that answer, however, we may give two very different interpretations. Our own happiness, and what is theologically termed the glory of God; our own pleasure and the pleasure of God are one; but which is our ultimate end? Do we seek to please God for the sake of our own happiness? or do we secure our own happiness while endeavouring after God? The latter, I think. For, in exhibiting the third law of pleasure, I attempted to prove, and whether proven or not proven, whether paradoxical or not paradoxical, it is true that man cannot be happy in seeking his own happiness. Man is happy only, then, when he pursues an object apart from himself; and he is happy in God only when he gives himself up to God with utter self-forgetfulness. The higher lyric is therefore justified in regarding God, not our own happiness, as to us the sovereign good. As God is the unfathomable beginning of all things; so likewise He is not only the end beyond which there is no end, but is also accounted such by his creatures.

It will be seen that this idea of God is vitally connected with that of Immortality. The notion of Immortality in fact involves such an idea of God, not as being the Eternal Cause, the lost beginning of all things, but as the end-all and the be-all, an everlasting consequence, effect producing effect, producing effect far beyond ken of human thought. The English free-thinkers of last century felt that they could escape from the bugbear of Immortality, if they could only show to the

idea of God a door out of the universe.

Some one replied, Not quite so fast, good sirs! you have not yet got rid of Immortality; since, if chance brought you into this particular world, why then, at death, chance may also send you to the bottomless pit, and keep you there for ever. The retort was fair enough, and a good argumentum ad homines; but of course, without resting on the idea of God, we can conceive our Immortality no more than our creation,

The subject of this part is resumed in the latter portion of Book Fourth.

PART SECOND.

THE LANGUAGE OF POESY.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL.

Roscius challenged Cicero to express his ideas by spoken language faster and more clearly than he himself could by gesture; and cases without number will occur to every mind where feeling, in coming to the surface, finds, and ever has found for its expression, means far more eloquent than words. Properly, therefore, the art of poesy should consider any and every expression whereby man has been able to unburden his mind of poetic feeling, whether in so doing he transfers that load to the bosom of another, or with no eye, no ear to witness, launches it on the passing breeze. That woman who, when the Western Highlands of Scotland were visited, as Ireland was about the same time, with

a dearth so great, so awful, that in the memory of man. nothing like it had been seen, in the proud spirit of independence by which the clansmen are generally marked, chose rather than ask for the food which had been sent thither by the charity of the lowland towns, to go without nourishment for days together, but at length when overcome by suffering, and almost starved to death, drew nigh to where the almoners were dealing out their bounty, and ashamed to beg, only bared her arm, and lifted it up to show how lank and shrivelled it had become; she, little as she thought of art, was in the same sense in which we may so call any poet who pours forth unpremeditated strains-an artist. Here, we confine ourselves to the artistic employment of words.

That the poet is of imagination all compact every one will readily admit. But in what way his peculiar faculty works, and, above all, how it outwardly betokens its presence in language, have long been mooted. Most people have felt and believed Verse to be the distinguishing trait of poetic utterance; while a few have maintained that verse is quite a secondary matter, and that the true shibboleth is Imagery.

Aristotle seems to say that an Epopee may be composed either in prose (yıλoîs λóyois, bare words) or in metre; and he afterwards roundly declares as much as that a writer-Empedocles-may have the musical gift of a Homer, and yet have nothing else in common which may entitle him to the name of poet. Other

writers regard verse as equally accidental. Sismondi holds, that at first it was merely a help to the memory; and Mr Disraeli, in the preface to his Wondrous Tale of Alroy, while he puts in a salvo for the lower form of verse, commonly called rhythmical prose, says the very same of the higher forms, that they were merely the aids of memory, the offspring of an unlettered age, and that they are no longer needed by us who commit everything to paper. Wordsworth likewise, in the appendix to a very celebrated preface, affirms, that "metre is but adventitious to composition;" and Coleridge says, that it is 66 simply a stimulant of the attention,” which, if true, would render all his other theories very needless, and which is at once seen to be false when placed beside the parallel theory of a French writer, Cerceau by name, who maintained that the inversion of its grammar is all that distinguishes the verse from the prose of his countrymen, and that this inversion is but a stimulant. Even those who, like Archbishop Whately, consider verse to be an essential of poesy, have never shown on satisfying grounds why it should be so; they have never shown the necessity by which the expression of poetic feeling becomes metrical.

Had we to choose between Verse and Imagery, the former is certainly the more worthy badge of a poet, and it is also the more searching test; because while imposing imagery can be supplied to any extent by mechanical rule, if not by native impulse, none but a