the ideal man of imaginative thought, an idea as perfect as it can be, when drawn from no higher source than what lies in man himself. The manifold dazzling glories of Athens and of Greece filled their minds with the notion of the greatness of human nature: and that greatness they tried to exhibit in its struggles with fate and with the gods. Their characters are mostly statuesque even in this respect, that they have no background. In the Prometheus itself, the wilderness and the other natural horrours are mainly employed, like the chains and wedge, as instruments by which Jupiter tries to intimidate the benefactor of mankind. This however is not so much the case with Sophocles; in whose Edipus at Colonus, Ajax, and Philoctetes, the scenery forms an important element, not merely in the imaginative, but even in the dramatic beauty. In after times, when the glory of Greece had faded and sunk, when its political grandeur had decayed, and man was no longer the one engrossing object of admiration, we find a revival of the love of Nature in the pastoral poetry of the Sicilians.

With regard to modern poetry, when we are looking at any question connected with its history, we ought to bear in mind that we did not begin from the beginning, and that, with very few exceptions, we had not to hew our materials out of the quarry, or to devise the groundplan of our edifices, but made use, at least in great measure, of the ruins and substructions of antiquity. Hence Greece alone affords a type of the natural development of the human mind through its various ages and stages. Owing to this, and perhaps still more to the influence, direct and indirect, of Christianity, we from the first find a far greater body of reflective thought in modern poetry than in ancient. Dante is not, what Homer was, the father of poetry springing in the freshness and simplicity of childhood out of the arms of mother earth: he is rather, like Noah, the father of a second poetical world, to whom he pours out his prophetic song, fraught with the wisdom and the experience of the old world. Indeed he himself expresses this by

representing himself as wandering on his awful pilgrimage under the guidance of Virgil.

It would require a long dissertation, illsuited to these pages, to pursue this train of thought through the literature of modern Europe. Let me hasten home, and take a glance.at our own poets. The early ones, especially the greatest among them, were intense and devoted lovers of Nature. Chaucer sparkles with the dew of morning. Spenser lies bathed in the sylvan shade. Milton glows with orient light. One might almost fancy that he had gazed himself blind, and had then been raised to the sky, and there. stood and waited, like "blind Orion hungering for the morn." So abundantly had he stored his mind with visions of natural beauty, that, when all without became dark, he was still most rich in his inward treasure, and Ceast not to wander where the Muses haunt Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill." Shakspeare "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." All nature ministers to him, as gladly as a mother to her child. Whether he wishes her to tune her myriad-voiced organ to Romeo's love, or to Miranda's innocence, or to Perdita's simplicity, or to Rosalind's playfulness, or to the sports of the Fairies, or to Timon's misanthropy, or to Macbeth's desolating ambition, or to Lear's heart-broken frenzy, he has only to ask, and she puts on every feeling and every passion with which he desires to invest her.

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But, when Milton lost his eyes, Poetry lost hers. A time followed, when our poets ceast to commune with Nature, and ceast to love her, and, as there can be no true knowledge without love, ceast therefore to know anything about her. Man again became all-in-all,- but not the ideal human nature of Greek poetry, in its altitudes of action and passion. The human nature of our poets in those days was the human nature of what was called the town, with all its pettinesses and hollownesses and crookednesses and rottennesses. The great business and struggle of men seemed to be, to outlie, outcheat, outwhore, and outhector each other. Our poets then dwelt in Grub-street, and, to

judge from their works, seldom left their garrets, save for the coffeehouse, the playhouse, or the stews. Dryden wrote a bombastical description of night, from which one might suppose that he had never seen night, except by candlelight. He talkt of "Nature's self seeming to lie dead,”—of “the mountains seeming to nod their drowsy head,”—much as Charles the Second used to do at a sermon,—and of "sleeping flowers sweating beneath the nightdews,”—which I can only parallel by a translation I once saw of Virgil's Scilicet is superis labor est,“Ay sure, for this the gods laborious sweat." Yet this was extolled by Rymer, a countryman of Shakspeare's, as the finest description of night ever composed: an opinion which Johnson quotes, without expressing any dissent; telling us moreover that these lines were repeated oftener in his days than almost any others of Dryden's.

It is true that, as I have been reminded, Shakspeare also has said of night, "Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead ;" and doubtless it was from hence that Dryden took what he thought a very grand idea. But as thieves never know or dare to make the right use of their stolen goods, so is it mostly with plagiaries. The verbal likeness only exposes the empty turgidity of Dryden: nor can there be a more striking illustration of Quintilian's saying, Multa fiunt eadem, sed aliter. For observe, where Shakspeare uses this expression, and how it exemplifies that unrivaled power of imagination, wherewith, under the impulses of a mighty passion, he fuses every object by its intense radiation, and brings them into harmony with that passion by bathing them in a flood of bright, or sombre, or mellow, or bloodred light. Macbeth, just as he is going to commit the murder, standing on the very brink of hell, and about to plunge into it, sees the reflexion of his own chaotic feelings in all things. Order is turned into disorder; law is suspended; every natural, every social tie is cracking: he is hurling an innocent man, his guest, his king, into the jaws of death: death is in all his thoughts. To him therefore, with the deepest truth, "o'er the one

half world Nature seems dead;" even as he had just seen the instrument with which the crime was to be perpetrated, "in palpable form" before him, though only "a dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain." All the other visions too which haunt him are of the same kind.

Wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate's offerings; and withered Murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, toward his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horrour from the time,
Which now suits with it.

With what wonderful fitness do all the images, all the thoughts, all the words here “suit” with each other, and with Macbeth's terrific purpose! whereas in Dryden's description there is no congruity, but only a string of poor and incongruous conceits, cold and extravagant; and the occasion is merely that Cortez, who with like incongruity has fallen in love at sight with the daughter of Montezuma, cannot sleep, because "Love denies Rest to his soul, and slumber to his eyes." What then must have been the knowledge of Nature, and what the feeling for it, in an age when the poetical imagery, which the readers and repeaters of poetry were accustomed to associate with night, was Nature's lying dead, mountains nodding their drowsy heads, little birds repeating their songs in sleep, and sleeping flowers sweating beneath the nightdews? People even learnt to fancy, and to tell one another, that all this was indeed so. As it is the wont of hollow things to echo, whenever a poet hit on a striking image, or a startling expression, it was bandied from mouth to mouth. Thus nodding mountains became a stock phrase. Pope makes Eloisa talk of "lowbrowed rocks that hang nodding o'er the deep" where however we may suppose the poet to transfer the motion of the image in the water to the rocks themselves. In his Iliad, “Pelion nods his shaggy

brows," and "nodding Ilion waits the impending fall:” in his Odyssee, "On Ossa Pelion nods with all his woods." The same piece of falsetto is doubtless to be found scores of times in the versewriters of the same school.

Yet description, and moral satire or declamation, were the richest veins, poor and shallow as they are at best, which were opened in our serious verse between the death of Milton and the regeneration of English poetry at the close of the last century. Nor was our description of the highest kind, being deficient both in imaginativeness and in reality. It seldom betokened anything like that intimate, personal, thoughtful, dutiful, and loving communion with Nature, which we perceive in every page of Wordsworth: and owing to this very want of familiarity with the realities, our poets could not deal with them as he does, shaping and moulding and combining and animating them, according to the impulses of his imagination, and calling forth new melodies and harmonies, to fill earth, sea, and sky. They did look at Nature through the spectacles of books. It was as though a number of eyes had been set in a row, like boys playing at leap-frog, each hinder one having to look through all that stood before it, and hence seeing Nature, not as it is in itself, but refracted and distorted by a number of more or less turbid media. Ever and anon too some one would be seized with the ambition of surpassing his predecessors, and would try by a feat at leap eye to get before them: in so doing however, from ignorance of the ground, he mostly stumbled and fell. Making an impotent effort after originality, he would attemp to vary the combinations of words in which former writers had spoken of the same objects: but, as one is ever liable to trip, and to violate idiom at least, if not grammar, when speaking a forein language, so by these aliens to Nature, and sojourners in the land of Poetry, images and expressions, which belonged to particular circumstances, or to particular phases of feeling, were often misapplied to circumstances and feelings with which they were wholly incongruous. When the jay spread out his