She smiles; thou need'st must smile on her.
And, see, beside her face

A rich, white cloud that doth not stir.—
What beauty, and what grace!

And pictured beach of yellow sand,
And peaked rock and hill,

Change the smooth sea to fairy land.—
How lovely and how still!

From that far isle the thresher's flail
Strikes close upon the ear;
The leaping fish, the swinging sail
Of yonder sloop sound near.

The parting sun sends out a glow
Across the placid bay,
Touching with glory all the show.-
-A breeze!-Up helm !-Away!

Careening to the wind, they reach,
With laugh and call, the shore.
They've left their foot-prints on the beach;
But them 1 hear no more."

The best lines and stanzas throughout, are those in which the language is most simple and direct-in which there are no harsh inversions or other common devices of metrical arrangement, and no so-called poetic words or phrases. Examine, for instance, the lines in italics. Their excellence consists simply in truth-truth to nature, both in conception and in language. But it is truth to nature as opposed not only to every thing unnatural and factitious in matter or form, but to that unobservant and unthinking familiarity with the objects around us, and that use of current words and phrases without any sense of their import, which are as a crust over most men, so that their eyes see not, their ears hear not, and their hearts neither feel nor understand. It is a truth to nature, resulting from the poet's own free communion with her. The phraseology is what we understand Wordsworth to mean by the "real language of men," as distinguished from "that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression." The con

ceptions illustrate beautifully Cicero's remark about the educated eye of the painter-a remark that is no less true of the poet. He, too, is attracted on every side by objects of contemplation and attachment that the many know nothing of. In this consists, in part, his power. It also indicates his duty. Man lives in the midst of scenes and occurrences fitted and intended to exert a constant and powerful influence upon him. It is the poet's duty to awaken him to the perception and enjoyment of them, and bring him under their salutary control. What surrounds us every day,

The common earth, the air, the skies,

familiar sounds, and ordinary occurrences, which had before excited no feeling, and taught no lesson, he calls up into the active and beneficent influences that God designed them for. The legitimate purpose of poetic power, is not answered therefore by directing attention to the rare and the wonderful, either in nature or in life, and thus employing the fancy and interesting the feelings in marvels. To act as an antagonist force to that ignorant inadvertency, that inveterate worldliness, that slavery to time, and sense, and custom, which so generally result from the employments and intercourse of society, poetry must be an influence that shall attend man in his daily walks; it must awaken voices that shall call to him from rock and tree, streamlet and ocean wave; and give a lesson for him, to meadow and upland, forest and leaf and flower; and especially must it speak through human passions, affections, sympathies and relations, as such, and not merely by exhibitions of them in extraordinary circumstances and modifications.

"These given, what more need I desire,

To stir-to soothe-or elevate?

What nobler marvels than the mind
May in life's daily prospect find,
May find or there create?"

But for this, something more is necessary than the poetic eye and the power to communicate its observations in such a way as to bring them home to the conceptions and sympathies of others, both so beautifully exemplified in the above extracts. Not only must the eye and ear be opened, and the heart warmed into feeling; not only must we be led to observe and delight in nature, but to listen to her as a

teacher, and yield ourselves to her influence as an educator. The "many pleasant voices" with which she calls to us, have meanings; and the poet is by right and duty her interpreter. But how her interpreter?

The efforts of mind in both directions of its highest development-in science and in creative art-tend to intellectualize nature, to find God in his works. Science seeks for those laws, those constitutive ideas of the divine mind, of which phenomena are the diagrams. The material universe, for instance, is constructed mathematically. The plant receives its nourishment, the river flows, the lightning darts, the crystal is formed, the mote moves in the sunbeam, and worlds act on worlds, according to mathematical principles. It is the aim of science to apprehend these principles, and to assign to phenomena their appropriate place in accordance with them. It would discover and follow, as it were, the track of creative power in the construction of the created object. It would look through matter to mind in what we call the laws of matter. The object and process of art are different. The poet looks for the expression of nature's countenance-not for the order of the curves, the degrees and relations of the angles, or the reflections and refractions that may exist there. The mother's smile was not given to teach the child what pair of muscles to use on this or that occasion. 'Spalatro's Vision of the Bloody Hand' was not painted for the purpose of illustrating the principles of perspective, or the doctrine of colors. No more has God constructed this glorious moving panorama of nature and of life, merely as a diagram for the demonstrations of science, or to subserve the purposes of our mere animal existence. If, as the eternal Geometrician, he has most exactly drawn the lines and calculated the powers introduced into the work of his hands, he has also filled heaven and earth with endless combinations of form, color, and movement, expressive of his conceptions as the supreme Artist. It is in this view that the poet is the interpreter of nature. He sees in phenomena the meaning of the Eternal Spirit, as he sees in the work of a brother artist what it was intended to express. Mr. Dana's volume abounds with admirable illustrations of this. The following is from "The Changes of Home: "

"Such was the Vale. And then within it played Edward, a child, and Jane, a little maid.

I see them now no more, where once they stood
Beside the brook, or 'neath the sloping wood.
The brook flows lonely on; o'er mimic mound
No longer made to leap with fairy bound.
Then, as they built the little dam and mill,
Their tongues went prattling with the prattling rill,
As if the babes and stream were playmates three,
With cheerful hearts, and singing merrily.
The tiny labor's o'er; the song is done
The children sang; the rill sings on alone.
How like eternity doth nature seem

To life of man-that short and fitful dream!
I look around me; no where can I trace
Lines of decay that mark our human race.
These are the murmuring waters, these the flowers
I mused o'er in my earlier, better hours.

Like sounds and scents of yesterday they come.—
Long years have past since this was last my home!
And I am weak, and toil-worn is my frame;

But all the vale shuts in is still the same :

'Tis I alone am changed; they know me not:

I feel a stranger, or as one forgot.

The breeze that cooled my warm and youthful brow,
Breathes the same freshness on its wrinkles now.
The leaves that flung around me sun and shade,
While gazing idly on them as they played,
Are holding yet their frolick in the air;
The motion, joy, and beauty still are there-
But not for me!-I look upon the ground:
Myriads of happy faces throng me round,
Familiar to my eye; yet heart and mind
In vain would now the old communion find.
Ye were as living, conscious beings, then,
With whom I talked-but I have talked with men!
With uncheered sorrow, with cold hearts have met;
Seen honest minds by hardened craft beset;

Seen hope cast down, turn deathly pale its glow;

Seen virtue rare, but more of virtue's show."-pp. 34-35.

The sublimely imaginative address to the ocean in "Factitious Life," is still better:

"Type of the Infinite! I look away
Over thy billows, and I cannot stay
My thought upon a resting-place, or make
A shore beyond my vision, where they break;

But on my spirit stretches, till it 's pain

To think; then rests, and then puts forth again.
Thou hold'st me by a spell; and on thy beach
I feel all soul; and thoughts unmeasured reach
Far back beyond all date. And, O! how old
Thou art to me. For countless years thou hast rolled.
Before an ear did hear thee, thou didst mourn,
Prophet of sorrows, o'er a race unborn;
Waiting, thou mighty minister of death,

Lonely thy work, ere man had drawn his breath.
At last thou did'st it well! The dread command
Came, and thou swept'st to death the breathing land;
And then once more, unto the silent heaven
Thy lone and melancholy voice was given.

And though the land is thronged again, O Sea!
Strange sadness touches all that goes with thee.
The small bird's plaining note, the wild, sharp call,
Share thy own spirit: it is sadness all!

How dark and stern upon thy waves looks down
Yonder tall Cliff-he with the iron crown.
And see! those sable Pines along the steep,
Are come to join thy requiem, gloomy Deep!

Like stoled monks they stand and chant the dirge

Over the dead, with thy low beating surge."-pp. 78-79.

Sometimes the purpose is answered, with great effect, by a line or two; as when the Spanish lady, in "The Buccaneer," had plunged into the sea out of the hands of pirates and murderers :

"The waves have swept away the bubbling tide.

Bright-crested waves, how calmly on they ride!"-p. 11.

In this way poetry gives to nature its legitimate power, as a medium through which God speaks to us, to instruct, and move, and bless; and the proper end of the power it is able to give to the objects around us is answered only so far as it assists us to recognize in them, with suitable emotions, the omnipresent Spirit. Hence the necessity, even in this department, that the poet should study in the school of a holy religion.'

"It is the Soul's prerogative, its fate, To shape the outward to its own estate.