riably acts as an umpire over their claims, and despises, or sets at nought, their seductions.Whatever, therefore, draws the senses to the side of virtue, associates natural impulses with the "better mind," is of high value in civilized life. Many persons, unthinkingly, are ready to say—what is the use of poetry? There is not any information contained in it. To such persons the Author would make the following reply. Is it of any use to have thy brute appetites chastened to exalted delight? To connect ideal charms with all the visible creation? To learn to trace a moral character, and feel a taste excited, and a passion without price gratified, by every object of pure beauty that presents itself? Is it of importance for minds of sensibility to be led from the world of Art, which is often full of disappointment, and disease, and discontent, to the more simple, and more noble, and more beautiful world of Nature, which is full of beauty, and peace, and harmony? Is it of importance

to be rather independent and happy in thy feelings than dependent and miserable? Ask thy heart these questions, and thou wilt have discovered how far the poetic gift is excellent, holy, and sublime.

In this panegyric on Poetry, every description of it is excluded by the Author, which seduces the mind and the heart to the senses; of that poetry, which, by presenting pure and blameless objects to the former, either keeps in just subserviency, or elevates the latter to them, he is alone the advocate.

Poetry is the language of the heart and imagination: and whatever in feeling refines, or animates the heart, or in imagination fires and exalts the mind, is a proper object for poetry. It is a language, too, which brings images from all the world of sense; it delights itself in bodying forth ideal shapes, and loves all new and

fanciful combinations of, and associations with, sensible objects. It is not exactly, as a modern author has defined it to be, the language of the eye: since, were the accuracy of representing visible objects alone attended to, and not any feelings or phantasies engrafted on them, it would sink into vapid description: into description, which must yield all pretensions to equality with the sister art of Painting.

Dr. Darwin defines poetry to be the language of the eye. He has succeeded, because, as an individual, he has a genius for the poetry comprised in that definition; but were all other poetry excluded, a race of meagre imitators would start up, and at last poetry herself would abandon her votaries as the only persons ignorant of her charms. There would scarcely be any end to definitions in any art, or subject of taste, were all men thus to theorize on their own genius. A landscape painter might as well de

fine painting to be the reprehension of rural scenery, as the poetical admirer of visible objects" poetry the language of the eye."

How is the eye addressed in the lofty hymns* of the Old Testament, on which Milton professes to have formed his genius. In short, the essence of poetic excellence seems frequently to consist in avoiding every thing like accurate description; and after carefully keeping in the back ground all sources of disgust, by happily seizing on one idea necessarily involving a crowd of inferior associations, to raise the fancy, and awaken the mind to a delightful though indefinable tumult. The best epithets in poetry are often those the least determinate, and which

* "But those frequent songs throughout the law and the prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear, over all kinds of lyrick poetry, to be incomparable."-Milton's Prose Works.

leave the greatest scope for the imagination. It is true, that to peruse such poetry with advantage, the reader should partake of the poetical conception of the author. How would our Milton or Shakspeare fare, if the definition were admitted that "poetry is the language of the eye?" Is not the author warranted, therefore, in the more loose and comprehensive one, that it is the language of the heart and imagination?

To conclude, the following trifles have met with encouragement from those who are pleased with a delineation of the feelings of human nature. They do not affect the excellence of the higher orders of poetry; they are only the effusions of sentiment, to which, in the course of this address, the author has assigned the lowest niche in the temple of poetic fame:—and he trusts that he shall not incur the stigma of presumption in once more introducing them, toge