NORTH. Yes. And no sooner does he behold the forms in palpable representation, than his conception itself changes; for his feelings, Hal, are warmed by that beauty as by" touch ethereal of Heaven's fiery rod;" his thoughts glow as in a spiritual furnace A spiritual furnace ! TICKLER. NORTH. And that first imperfect conception is invested with purer brightness, and moulded to shape divine. From unknown dwelling-places in his genius the fair ideas come flocking— All birds of a feather. TICKLER. NORTH. And then indeed, Tickler, his mind teeming with a thousand unembodied conceptions, all ready to burst into life, he understands in his joy what creative mind itself may owe to the works it would frame for others' delight, and perceives that his own art is the only muse he must invoke to inspire his genius. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. How much, sir, have the best, the most sacred conceptions of men's souls, been affected by edifices reared at their own bidding! How vast the power of a Gothic Cathedral! There, all is subjected under its one use of a house of religious worship. There are found all that serves to the many ministrations of religion; and there too is another important use, not necessarily connected with them, it is a repository of the dead. Its natural sanctity, as a house of worship, has made it a fit mansion of expecting rest, a dormitory of the living dead! Be intelligible, sir. TICKLER. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. And again, sir, all these uses, and all that appears extrinsic to them, in the elaborate and prodigal beauty of its forms, are subjected to the one great purpose, the one imagination of the whole structure, religious awe. It is thus, sir, that the human being gives his own spirit to the insensate stone, till it breathe back again upon him a still loftier and more divine inspira tion. NORTH. Well said, my good lad. That which the works of the Fine Arts effect partially, speech may be said to effect to the human species. Suppose us from the creation all dumb! TICKLER. Well for us had it been so with women. NORTH. Savage!-We should have lived in an obscure dream haunted by shapeless phantoms. Silent people often get insane. It is not safe to have too many dealings with wordless thoughts. You cannot discover what they would be at-they are at the best suspicious characters-and sometimes vagrants that would not scruple to murder you at midnight in your bed. TICKLER. The thought uttered in speech [don't keep staring at North] is embodied, young gentleman, in a sort of distinct reality, and is thus made apparent to the mind itself in a palpable form, just as its beautiful conceptions of visible things become defined and strong in the colours and lineaments of the growing picture. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. And hence it is, sir, that the orator, as the torrent of his speech rushes on, kindles in his eloquence, just like the painter in his work of creation. NORTH. You are thinking, I perceive, Hal, of one of those great men, who, inspired with the zeal of their holy cause, have stood up to speak fearlessly before the face of kings and in the presence of corrupted courts, those truths which bow down courts and kings to the level of the peasant and the beggar. That race is extinct. TICKLER. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. He heard himself the voice that thundered in the ears of his audience; the fervour of passion which was pouring forth in the sound, urged on and bore along his own spirit-the TICKLER. Stop-pull up-hold fast. All that and much more applies to extemporaneous eloquence-but not to MSS., much less to printed sermons-or to discourses got by heart and spouted forth by a hypocrite, not ashamed by assumed fervour to swindle you into a belief that all his sedulously got up paragraphs are sudden inspiration. NORTH. I would have the great minds among us, and there must be many, study more profoundly the laws of thought and feeling. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. Of all studies, sir, surely the most ennobling! Higher far such science than those that deal with mere matter-but, alas! more difficult far, as is seen in the results, sir. The mind is as great a mystery now as it was to Plato. Or Pythagoras. TICKLER. NORTH. To the observer of Physical Science, it may be said truly, the subject is uniform and constant. Gold, iron, are the same metals now and heretofore-here and in every place. The races of living nature have continued unchanged. The growth of every plant is a constant process. Every spring brings the same blossoms-every autumn the same fruit. The same air breathes-the same showers fall-the same ocean rolls to all nations through all time. The stars keep their place, and the planets their motion, and astronomy, from the sun's latest eclipse, can read back the heavens to the moment when his orb was first darkened in the sky. TICKLER. North-I am not given to compliments-but douse my daylights, if that be not spoken like a poet and a philosopher. NORTH. It is evident what is the result to science of this unchangeableness in the subjects of observation. Every enquirer knows that the same matter is before him which was before the eyes, or under the hands, of all his predecessors in enquiry; he knows that he has but exactly to follow definite methods of observation which they have pursued and prescribed, and all the means of which are as constant and unchangeable as the matter itself, and the result which they found must discover themselves too to his sight. All that has been gained is possessed; every province that is won is at the same time secured; and the empire of science, continually enlarging, descends an unimpaired inheritance to each new generation of enquirers. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. The only change, perhaps I may be permitted to say, sir, that is possible, is improvement; because the methods of Physical Science, which are too definite in their nature to be lost when they are recorded, are yet susceptible of endless amelioration; and by those only erring knowledge is set aside. TICKLER. Nothing in this world, therefore, so easy as to be a chemist. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. And more so to be a mathematician. NORTH. Compare with this the condition of Moral Science. To it there is but one subject-assuming endless modifications. One part of it is-the Passions. Love, ambition, revenge! We give, indeed, one name to a passion, supposed to be one in different minds. But examine that one passion in different minds, and see where is its unity. TICKLER. O'er the hills and far away. What say you, Hal? Nothing, sir. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. NORTH. We see love in one mind a fierce, self-willed, devouring passion, that seeks nothing but its own gratification at all consequences. In another we see it pure, generous, and heroic, in its every height of strength sacrificing itself to its object, or to solemn duties, and enabled by its own intense strength to make that sacrifice. In another we see it humble and meek, the sorrow and the solace of a gentle, patient, uncomplaining life. Is this the same passion to which we have given the same name? Vain delusion, indeed! YOUNG GENTLEMAN. NORTH. We read the story of two men who have signalized themselves by their giant usurpation of power over the obedience and destinies of their kind. We call both ambitious. Yet I find Julius Cæsar shedding no blood but as a soldier in the field, dropping tears to see the pale mangled head of his mightiest foe, and taking those, in the frankness of generous affection, to his unmistrusting confidence, who were erelong to whet their daggers against his life. He was a tyrant. TICKLER. NORTH. We may live-nay, not we-but Hal here-to see worse. We find another to whom ambition supplies a very different heart; whose spirit it steels against remorse; to whom it makes the paths of peace and of blood alike on the way to empire, from whose own heart it shuts out peace, sowing fear, suspicion, and hate in its place; to whom it makes the happiness and life of one man and those of millions a matter of like indifference, in the calculations of that sole arbiter of Will and Destiny. Can we think that in the two men we have understood the passion of their ambition, because we have given it one name in both? The truth is, Hal, that the Poets have done great and glorious things with the Passions-the Philosophers little-and the Metaphysicians nothing. YOUNG GENTLEMAN. In that field, revered sir, as in others, you are born to work wonders that shall make the name of North immortal. NORTH.. Turn to those with whom you live, Hal, and see how the same affection towards yourself is different in different breasts. Is intellect, is judgment, is memory, the same? The entire mind is different by the complex difference of the thousandfold variety in all its faculties and powers. Nay, it is different to itself. Every new passion that enters, each successive year's longer experience of life, changes all that was before-the whole mind, through all its feelings and all its thoughts. TICKLER. Aye-every mind undergoes metamorphoses more miraculous than any sung by Naso. [Silver Time-piece smites Ten-Enter AMBROSE with roasted Goose, Turkey Ditto, and the accustomed etceteras.] [Curtain drops.] Printed by Ballantyne and Company, Paul's Work, Edinburgh, ALMOST all men, women, and children, are poets, except those who write verses. We shall not define poetry, because the Cockneys have done so; and were they to go to church, we should be strongly tempted to break the Sabbath. But this much we say of it, that every thing is poetry which is not mere sensation. We are poets at all times when our minds are makers. Now, it is well known, that we create ninetenths at least of what appears to exist externally; and that such is somewhere about the proportion between reality and imagination. Millions of supposed matters-of-fact are the wildest fictions-of which we may mention merely two, the rising and the setting of the sun. This being established, it follows that we live, breathe, and have our being in Poetry-it is the Life of our Lifethe heart of the mystery, which, were it plucked out, and to beat no more, the universe, now all written over with symbolical characters of light, would be at once a blank obscurely scribbled over with dead letters; or rather, the volume would be shut up-and appear a huge clumsy folio with brass clasps, bound in calf-skin, and draperied with cobwebs. But instead of that, the leaves of the living Book of Nature are all fluttering in the sunshine; even he who runs may read; though they alone who sit, stand, or lie, pondering on its pages, behold in full the beauty and the sublimity, which their own immortal spirits create, reflected back on them who are its authors, and felt, in that trance, to be the spiritual sound and colouring which vivifies and animates the face and the form of Na ture. All men, women, and children, then, are manifestly poets, except those who write verses. But why that exception? Because they alone make no use of their minds. Versifiers-and we speak but of themare the sole living creatures that are not also creators. The inferior animals-as we are pleased to call them, and as indeed in some respects they are-modify matter much in their imaginations. Rode ye never a horse by night through a forest? That most poetical of quadrupeds sees a spirit in every stump, else why by such sudden start should he throw his master over his ears? The blackbird on the tip-top of that pine-tent is a poet, else never could his yellow bill so salute with rapturous orisons the reascending Sun, as he flings over the woods a lustre again 'gorgeous from the sea. And what induces those stock-doves, think ye, to fill the heart of the grove with soft, deep, low, lonely, far-away, mournful, yet happy-thunder; what, but Love and Joy, and Delight and Desire, in one word, Poetry-Poetry that confines the universe to that wedded pair, within the sanctuary of the pillared shade impervious to * Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson. London, Effingham Wilson, 1830. VOL. XXXI. NO. CXCIV. 3 A meridian sunbeams, and brightens and softens into splendour and into snow divine the plumage beautifying the creatures in their bliss, as breast to breast they croodendoo on their shallow nest! Thus all men, women, and children, birds, beasts, and fishes, are poets, except versifiers. Oysters are poets. Nobody will deny that, who ever in the neighbourhood of Prestonpans beheld them passionately gaping, on their native bed, for the flow of tide coming again to awaken all their energies from the wide Atlantic. Nor less so are snails. See them in the dewy stillness of eve, as they salute the crescent Dian, with horns humbler indeed, but no less pointed than her own. The beetle, against the traveller borne in heedless hum, if we knew all his feelings in that soliloquy, might safely be pronounced a Wordsworth. Thus are we all poets-high and low-except versifiers. They, poor creatures, are a peculiar people, impotent of good works. Ears have they, but they hear not-eyes have they, but they will not see-nay, naturalists assert that they have brains and spinal marrow, also organs of speech; yet with all that organization, they seem to have but little feeling, and no thought; and but by a feeble and monotonous fizz, are you made aware, in the twilight, of the useless existence of the obscure ephemerals. But we fear that we are getting satirical, than which nothing can well be more unbecoming the character of a Christian: So let us be serious. Many times a month do we hint to all such insects, that Maga looks upon them as midges. But still will they be seeking to insinuate themselves through her long deep veil, which nunlike she wears at gloaming; and can they complain of cruelty, if she brush them away with her lily hand, or compress them with her snow-white fingers into unlingering death? There is no such privileged place in this periodical world now as the fugitive Poets' Corner. All its regions are open to the inspired; but the versifier has no spot now wherein to expand his small mealy wings; and you see him sitting disconsolate as one of those animalculæ, who, in their indolent It is not easy to find out what sets people a-versifying; especially nowa-days, when the slightest symptoms of there being something amiss with them in that way, immediately subject them not only to the grossest indignities, but to the almost certain loss of bread. We could perhaps in some measure understand it, were they rich, or even tolerably well-off; in the enjoyment, let us suppose, of small annuities, or of hereditary kail-yards, with a well in the corner, overshadowed with a bourtree bush; but they are almost always, if in at the knees, out at the elbows; and their stockings seem to have been compiled originally by some mysterious process of darning upon nothing as a substratum. Now nothing more honourable than virtuous poverty; but then we expect to see him with a shuttle or a spade in his hand, weaving "seventeen hunder linen," or digging drains, till the once dry desert is all one irrigated meadow, green as the summer woods that fling their shadows o'er its haycocks. He is an insufferable sight, alternately biting his nails and his pen, and blotching whitey-brown with hieroglyphics that would have puzzled Champollion. Versifying operatives are almost always half-witted creatures, addicted to drinking; and sell their songs for alms. Persons with the failing, in what are sometimes called the middle-classes, or even in more genteel or fashionable life, such as the children of clerks of various kinds, say to canal or coal companies, are slow to enter upon any specific profession, trusting to their genius, which their parents regard with tears, sometimes of joy, and sometimes of rage, according as their prophetic souls see the brows of their offspring adorned with laurels, or their breeches with tatters. Sensible parents crush this propensity in the bud, and ruthlessly bind the Apollos apprentices to Places; but the weaker ones enclose contributions to Christopher North, as if they |