the first word to the last. Love, country, faith, all are divinities in an ode. It is the apotheosis of sentiment. In order tc conceive the true grandeur of lyric poetry, we must wander in thought into the ethereal regions, forget the tumult of earth in listening to celestial harmony, and consider the whole universe. as a symbol of the emotions of the soul.

The enigma of human destiny is nothing to the generality of men; the poet has it always present to his imagination. The idea of death, which depresses vulgar minds, gives to genius additional boldness; and the mixture of the beauties of nature with the terrors of dissolution, excites an indescribable delirium of happiness and terror, without which we can neither comprehend nor describe the spectacle of this world. Lyric poetry relates nothing, is not confined to the succession of time, or the limits of space; it spreads its wings over countries and over ages; it gives duration to the sublime moment in which man rises superior to the pains and pleasures of life. Amid the wonders of the world, he feels himself a being at once creator and created; who must die, and yet cannot cease to be, and whose heart, trembling, yet at the same time powerful, takes pride in itself, yet prostrates itself before God.

The Germans, at once uniting the powers of imagination and reflection (qualities which very rarely meet), are more capable of lyric poetry than most other nations. The moderns cannot give up a certain profundity of ideas, to which they have been habituated by a religion completely spiritual; and yet, nevertheless, if this profundity were not invested with images, it would not be poetry: nature then must be aggrandized in the eyes of men, before they can employ it as the emblem of their thoughts. Groves, flowers, and rivers were sufficient for the poets of paganism; but the solitude of forests, the boundless ocean, the starry firmament, can scarcely express the eternal and the infinite, which pervade and fill the soul of Christians.

The Germans possess no epic poem any more than ourselves: this admirable species of composition does not appear to be granted to the moderns, and perhaps the Iliad alone completely

answers our ideas of it. To form an epic poem, a particular combination of circumstances, such as occurred only among the Greeks, is requisite, together with the imagination displayed in heroic times, and the perfection of language peculiar to more civilized periods. In the middle ages, imagination was strong, but the language imperfect; in our days, language is pure, but the imagination defective. The Germans have much boldness in their ideas and style, but little invention in the plan of their subject: their essays in the epic almost always resemble the character of lyric poetry; those of the French bear a stronger affinity to the dramatic, and we discover in them more of interest than of grandeur. When the object is to please on the stage, the art of circumscribing one's self within a given space, of guessing at the taste of spectators, and bending to it with address, forms a part of the success; but in the composition of an epic poem, nothing must depend on external and transient circumstances. It exacts absolute beauties-beauties which may strike the solitary reader, even when his sentiments are most natural, and his imagination most emboldened. He who hazards too much in an epic poem would possibly incur severe censure from the good taste of the French; but he who hazards nothing would not be the less condemned.

It must be acknowledged, that in improving the taste and language of his country, Boileau has given to French genius a disposition very unfavorable to poetic composition. He has spoken only of that which ought to be avoided, he has dwelt only on precepts of reason and wisdom, which have introduced into literature a sort of pedantry, very prejudicial to the subime energy of the arts. In French, we have masterpieces of versification; but how can we call mere versification poetry! To render into verse what should have remained in prose, to express, in lines of ten syllables, like Pope, the minutest details of a game at cards: or, as in some poems which have lately appeared among us, draughts, chess, and chemistry, is a trick of legerdemain in words: it is composing with words what we call a poem, in the same manner as, with notes of music, we compose a sonata.

A great knowledge of the poetic art is, however, necessary to enable an author thus admirably to describe objects which yield so little scope to the imagination, and we have reason to admire some detached pieces in those galleries of pictures; but the intervals by which they are separated are necessarily prosaic, like that which passes in the mind of the writer. He says to himself, "I will make verses on this subject, then on that, and afterwards on this also;" and, without perceiving it, he intrusts us with a knowledge of the manner in which he pursues his work. The true poet, it may be said, conceives his whole poem at once in his soul, and, were it not for the difficulties of language, would pour forth his extemporaneous effusions, the sacred hymns of genius, as the sibyls and prophets did in ancient times. He is agitated by his conceptions as by a real event of his life; a new world is opened to him; the sublime image of every various situation and character, of every beauty in nature, strikes his eye; and his heart pants for that celestial happiness, the idea of which, like lightning, gives a momentary splendor to the obscurity of his fate. Poetry is a momentary possession of all our soul desires; genius. makes the boundaries of existence disappear, and transforms into brilliant images the uncertain hope of mortals.

It would be easier to describe the symptoms of genius than to give precepts for the attainment of it. Genius, like love, is felt by the strong emotions with which it penetrates him who is endowed with it; but if we dared to advise where nature should be the only guide, it is not merely literary counsel that we should give. We should speak of poets, as to citizens and heroes; we should say to them, Be virtuous, be faithful, be free; respect what is dear to you, seek immortality in love, and the Deity in nature; in short, sanctify your soul as a temple, and the angel of noble thoughts will not disdain to appear in it.

CHAPTER XI.

OF CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC POETRY.

THE word romantic has been lately introduced in Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs of the Troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry and Christianity. If we do not admit that the empire of literature has been divided between paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the middle ages, chivalry and the institutions of Greece and Rome, we shall never succeed in forming a philosophical judgment of ancient and of modern taste.

We sometimes consider the word classic as synonymous with perfection. I use it at present in a different acceptation, considering classic poetry as that of the ancients, and romantic, as that which is generally connected with the traditions of chivalry. This division is equally suitable to the two eras of the world,—that which preceded, and that which followed the establishment of Christianity.

In various German works, ancient poetry has also been compared to sculpture, and romantic to painting; in short, the progress of the human mind has been characterized in every manner, passing from material religions to those which are spiritual, from nature to the Deity.

The French nation, certainly the most cultivated of all that are derived from Latin origin, inclines towards classic poetry imitated from the Greeks and Romans. The English, the most illustrious of the Germanic nations, is more attached to that which owes its birth to chivalry and romance; and it prides itself on the admirable compositions of this sort which it pos Besses. I will not, in this place, examine which of these two kinds of poetry deserves the preference; it is sufficient to

show, that the diversities of taste on this subject do not merely spring from accidental causes, but are derived also from the primitive sources of imagination and thought.

There is a kind of simplicity both in the epic poems and tragedies of the ancients; because at that time men were completely the children of nature, and believed themselves controlled by fate, as absolutely as nature herself is controlled by necessity. Man, reflecting but little, always bore the action of his soul without; even conscience was represented by external objects, and the torch of the Furies shook the horrors of remorse over the head of the guilty. In ancient times, men attended to events alone, but among the moderns, character is of greater importance; and that uneasy reflection, which, like the vulture of Prometheus, often internally devours us, would have been folly amid circumstances and relations so clear and decided, as they existed in the civil and social state of the ancients.

When the art of sculpture began in Greece, single statues alone were formed; groups were composed at a later period. It might be said with equal truth, that there were no groups in any art: objects were represented in succession, as in basreliefs, without combination, without complication of any kind. Man personified nature; nymphs inhabited the waters, hamadryads the forests; but nature, in turn, possessed herself of man; and, it might be said, he resembled the torrent, the thunderbolt, the volcano, so wholly did he act from involuntary ́impulse, and so insufficient was reflection in any respect, to alter the motives or the consequences of his actions. The ancients, thus to speak, possessed a corporeal soul, and its emotions were all strong, decided, and consistent; it is not the same with the human heart as developed by Christianity: the moderns have derived from Christian repentance a constant-habit of self-reflection.

But in order to manifest this kind of internal existence, a great variety of outward facts and circumstances must display, under every form, the innumerable shades and gradations of that which is passing in the soul. If in our days the fine arts