it still will keep It would, however, be a grave error to suppose that the national is alone the great poet. On the contrary, it is among the results of poetic versatility, as well as of the instincts of the human heart, that there has ever existed in our literature, and, to no small degree, in that of other countries, two great schools of poetry, one only of which can properly be called national. It does not depend on the circumstances of the age alone whether the poet find his materials in the circle of surrounding things, or seek them elsewhere: this will in the main be determined by the constitution of his own moral nature, and the preponderance in it of a vivid sympathy with reality on the one hand, or, on the other, of an ardent aspiration after the ideal. In either case the imagination will lend to him its high mediating powers; in the former interpreting the outward world to him, in the latter interpreting him to his fellow-men. Even in the best and healthiest periods of national development the human mind will aspire after a region more exalted and pure than it can ever find on earth even in the most prosaic it will be able to detect something noble in the world of common things. From this double power arise two converse schools of poetry the one characterized by its plastic power and its function of embodying the In Greece, as in England, those two speabstractedly great and the ideally beautiful; cies of poetry coexistd; but in the former the other by its reality, its home-bred sym- neither of them connected itself with the aspathies, its affinities with national history, sociations of any foreign country. No recharacter, and manners. To expound the phi-gion more beautiful or sacred than Greece losophy of these two schools would be to write a treatise on poetical versatility and imagination. On such an enterprise we cannot now adventure. We must content ourselves with some slight historical notices of the two schools among ourselves,-schools which have existed from the beginning of our literature, and which have been reproduced in our own day. The merest outline will illustrate the momentous truth that neither in nations nor individuals has poetry an isolated existence, but that it flourishes or declines in conjunction with that moral, political, and spiritual well-being which it helps to sustain. We shall conclude with some remarks on two poets of the ideal school, Shelley and Keats with whom Mr. Tennyson has been sometimes compared-although, as we A perfect Poet ought to unite both the great attributes of poetry. To a limited extent the greatest have done so; but even in their case the balance has ever preponderated in one direction or the other. could then be conceived of: and the Greek poet could only forsake the company of his heroes for that of his gods. But in our northern regions, which on emerging from barbarism found the ancient literature a perfect work imperfectly explored, the South has always been regarded with feelings akin to those entertained by the Greek for the fabled Hesperia of the west. It was a region of beauty and delight on which the imagination might rest half way to heaven,an asylum which combined the solidities of this earth with the ideal perfection of the worlds beyond. The beauty of the southern countries, their remoteness, and their ancient fame, favored the illusion: and the imagination of England was further drawn to them by the indirect attraction of those other arts, sympathetic with poetry, which have been | carried to perfection in the South alone. The southern mind, moreover, is more inventive than that of the North, though less thoughtful and imaginative; and, as a consequence, Italian and Spanish "Novelle" supplied the plot to half our British Dramas,- -a circumstance too commonly ascribed to the single fact that on the revival of letters the literature of the South had sprung first into existence. All these influences imparted a character distinctly southern to that school of English Poetry, which was inspired rather by the love of the beautiful than by national associations, as both advanced to their development. It was in Shakspeare and Milton that the two great schools found their chief representatives. The former is the greatest of national poets, although he occasionally forsook the national for the ideal department of song; and Milton is not a national poet, although (his ideal resulting as much from his moral sense as his imagination,) his poetry derives from his religion a reality and a solidity which seldom belongs to the ideal school. This distinction between the character of the two poets is illustrated by the different reception their works have met with. Shakspeare's sympathies were keenly native; and he has therefore ever been a favorite with the people. He is above their appreciation, indeed, but not beyond their love. His dramas have many planes of interest, which underlie each other like the concentric layers of bark produced by the annual growth of a tree; and while the most philosophic eye cannot penetrate the inmost, the most superficial is pleased with that which lies outside. Where any love of the drama remains, Shakspeare is enjoyed even by the most homely audience. But if any one were to submit to such an audience a page or two of the Paradise Lost, far from being received like the Rhapsodist of old, the Ballad-singer, or the Methodist Preacher, he would effectually disperse the crowd. The audience which Milton demanded was 'fit though few" Shakspeare demanded none; but if people came, he probably thought "the more the merrier." The latter wrote for the stage, but never was at the trouble of publishing his works: the former prescribed for himself a choral audience consisting of grave divines, sage patriots, and virtuous citizens; and when this selected audience hissed him, as occasionally happened, he cursed them to their faces in Hebrew and in Greek-as "asses, apes, and dogs," whose portion ought to be with the schismatics who had "railed at Latona's twin-born progeny!" It is not, however, its deficient popularity so much as its subject and its form which proves that Milton's great work is not a national poem, high as it ranks among our national triumphs. If that mind had remained with him, which was his when English landscape supplied the scenery of his "Allegro," and Anglican theology inspired the moral teaching of his "Comus," he would probably have fulfilled his youthful intention, and celebrated Britain's mythic hero. But, instead of the great romance of the North, he wrote the religious epic of the World. Some will affirm that he illustrated, in that work, his age if not his country. His age, however, gave him hints rather than materials. Puritanism became transmuted, as it passed through his capacious and ardent mind, into a faith, Hebraic in its austere and simple spirit,—a faith, that sympathized, indeed, with the Iconoclastic zeal which distinguished the anti-papal and anti-patristic theology of the day, but held little consent with any of the complex definitions at that time insisted on as the symbols of Protestant orthodoxy. Had the Puritan spirit been as genuine a thing as the spirit of liberty which accompanied it; had it been such as their reverence for Milton makes many persons still suppose it to have been, the mood would not so soon have yielded to the licentiousness that followed the Restoration. Milton labored as a patriot while a field of labor was open to him: he then turned again to his true greatness, and once more confronted the mighty works of ancient genius. They pleased him still, from their severity and their simplicity: But they did not satisfy him-because they wanted elevation. When some one pointed in admiration to the dome of the Pantheon, Michael Angelo, who was already engaged on his studies for St. Peter's, rejoined, "But I will lift it up, and plant it in heaven." It was thus that Milton regarded the ancient Epic! And thus that in his Paradise Lost he elevated and endeavored to spiritualize that majestic form of composition. There are many who will always regard St. Peter's temple in the air as the first of architectural monuments. The admirers of the classic will, however, feel that its amplitude and elevation are no sufficient substitute for that massive simplicity and breadth of effect which belong to the Parthenon; while those who revere our cathedrals will maintain that it lacks the variety, the mystery, the aspiration, and the in finitude which characterize the Christian ar- | moral influence of which the origin eluded chitecture of the North. On analogous the eye, like the invisible garland of the saint, grounds the more devoted admirers of Ho--that influence which was exhaled from the mer and of Shakspeare will ever be dissatisfied with Milton's work-however they may venerate his genius. It is undoubtedly composite in its character-the necessary result of its uniting a Hebraic spirit with a classic form. Dante, like Milton, uses the Greek mythology freely; considering it, no doubt, as part of that inheritance of the Heathen, into possession of which Christendom had right to enter; but he uses it as a subordinate ornament, and in matters of mere detail. His poem is a Vision, not an Epic, the vision of supernatural truth of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise-that passed before the eyes of the medieval Church as she looked up in nocturnal vigil; not the mundane circle of life and experience, of action and of passion, exhibited in its completeness, and contemplated with calm satisfaction by a Muse that looks down from heaven. But a mystic subject, open rather to apprehension than comprehension, would not have contented Milton; who, with his classical predilections, had early laid it down as a canon that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and impassioned," a statement of the utmost importance where applicable, but by no means embracing the whole truth. To him the classic model supplied, not the adornment of his poem, but its structure and form. The soul that inhabited that mould was, if we cannot say the spirit of Christianity, at least a religious spirit - profound, zealous, austere, and self-reverent as analogous, perhaps, to the warlike religion of the Eastern world, as to the traditional Faith of the second Dispensation. Such was the mighty fabric which, aloof and in his native land an exile, Milton raised; not perfect, not homogeneous, not in any sense a national work, but the greatest of all those works which prove that a noble poem may be produced with little aid from local sympathies, or national traditions. From the earliest period of our literature, as we have observed, we have possessed the two schools, which culminated in Shakspeare and in Milton. In Chaucer the national element greatly preponderated: it reigns almost alone in many of the Canterbury Tales, especially in the humorous; but in several, of which the moral tone is higher and the execution more delicate, a southern spirit prevails. Of these his "Second Nonne's Tale," including the legend of St. Cecilia, is a beautiful example; illustrating, as it does, that life and manners of the first Christians, and through which, in part, their religion was diffused. The national element of our poetry, too, has always asserted itself almost exclusively in our historical ballads; that exquisite series, the musical echo of so much of our history. Surrey and Wyatt, in no slight degree, represented that Italian-Gothic school of which Spenser may be considered as the great representative. In him the spirit of chivalry elevated the love of the beautiful; and both, while ennobled by a meditative piety, were enriched by all the gentler associations of classical song. He was a man of a graver mind than belonged to any of his models; and we miss in him that buoyant gaiety which animates the poets of the South: But such deficiencies were amply atoned for by that tenderly contemplative spirit which pervades his poetry. His Hymns on Heavenly Love" and "Heavenly Beauty" are noble specimens of the Platonic moral philosophy: and it is probable that we can nowhere meet an exposition of the Christian Religion in its completeness and proportions, doctrinal, devotional, and practical, so searching and so large as exists in the Tenth Canto of his First Book, describing the visit of the Red Cross Knight to the "House of Holiness." In the Faery Queen, indeed, we find the essence of the prose Romances of the Middle Ages--as we find the essence of their theologians in Dante. Ariosto is neither more various nor more picturesque: nor is that imaginative love-sentiment which, rather than the passion itself, was the theme of the ideal poets, celebrated with more purity, refinement, and sweetness, in the sonnets of Petrarca than in those of Spenser. Spenser's faery-land will never be much frequented by those whose sympathies are exclusively with "Action, Passion, and Character. But with poetic students of another class, who, if they have advanced less in the lore of life, have wandered less from the breast of the Muses; with those by whom ideal beauty, refined sentiment, rich imagery, "fancies chaste and noble," harmonious numbers, and a temperament of poetry steeped in the fountains of pleasure, but irradiating them with its own purity;--with those by whom such qualities are cherished, the poetry of Spenser must ever remain a favorite haunt. It is not, indeed, a classic temple, which charms and rests the eye by the perfection of its finite proportions. Yet to it also belongs, in its several parts, that definiteness without which organic beauty cannot exist. It is a forest palace,-half natural, half artificial: we wander through groves as regular as galleries; and catch glimpses of openings like stately halls dismantled :--but our foot is ever upon flowers; and the moonlight of the allegory helps to sustain the illusion. From the chivalrous paradise of Spenser's "Faery Queen" to Milton's "Paradise Lost," the two schools of English poetry maintained a friendly rivalry. Both sources of inspiration contended at times in the same author, even when a dramatist. Marlow, in his beautiful narrative poem "Hero and Leander;" Shakspeare, in his "Rape of Lucrece" and his "Venus and Adonis;" Fletcher, in his "Faithful Shepherdess;" Shirley, in his "Narcissus and Echo," are southern, not only in their subject, but in their mode of treating it. In Brown's "Britannia's 'Pastorals,' -a poem full of beauty, and which, we are glad to see, has recently been republished in a cheap form, the classic spirit reigns almost alone. The scenery itself is classical, though the author was probably never out of England: and its "silver streams" and "pleasant meads" are never depressed by the shade of northern mountains or clouds. The Sonnets of Drummond abound in an Italian beauty; as indeed do many of Daniel's, whose other writings are characterized by an English robustness and thoughtfulness. The exquisite fragments which, in his swift and brief career, were carelessly shaken from Sidney's affluent genius, are as full of the southern inspiration as the dew-drops of dawn are of light; and in Lovelace, Suckling, Carew, as well as other lyric poets of their time, we find a terseness and light-hearted grace which are not of northern origin. In Herrick the southern spirit becomes again the spirit of the antique. In the very constitution of his imagination he was a Greek: Yet he sang in no falsetto key: his thoughts were instinct with the true classical spirit; and it was, as it were, by a process of translation that he recast them in English words. It is to this circumstance that we are to attribute his occasional license. His poetry hardly lay in the same plane with the conventional part of our Protestant morality; but his genius never stagnates near the marsh. In his poetry we "Recognize that Idyl scene Where all mild creatures without awe, *R. M. Milnes. that succeeded the Restoration was as fatal to the ideal as to the national school of English poetry. The religious sentiment had bled well nigh to death, through the wounds of a society cut up with sects and with schisms. The political enthusiasm had also burned out. The sublime had been changed into the ridiculous; the performance had mocked the conception; and if Milton's majestic prose treatises had sounded the Prologue, the Epilogue of this literary drama was furnished by the shrewd and thoroughly English comment of Butler's Hudribas. The Gothic church was pulled down, indeed; but the "second temple" remained unbuilt. Cromwell passed away; and the grand and gloomy world his shoulders had supported, fell with him. As if the Puritan prophets had but prophesied in somnambulism, as if the nation had but in hypochondria fancied itself a Levitical community, as if their lofty Hebraic aspirations had been but an ethical "renaissance" or "the nympholepsy of some fond despair," the work of their hands melted strangely away before the eyes, and with the seeming consent of the English people! The cavaliers had again their day; but their success turned out likewise a failure. The king had been brought back; but he could not believe in himself-and the ancient loyalty was no more. A less imaginative age had succeeded, and the pleasures of sense were called in, to supply the place of spiritual illusions dispelled. The degradations of society infected literature. The national riot, to be sure, in time subsided; but the debauch of the night left the head giddy and the stomach weak in the morning; and the epicurean had soured into the cynic. That period was succeeded by a still colder one. Its chief political work, the Revolution, was effected in business-like fashion,-but with little on either side of that faith or hope which had elevated the earlier struggle. Its theology held equally in suspicion whatever was passionate and whatever was traditional: its philosophy repudiated abstractions and a priori views; and its arts lacked the fervor alike of ideal conceptions and of home-bred affections. At such a time poetry necessarily became imitative; and the Anglo-Gallican school grew up. The silver age of English poetry was adorned with writers of admirable abilities; of whom Dryden was the greatest in mental power, while Pope has left behind him the most perfect works. Con| ventional manners, satire, and if not moral philosophy at least moral disquisition, supplied their chief materials to that school: |