verses have been studied and imitated by the Latin writers of all ages, and indeed by nearly every nation in all succeeding times, that have loved the Muses.

The false prophet of Mecca was a poet, his Koran is poetry, and by it he has formed the faith and guided the actions of millions. O! that he had sung the praises of virtue, and not of vice, and instead of falsehood, had promulgated truth.

That is a fine legend of the ancients to intimate the power and influence of Poetry, in which Orpheus is fabled, to have made the beasts of the field and the trees of the forest, and even the rocks and mountains, to follow after him, enchanted by the melody of his song. And it is indeed true, that there are among men, few with natures so bestial, and hearts so stony, as not to be moved by the power of Poetry. The Greeks and Romans were so well aware of the charms of the Muse, that their poets were the chief doctors and teachers of the national creed. The Druids of our own land committed to the Muse the keeping of their religious precepts, the Deity himself has deigned to give us the revelations of his will, written in great part, in language of the most glowing Poetry.

Again, does not the Poetic art refine the taste, and polish the manners of a nation? We find that in all nations, which have attained to a degree of civilization, Poetry has been the first bright harbinger of the dawn of refinement. In the literature of a people, Poetry is more early than history, than philosophy, and than science. In the growth of a nation, its Poetry is simple and tender, in its maturity, full and mighty, in its decline, it sickens and dies. So that in some measure, the Poetry of a people may be considered the index of its health, or of its weakness, of its vigour, or of its decay. There is a delightful freshness, a simplicity and tenderness pervading the early songs of our British minstrels, which no refinements of civilization can surpass, and for which we may search in vain in the productions of later times. But the most stupendous works of genius, in all countries, have been produced at an intermediate period, before luxury and ease had enervated the people, and when a healthy vigour was the nation's inheritance.

The present century has given birth to no Dante or Ariosto, no Shakspere or Milton. There were giants in those days. These men were the great offspring of a grand and glorious age. Can they ever be surpassed? Can they ever be equalled? I should think not. Certainly not in their respective countries, for the reign of power has ceased, and utility is now sole sovereign. There may hereafter arise a New Zealand Milton, or a Namacqua Shakspere, a Chipewa Dante, or a Hottentot Ariosto; but alas! we shall never behold them; we shall have lain hid in our narrow beds" for centuries, ere these "morning stars" shall have arisen to smile upon, and enlighten an awakening world.

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But intellectual refinement is not the only benefit which Poets confer upon a nation. Do they not relate the history of past events, and otherwise forgotten times?

"How many a sad and merry chronicle,
Worthy the note of all posterity,

But for the kindling spirit of their strings,
Would sleep for ever in oblivion."

Homer's poems contain nearly all that we know of the manners and customs of the people of his own times. The Troubadours of Spain and Provence have preserved from forgetfulness vast historical information, and the songs and ballads of the British Bards, teach us more of the domestic history of ancient Britain, than all the prose writings of the period. Indeed we can have but little faith in history, when it travels back to a nation's most remote antiquity; for the infancy of a country is invariably enveloped in so much mystery and confusion, that nothing which is merely historical, can be sufficiently authenticated or established, to be received with implicit reliance. The term "dark ages," is most particularly applicable to these so distant times; and I would add, that could all history be fully depended upon, the commencement of society would afford no great events or actions worthy the historian's pen. But that which is really valuable, is a faithful record of the mode of acting and thinking, general in a country's childhood, pictures of domestic life, and histories of the human mind, and its various controlling passions. We love to ascertain what objects were pleasing to the uncultivated tastes of our forefathers, whether their joys were pure, their sorrows deep. Were their hearts attuned to the harmony and beauty of nature, had grace and dignity any dwelling in their souls? History knows nothing of all this, it has to do only with the external world, and attempts not to explore that which lies below the surface. All this, however, we learn from the Poets. It is their delight to study the human character, and to show us men as they really were, before they were disguised by the refinements of later life. It is also their province to sing of great and glorious exploits, of wondrous achievements, and of national events; aud to draw in more glowing and unfading colours, the same pictures which the historians can only sketch. The great Marlborough has said, that "he knew no English history but what he had learned from Shakspere."

"He

I have already said, that every man who can write rhyme, is not a Poet. Many who suppose their copious effusions to be pure poesy, make a small stir to day, and to-morrow are forgotten. cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow." Those who write with the greatest freedom, are usually the most unworthy. Horace's friend, the old Roman, who could write a hundred verses while he stood upon one leg, was not a poet, but a poetaster. To such men the satirical couplet of Hudibras, will well apply. To them

"One line for sense and one for rhyme,
Are quite sufficient at a time."

Many however, who have been charmed by the flattering name of Poet, have sought to overcome this inequality-and have most triumphantly succeeded-in excluding "sense," altogether from their concoctions, and have won to themselves the enviable distinction, of having invented pure, unadulterated absurdities. Of these men we have nothing to say, let their fame speak for them, We have to do only with the true, the genuine Poet, "whose inspirations are direct from heaven."

Here I would refer to the beautiful theory of the Germans,

namely, that all great thinkers, all men of genius, and all prophets, are Poets. Men above the herd, who dwell apart, to whom others look for guidance, all these are Poets. They tell us that in the early childhood of nations, all minds were dark and uncertain, all to them, was wonder, astonishment, awe; the world was a magnificent enigma, a glorious mystery. No man could solve it. Nothing was certain. At length the man of thought arose, he caused other men to think, to reflect; he roused them from their sleep; he was the first Poet. He did not gaze in vague bewilderment on the splendid objects of creation, on the dazzling sun, rising each morn from the distant ocean with renewed lustre to gladden all things animate, and inanimate, and to make them sing for joy: on the moon, the pensive quiet moon, stealing in melancholy grandeur through the azure vault of heaven, bathing in dewy tears the sleeping flowers, and the leaves of the forest trees. He felt that all this was not the work of chance; he saw harmony in all things; he could realize beauty in all the works of creation..

"the sounding cataract

Haunted him like a passion; the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms were then to him

An appetite, a feeling, and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm

By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.'

His mind was wrought upon by all this mighty magic, he had deep thoughts, and they overpowered him, he became warmed into enthusiasm, and his utterings were Poesy; he was the first Poet. Many others arose and they sought for truth, and sang the praises of its loveliness; they told of virtue, the alleviator of sorrow, the only cure of a guilty conscience. They discovered music and painting, and sculpture. If the Poets had not existed, these sister arts would have been unknown for ever. They stopped not here, they were not satisfied with the shows of things, with the external covering, they explored the interior and discovered the wonders, and unravelled the mysteries of creation.

Carlyle, in his second lecture on Hero-worship, has some eloquent passages exemplifying this beautiful theory. He says, "Transport yourself into the early childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light of our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a great sunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to think, to Be! Wonder, hope; infinite radiance of hope and wonder, as of a young child's thoughts in the hearts of these strong men! Strong sons of Nature." "Man was then," he continues," simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he had not united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes and motions which we now collectively call Universe, Nature, or the like,—and so with a name dismiss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted man, all was yet new, unveiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man what to the Thinker the Prophet it ever is-preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth,

the trees, the mountains, many sounding seas;-that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail, and rain: What is it? Ay, what? The Great Thinker came-the original man, the seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capabilities of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;-is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honour such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth; but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet a God!" This is a grand picture of a poet, a genius; and the author next proceeds to show that thought when once awakened, can never again slumber; that man once possesed of the key of knowledge, rests not till its treasures are his own, till he has solved the enigma of this universe. All men may subscribe to the truth and force of this speculation of Carlyle's, but none who believe in Christianity can agree with others in which he indulges with equal assurance of their correctness. We have not faith in the false prophet of Mecca; we do not believe that the worship of idols is pleasing to God; nor do we believe that all religions are true, and that Christianity is the truest. The heathen philosophers in the 4th century took refuge in this notion, but we had hoped that Pantheism was declining.

In studying the history of great men in all ages, what they have said and what they have accomplished; and in examining the constitution of human society throughout the civilised world, we cannot have failed to have discovered as a universal regulation, that the grand distinguishing characteristic of the Poet is Intellectual superiority. Imagination, Fancy, Passion, must and do accompany it, but they are but the attendants. Intellect is the ruler, and should be so; and if the passions once obtain the mastery, it is all over with the Poet-there is no hope for him.

The greatest living illustration of the true Poet is John Critchley Prince, the Manchester cotton spinner. Every action of his life indicates a large soul, great superiority-he is the Burns of England. No man has ever yet sunk deeper into misery and poverty; he has reached the deepest depths of physical and mental wretchedness; he has been scoffed at, buffetted, starved; but he has never murmured or repined. When shunned by his fellow men for his poverty, he would wander forth to the green meadow, the waving forest, the mountain top, and there hold sweet converse with his Maker, drink deep of the cup of bliss, and revel in delights which are permitted to none but to the favourites of heaven. There he would exclaim with his great contemporary and model; even when alone and despised

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky,-and in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

He has written one book,* and it says he is a great man, and the world will soon say that he is a great man. known, yet the day will come when the name of Prince shall be famiHe is now but little liar to all ears. Born in the most wretched poverty, inured to want, totally uneducated and doomed to toil for a scanty subsistence in the pestiferous atmosphere of a cotton mill, surrounded by all that is vile, debasing, and wicked, he has not only come out untainted and pure, but has been so borne up by his own intellectual power, that while no repinings have passed his lips during these days of darkness and nights of woe, his soul has breathed forth some of the noblest aspirations-some of the purest bursts of eloquence that Poet ever

uttered.

There is prefixed to his poems a compressed account of the life of this extraordinary man, from which we learn that he came into the world at Wigan in Lancashire, in the year 1808. The father had it not in his power to send him to a day school, for he was poor. The lad, however, obtained a very imperfect knowledge of reading and writing at a Baptist Sunday School in the neighbourhood. But no. circumstances could keep Prince in ignorance, he had a teacher greater than any earthly pedagogue; he was taught from above. He studied not names, but things. He read the book of nature, he pondered over the most intricate paragraphs, he mastered the difficulties, and to what purpose his works have shown. half naked and three parts starved, he would always carry about with When but yet a lad, him a copy of Milton. Another lad, half famished, would have exchanged his Milton for a penny-loaf; not so Prince, the cravings of his mind were less easily allayed than those of his body. All men have their foibles, even the poets are not exempted, and Critchley had his; in 1826 he married, at a time when his earnings were not sufficient to procure himself and wife a common bread and water subsistence. For four years he lingered on between life and death in a most forlorn condition; the poor-house had no charm for him, he whose thoughts would "wander through eternity" had no heart to pull hemp, he could die rather. Information reached him that work was plentiful on the Continent at St. Quentin in Picardy, and off he started-for there was no hesitation with him-leaving his wife and three children behind him till he should have succeeded in his mission. But alas! he failed in his hopes, they were vain; no occupation offered, and after wandering from town to town in a strange land, ignorant of the language, subsisting on the charity of the few English residents whom he found on his way, " in the middle of a severe winter (January, 1831) with an ill-furnished knapsack on his back and ten sous in his pocket, he set off for Malhausen to return to Hyde in Lancashire with a heart light as the treasure in his exchequer." His sor

"Hours with the Muses," by John Critchley Prince. London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1842. Third Edition.