prayers are now so few and so cold?' The child, as it develops into youth, exchanges its repose for conflict fraught with danger; but would we forever keep it a child?

But if there is a loss of enthusiasm, there is a gain of temper. Unbelief has grown gentle and respectful. Benevolence, uprightness, enterprise, and freedom are multiplying. The religious element, the sighing for the perfect, the longing for the infinite, the thirst for beauty, the hunger for righteousness, can never die. The central, saving truths of the faith will flower and fruit. as long as there are days of toil and sorrow, or nights of weariness and pain.

Meanwhile the effective strength of the ministry is in earnestness,— in a solemn conviction that religion is a great concern; in a solemn purpose that its claims shall be felt; in acquaintance with contemporary secular thought; in ability to discern and explain the consistency of Christianity with the new lights which are breaking in from the outer world; in courage to renounce ideas that are outlived, or habits that are outlawed; in culture that is instinct with life and feeling.

Poetry. The potent tidal wave which threw on shore so many treasures of the deep, has long since ebbed, and no second has arisen which approaches the level of the former. The genius of the present is less creative than elective and refining, exquisite rather than imaginative, diffusive rather than powerful.

Two kinds of verse are discernible,—one which continues the impulse received from Keats and Shelley, the other from Wordsworth. The dominant tone is composite, uniting the classicism and romanticism of the first to the reflection and naturalism of the second. Richly melodied and highly colored, embracing every variety of rhythm and technical effect, it finds its chief voice in Tennyson.

The conditions affecting the social order have affected the conditions bearing upon art. The most notable of these are the iconoclastic tendencies of science and the passion for material progress. Both indicate a subsidence of the forces which heaved up the mountain ranges of the Byronic age. Never, perhaps, was the poetical talent so largely diffused. Never was so much good poetry written never so much performance above mediocrity; but poets have been supplanted in general regard, and

very few are able to command the attention of the English nations. New theories are far more exciting than new poems.

It is hardly necessary to add, that the refinements of life are transferred to literature and its works; that our poets, therefore, carry to further perfection reverence for human character, regard to human duty, tenderness for Nature, and love for the Divine. Their specific excellence is elaborateness of finish — perfection of form and structure- richness of diction and variety of metre.

Without much originality, the verses of Hunt (1784-1859) are sweet, fluent, and feeling,-successful imitations of the lighter and more picturesque parts of Chaucer. The following, on the grasshopper and the cricket, are characteristic:

'Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,

Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;

O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong

At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth

To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song

Indoors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.'

We recognize at once the simple delight of his master in the concrete forms and objects of the outer world.

Then the calm gravity of heart which makes the pulse of the two-fold inspiration:

Blest is the turf, serenely blest,
Where throbbing hearts may sink to rest,
Where life's long journey turns to sleep,
Nor ever pilgrim wakes to weep.

A little sod, a few sad flowers,

A tear for long-departed hours,
Is all that feeling hearts request

To hush their weary thoughts to rest.

There shall no vain ambition come
To lure them from their quiet home.
Nor sorrow lift, with heart-strings riven,
The meek imploring eye to heaven;
Nor sad remembrance stoop to shed
His wrinkles on the slumberer's head;
And never, never love repair
To breathe his idle whispers there.'

Another who warbled cheerful and trustful music, even through privation, sorrow, and anguish, was Hood (1799-1845), a nightingale in the stormy dark. There is something Shakespearean in his analysis of a spectral conscience:

But Guilt was my grim Chamberlain

That lighted me to bed

And drew my midnight curtains round,
With fingers bloody red.'

His noble efforts in behalf of the poor and unfortunate, his sympathy with suffering and woe, are felicitously wrought in The Song of the Shirt, and The Bridge of Sighs, all pathetic and tragical. But he could seldom express himself except through witty and humorous forms. One of his most popular effusions in the style peculiarly his own, is the ode to his infant son:

Thou happy, happy elf!

(But stop-first let me kiss away that tear)
Thou tiny image of myself;

(My love, he's poking peas into his ear!)

Thou merry, laughing sprite!

With spirits feather light,

Untouched by sorrow, and unsoiled by sin,

(Good heavens! the child is swallowing a pin!)

Thon little tricksy Puck!

With antic joys so funnily bestuck,

Light as the singing bird that wings the air,

(The door! the door! he'll tumble down the stair!)

(He'll climb upon the table, that's his plan!).

Thou pretty opening rose!

(Go to your mother, child, and wipe your nose!)
Balmy, and breathing music like the south,
(He really brings my heart into my mouth!)
Fresh as the morn, and brilliant as its star,
(I wish that window had an iron bar!)
Bold as the hawk, yet gentle as the dove,
(I'll tell you what, my love,

I cannot write, unless he's sent above!)'

A contemporary of Cowper, who bandied epithets with Byron, who lived to see Tennyson pass for the greatest poet of his country and his time, was the wayward and impetuous Landor (1775-1864); a pioneer of the school gone by, a reverend landmark of the one under review; a scholar of opulent range; a delightful essayist; a lover of beauty pure and simple; among recent singers, one of the most versatile, most independent, though far from being the greatest in achievement. His taste for classical themes, his facility in classical verse, his power of

bringing the antique spirit within the range of modern thought and sympathy, are seen in the Heroic Idyls, which are Latin poems, and their English version,-the Hellenics. He was always at ease in either language. The famous shell-passage in Gebir -an early poetical romance - is said to have been written first in Latin, and to have been more musical than its translation: But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed

In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one and it awakens, then apply
Its polished lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'

On the whole, however, to the multitude he will ever be a sealed book, because radically deficient in geniality of feeling. His imagery seems to us cold and statuesque. This may be due partly or mainly to his habit of first composing in a foreign tongue. We may be surprised that he often shed tears in the passion of his work. His affection for nature was instinctive and sincere. He desired,—

To let all flowers live freely, and all die,

Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart,
Among their kindred in their native place.
I never pluck the rose; the violet's head
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank,
And not reproached me; the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands

Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.'

To read Landor one must exert himself, and the exertion is to some purpose. The same is true, in even a higher degree, of Browning (1812- ), subtle and penetrating, eminently a thinker, exercising our thought rather than our emotion; concrete in presentation, and, when most felicitous, dramatic, but capricious in expression, and greatly deficient in warmth and music; original and unequal; an eclectic, not to be restricted in his themes, with a prosaic regard for details, and a barbaric sense of color and form.

The poem of his youth- Paracelsus-is a metaphysical dialogue, the history of a thwarted soul that would know and enjoy, that would drink deep at the fountains both of knowledge and of pleasure. The following passage is characteristic:

A make-shift, a mere foil, how fair soever,

To some fine life to come? Man must be fed
With angels' food, forsooth; and some few traces
Of a diviner nature, which look out

Through his corporeal baseness, warrant him
In a supreme contempt for all provision
For his inferior tastes-some straggling marks
Which constitute his essence, just as truly
As here and there a gem would constitute
The rock, their barren bed, a diamond.
But were it so were man all mind- he gains

A station little enviable. From God

Down to the lowest spirit ministrant,
Intelligence exists which casts our mind

Into immeasurable shade. No, no:

Love, hope, fear, faith-these make humanity,

These are its sign, and note, and character;

And these I have lost!-gone, shut from me forever."

This has the simplicity and truth of the old drama:

Festus, strange secrets are let out by Death,

Who blabs so oft the follies of this world:
And I am Death's familiar, as you know.

I helped a man to die some few weeks since.
No mean trick

He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him.

Then died, grown old; and just an hour before-
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes-
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors,
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take

Would not be precious as those blooms to him.'

Observe now the magical effect of high passion:

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird,

And all a wonder and a wild desire!`

Such the self-forgetful cadences in which he addresses his dead wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-1861); a rhymer at ten, an author at seventeen; an omnivorous reader, a loving student of philosophy and the classics; in style, original from the beginning, remarkable alike for defects and for beauties; often rugged and unfinished, from subordination of taste to excess of feeling; always intense, rarely sportive; worshipful and sympathetic, tremulously sensitive to the sorrows and mysteries of existence; the most fragile of beings, yet essaying to reach the infinite; all ethereal, yet all human, the idol of her kindred, the most beloved of minstrels and of women.

Her poetry as a whole is an uneven production, full of prosaic