evaded by simulation of virtue as inverted by consecration of vice, and where debauchery is argued for on principles of reason, and religion itself, the sacred law of love, is urged in behalf of lewdness and lust. The truth is, there are some people whose morality seems to be all in their ears; who cannot bear to have things called by their right names; nay, who are even fond of dirty things, and will compass sea and land to come at them, provided they can have them dressed in clean words; and who are never contented unless they have some

thing whereby to persuade themselves that they are serving God while indulging their lusts."

We do not feel as if this needed any comment. Indeed, at present, it is not apparent that anything remains to be said upon the subject.

In another instance the social reformers, a very presumptuous and ignorant species of "some people," are dealt with as follows:

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If " some people," who will read these lectures, do not have their eyes opened by these and similar passages, then, to use our author's phrase, they may be given over as "spoiled eggs." The truth shines out of them so clearly that there is no mistaking it without intentionally shutting the eyes. Some people" can talk, and twist, and shift,--they always could and will, which is the reason why it is, a waste of time to argue with them; their very nature and essence includes a want of reverence for God or man, and hence it is their religion never to stop talking, never to be put down, never to confess themselves wrong. But this plain showing of them up must do much to dash even their effrontery, (we refer particularly to the transcendental progressives and social reformers.)

one of

Walking down Broadway on those evenings when the lamplighters are instructed to presume the existence of a moon in defiance of the senses, an individ

so enlightened and sanctified as to identify social perhaps fancied, something besides virtue in hovels, and something besides vice in palaces; priests were not all villains, princes were not all dunces, criminals were not all heroes, beggars were not all saints, with him. Which will probably account for certain sneers and censures which have lately been cast upon him, as not being a reformer, but as being content to let things remain as he found them; as giving no 'prophecy' of a good time coming,' nor making any efforts to bring it about; in other words, that he did not patronize Providence, nor try to rectify the moral government of the universe, so that all men, and especially all reformers, should be immediately rewarded according to their deserts, themselves, being judges."

with moral distinctions; he therefore found, or

One other instance shall suffice for a view of Mr. Hudson's manner when speaking directly in his missionary character:

"Yet some appear to think that Shakspeare, irreligious himself, could not delineate or conceive truly religious characters; probably because his persons do not take sides on the 'quinquaticular controversy;' their faith always showing itself in works, not in words, and their piety consisting in doing right, not in getting religion.'

to afford you an unusual gratification, I take the liberty of walking by your side. You are now conversing with a person who was for a long time at the head of one of the greatest nations in the world. I am his late majesty, Louis Philippe, ex-King of France, in disguise." This might be a plan to delude one's vanity, while picking his pocket. But if there was an individual on the roof of the Museum, sending every now and then upon the obscured throng of passengers, those strong rays of the sible to feeling, the cheat is not one which Drummond light which seem almost senwould be likely to be attempted. The person addressed would turn to the face of the accoster, would see at once that he lacked the massy features of the ex-king, business, for that he desired none of his and would then tell him to go about his society.

Just so with "some people," these professors of Everything; they meet us in the crowd and affect to be so many Platos, Homers and Lycurguses; they afflict exceedingly many honest persons who lack strength of mind to shake them off, and who thus fall into the sin of answering them according to their folly. But now comes Mr. Hudson, and begins turning his Shakspeare lecture Drummond light-precisely

as the man does on the Museum. The honest persons turn upon the pseudo-philosophers who bore them, and they perceive only "some people"-some very silly people-frequently fantastically dressed, with long hair, and the natural position of their under garments reversed. The philosophers also become conscious that their character is known to be assumed, and cannot be sustained; if they were not before aware of this, the strong beams of truth make them so now, and those among them who have sincerely erred will encourage the delusion no more.

But many of them will persist in their claims with the same pertinacity in the face of truth and common sense, as though they were on the best of terms with those all-powerful allies. Just like the Democratic party, to which we have already compared them, their object is not so much the asserting and supporting truth, as the gaining and retaining power.

It is the instinct of a radical, no less in philosophy and letters than in politics, to be noisy. He cannot bear that there should be any finer or nobler being than his own. He cannot understand poetry or art, and his presence takes away from the enjoyment of either. He is fond of argument, because in it he can always talk, and always have the last word. If you pin him to a point he grins and avoids it. He will not permit the existence of any elevated state of feeling in his friends. He is ever manifesting a disposition to laugh at what he cannot enter into or lift himself up to. He will keep to the letter of courtesy while he violates its spirit. He wears upon the nerves, and requires to be held off at arm's length. Obedience, deference, modesty, politeness even, are virtues he does not practice. He is one, in short, to whom, if one wishes to do any good, he must put on dignity and carry it towards him authoritatively a painful effort for sensitive nerves.

For our own part, we are glad to avoid the immediate contact of this sort of people. They annoy us to the verge of distraction. We prefer to let our light shine upon them from a distance, and to obey the natural impulses of benevolence rather by laboring for their good through intelligent readers. Hence we hear no transcendental or ultra orthodox conversation; the only Fourierite friend we have is—yes, he is ashamed of

the folly, though of course he does not own it. Why should we go down and vex ourselves with thoughts and questions which lie in a region where all sensible thinkers are absolutely omniscient? If, when we are walking up Broadway, (to use our former comparison,) a man comes up who tells us there are three hundred lamp posts between the Astor House and Canal street, and that, therefore, we must believe in the speedy restoration of the Jews, we are not bound, unless by some very recent statute, to refute the proposition. The individual who wishes to entertain us with such speculations puts himself in a state of quasi insanity. He is no prophet, such a man, but an auger, and his conversation is an unprofitable bore.

If he intended to amuse us, or if he had to communicate, or desired to learn aught of us, that would be another affair. If for instance, in passing the new Russ pavement, one should call our attention to it as a fine example of the rus in urbe, (even that might be endured,) or if one stopped us merely to ask the way to such a street, or to inform us that we had dropped a glove— anything, no matter what, save utter vapidness, would be tolerable. But we cannot, with due courtesy to "some people," can not devote our time to nonsense. Their conversation and writing, therefore, have long ceased to appear to us worth answering, or, for its own sake, even noticing.

But Mr. Hudson, and this is another proof of his mission, is still annoyed by "some people," and delights to perplex and confound them. It is of the nature of his mind to see things minutely in detail. His Drummond light illuminates with exceeding clearness whatever point he turns it towards; but he is not, and this may be said without disparagement, since there are so few such in the world, a great fixed beacon like Coleridge, who irradiates at once the broad horizon.

Or, to speak in another figure, he is one who, in writing, does not bear himself away on the wings of emotion, aroused by the great vision of an entire effect, but he moves laboriously, fettered by the desire of being effective in every sentence, and by the intensity with which he sees the immediate points that arise in his treatment of his subject. His sight is keen, but near the ground; he detects weeds among flow

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and created states of emotion and fancy, and embodied them in these works of art. The sonnet commencing, "Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits," should have been from a wife to her absent husband; such ones as When in disgrace," or, "When I do count the clock," are from a lover to his mistress. The whole together appear to be a collection of pieces in that form, written at various times, and in different moods of mind. Some express a proud power, others sad resolution, tenderness, regret, hope, love, sorrow; yet all have that wonderful condensation and peculiar freedom of language which mark them as the production of the same great artist. Perhaps they were written as studies, and Shakspeare persevered in using the sonnet form as the most purely artistic and difficult of any, feeling that if he could attain the ease and habit of symmetry necessary to bring out that harmony of emotion and expression which is the perfection of poetry, while compelling his imagination to work under so great a stress of carefulness, then the requirements of ordinary verse would leave him almost free. Just as great composers of music write in strict fugued counterpoint till they acquire an almost miraculous command of harmony, and painters study the human face and form till they master its changes under the many shades of expression and effect.

For poetry is an art, and its forms require study as much as those of any other art. The poet's emotion, thought, fancy, passion, &c., pass out from him under the superintendence of his judgment, and in a strict form, of which he is perfectly conscious. A man cannot well write a sonnet without knowing what he is about. He must write in some form, and the mastery of any form is not a natural and inalienable attribute of humanity. We cannot "gush" poetry, as is evident not less from

* Mr. Hudson quotes thus:

Haply I think on thee; and then my state Is like the lark at break of day uprising From earth and singing hymns at heaven's gate. Our London Edition of Hazlitt's Poets has itHaply I think on thee,-and then my state Like to the lark at break of day arising

us.

the teachings of common sense within, than from the lamentable failures of late years in the many attempts to do so around Good poetry requires the reason, the taste, and the intellect, as well as the heart, the fancy, and the imagination. The raptures of song and music are not those of wine. It would seem to be the idea with a saperficial class of thinkers, that even admitting the necessity of a study of the form of poetry, the poet should, at the time of inspiration, be able to forget that he was using any form, and should flow on in spontaneous jets of musical eloquence; and that poetry so written would be more perfect in form than if the writer should endeavor conscientiously to conform to rule. In other words, they would have him study his rule till the moment of application, and then throw it aside and go by the pure astus animi. This, it seems to us, is a very low view of the art. We are not to stndy celare artem but the ars celare artem. That is, we should not aim to throw aside the art and conceal it by not using it, but we should endeavor to command the art, with so much power that there shall be a sense of ease and strength imparted to the reader.

Just at our time, when "some people" are so given to self-utterance, so ready to take upon themselves the feeling that they are great artists, when they are in truth no artists at all, it is well to insist on the practical part of poetry, and to say very plainly, at the expense of being styled a "conventionalist," "purist, or whatever the phrase may be, that poets are not those who can intoxicate themselves with the nectar of conceit, and then expose their raptures to the world. They are those who can express raised states of the soul experiable by all mankind, in forms suitable to those states; who have the art to control themselves and beget a temperance in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion; who express not themselves but what they think, see, and hear, in that way, because they are impelled to it by a natural spiritual impulse-a feeling not primarily of desire for fame or any other consequence, but of a strong wish to excel in that department, and a notion that they can and will-by study, by thought, by a resolute

This must be the true reading.

earnestly did the inspired ploughman labor

poems.

If these be true views of the art of writing poetry, then they afford a reason for supposing that Shakspeare composed his Sonnets chiefly as exercises, artistically creating imaginary conditions within himself, and producing them in required forms. There is no necessity for believing them to have been personally intended; indeed, if it could be proved that they were so, it would tend to show that Shakspeare was not only himself, but comprehended Milton, and at the same time sang his native wood-notes wild on the blos'my spray of the social earth, and towered among the stars like a winged messenger of heaven; it would make him the artist of control as well as of liberty, and force us to admire the power of an imagination which could at once bear its possessor to the gates of paradise, and gladden the sullen earth with smiles. In fine, it would make the musical element in him to predominate and sustain the descriptive and the reasoning powers in such a way that he should seem to address himself to others, whereas in his manifestation of himself through the drama he appears rapt in contemplation and self-communion, (not revery, speaking to himself alone-borne upward in his flight, not on self-created pinions, or by the fire and strength of his melody, but by the natural loftiness of his being.

Before proceeding further in the path of thought suggested by these observations, there is a passage from Coleridge which it is necessary to quote, for its own sake, as well as in justice to Mr. Hudson. It is part of the concluding paragraph of the critical analysis of the Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, in the second volume of the Biographia Literaria. There is in the latter form, he says—

"lastly, the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language.

VOL. II. NO. 1. NEW SERIES.

power by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his himself forth, and passes into all the forms of compeer, not rival. While the former darts human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own IDEAL. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of MILTON; while SHAKSPEARE becomes all things, yet forhast thou not produced, England! my country! ever remaining himself. O what great men truly indeed

Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue Which Shakspeare spake ; the faith and morals

hold

Which Milton held in everything we are sprung

Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold !'"

In Mr. Hudson's chapter on Shakspeare's perceptive powers, near the end, we have the following:

Milton. Milton concentrates all things into "Herein Shakspeare differs altogether from himself, and melts them down into his own individuality; Shakspeare darts himself forth into all things, and melts down his individuality into theirs. Every page of Milton's writings exhibits a full-length portrait of the author; the perfect absence of Shakspeare from his own human being's having written them. pages, makes it difficult for us to conceive of a secret of this probably is, Milton had nearly all of Shakspeare's imagination, but perhaps not a tithe of Shakspeare's vision. The former might have created a thousand characters, and all would have been but modifications of himself; the latter did create nearly a thousand,

The

and not an element of himself can be found in objects of his contemplation into himself, while Shakspeare transforms himself into whatever object he contemplates: the one makes us see his own image in all things, the other makes us see everything but his own image."

one of them. Thus Milton transforms all the

And the chapter concludes as follows:"With most authors language is as hard and stiff as granite. It comes from them shaped and colored exactly as they find it. Instead of governing it, they are governed by it; they shape and submit their minds to its pre-existing