religion, and religion will give to morality a transcendent sanction and spiritual energy.

This volume is published chiefly in the hope that it may reach some of the thoughtful young. Older persons do not much affect books of this kind. It is otherwise with those in whom thought is just awakening. If what I have written should lead any of these to acquaint themselves with the men here described, and to assimilate their thought, they will, I am sure, be the better for it, and the happier.

ST. ANDREWS, March 1868.

WORDSWORTH.

THE deep stirring of men's minds with which the last century closed, and the present century set in, expressed itself in many ways; in no way more conspicuously than in the prodigality of poetic genius which it poured forth. What gave the impulse to the broader, profounder, more living spirit, which then entered into all regions of thought, who shall determine? To recount the literary commonplaces on the subject, to refer that great movement of mind to the French Revolution, or to the causes of that Revolution, is easy; but such vague talk does not really increase our knowledge. Perhaps it may be for the present enough to say, that the portentous political outbreak in France was itself but one manifestation of the new and changed spirit, which throughout Europe then penetrated every department of human thought and action. Whatever the causes, the fact is plain, that with the opening of this century there was in all civilized lands a turning up of the subsoil of human nature, a laying bare of the intenser seats of action, thought, and emotion, such as the world had seldom, if ever before, known. That time was, what it has been called, 'the new birth of imagination.'

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