man.

The theory of a real inspiration will probably meet with most acceptance and least cavil, as thus put by the greatest of German thinkers. The matter, he considers, divine; the form, human, or at least partly huYet even thus we are not a whit nearer the solution of the problem. For, entering that region wherein the existence of human influences may to a certain extent be assumed, what do we know? Be it human or divine, what do we know of the act of creating? As in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth before he said, Let there be light, and there was light; so in every case, creation is a work of darkest obscurity. The unconsciousness necessary to productive energy is an effectual bar to any thoroughgoing knowledge of the process; and to attempt such knowledge is in truth as if one riding at full speed were to stop his horse that he may see how it gallops; or, as if a sleeper should awake with a view to the examination of dreaming; for the unconsciousness almost amounts to a deep sleep when the energy is at its height. Dumbiedykes, in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, is shrewdly advised by his dying father to plant trees, for they grow while we are asleep. Good and great thoughts are in this like trees: they grow to size, put forth leaves and bear fruit without our care, and without watching of any kind. Perhaps nothing great has ever been attained by conscious effort. "Tarry thou the Lord's leisure," says the Psalmist; "Attention is the prayer of the intellect," says Malebranche;

and such is the attitude of every true worshipper in the temple of knowledge, an attitude of patient waiting. Newton confessed that to his patience he owed everything. An apple plucked from the tree was the death and ruin of our race; an apple falling from the tree told the story of the stars.

While the mystery of Genesis thus baffles, it also continually allures inquiry, from that of the child, who daily and hourly digs up the seeds planted in his garden that he may see how they are growing, to that of the man, who searches into the rise and growth of ideas. And there would seem to be no reason to doubt, rather good reason to hope, that such inquisition will not be altogether vain. It is to be hoped, that, in asking for an egg, we shall not receive the scorpion of self-consciousness into our bosoms, and that we may at least be rewarded with an eggshell, I mean, some superficial knowledge of the forms assumed by the active principle in the course of its development. The coach that passed five minutes ago fixes the word that shall be used five minutes hence; the soft gliding of a swan and cygnets on the river makes the movement of a verse; perhaps the cawing of a rook, the pat saying of a parrot, the song of a canary, the music of the waits, or something equally foreign, will, unknown to yourself, decide your judgment of what I am now writing; and what should hinder us from gaining some deeper knowledge than at present we possess of the laws of association, by which

those influences work? What was there in the nature of things to prevent John Dennis, the great, from writing that work which Steele described as in progress, showing "from reason and philosophy why oysters are cried, cardmatches sung, turnips and all other vegetables neither cried, sung, nor said, but sold with an accent and tone natural neither to man nor to beast"? Perhaps criticism may yet accomplish the feat, fathoming all the depths of "Old Clo'," and reaching all the heights of "Caller oo." Here, however, nothing so high nor so low will be attempted. In the following remarks it is proposed simply to glance at the history of art in so far as its development in the individual and in the national soul are alike.

I. It is very true that the chief end of poesy is pleasure but we must beware of understanding this too loosely. A thing of pleasure we are not wont to regard as of need; we may have it or not according as we choose; in common parlance we may have it at pleasure, that is, at will. Is poesy, then, the offspring of human will, or of an unavoidable instinct?

Up to a certain point, it will be readily admitted that the expression of our feelings generally, therefore of poetic feeling, is unavoidable. Says Malcolm in Macbeth,

"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak

Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break."

So Alvarez in Aaron Hill's tragedy of Alzira :

"Words will have way, or grief, supprest in vain,

Will burst its passage with the outbursting soul;"

We

and many more; all of whom but echo the words so well known to every one, "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh." These statements may be taken as acknowledging the fact, as beautiful illustrations of it also, but are by no means to be regarded as explanatory. For it is remarkable, that even when the cause of our feeling-say grief-is in nothing weakened, but remains in full force, and perhaps may have been strengthened, the merely having given utterance to our sorrow yesterday, lightens it to-day and for ever. can easily understand how, by simply putting our feelings into words for the benefit of another, or into a journal for no other eye than our own, they should for the time cool down, writing and speaking being in their nature so much more cold-blooded than is feeling; but why they should, as they often do, remain cool for ever after, is not so clear. And we find the same law in the head as well as in the heart; for burn as we may to communicate our knowledge, when once we have done so whether we have really made it known to some one, or only written it on paper, placing that paper in a desk, we have often no more desire to tell it, and cease even to think of it; or, if we do So, it comes up in some new shape, or linked with some new fact.

Bearing this in mind, that to write in a diary, or, as Bacon tells, the speaking to a statue, gives often as much relief as speaking to a friend; it will be evident that to account fully for the necessity felt more or less by all thus to express what is passing within them, we must look to something deeper than the social impulse, we must go down to the instincts of the individual man. Now, it is clear, that what first of all we want is to make a memorial. The prisoner who writes on the dim wall of his dungeon, the lone traveller who builds a cairn, the copper Indian notching his club, is satisfied with this, and with nothing short of this. And what is it but the working of the instinct of self-preservation? the instinct of immortality, an instinct which is no doubt most often found in league with the social feelings, but which, as surely as we have been so framed that in the life to come we shall be like the angels of God, neither marrying nor giving in marriage, is in reality concerned only with our individual selves. In this instinct, every word that we utter, all remembrancers whatsoever, much more those of the poet, are rooted. He, far more than other men, is influenced by "the pleasing hope, the fond desire, the longing after immortality." This it is which throws a lustre on the meanest work of art. It dignifies the very rattling of a chatterbox.

This hope, however, this desire is not to be confounded with a thirst of fame. It may take that shape; as