Hallam eal but

spirit

cive, to apt to

rtificial

they are not always firm friends or agreeable companions. Passing so much of their time in the "life ideal," the "life actual " appears to them by contrast dull, tame, and prosaic, and their imaginings of what men ought to be, make them disgusted with men as they

are.

Happiness of Poets - The spiritual existences of poets must be more stormy than those of other men, as they must feel and be moved by the passions they describe. Indeed, poets are little to be envied on the score of any greater enjoyment derived from their superior endowments. Though endued more plenteously with heavenly grace than other men, they are made to feel, from the necessities of their calling, far more painfully the need of it. Gifted by nature with a sensibility too acute for the more tranquil enjoyments of ordinary minds, this sensibility, already too great for the purposes of happiness, is necessarily, in the pursuit of their object, still further increased by art and culture. The poet's business is to sell his feelings to the public for as much as he can get for them in praise and pudding. Unfortunately for his hap

piness, the value of these feelings dep their intensity, and knowing this, he to sink a deeper well of sensibility in

Poets' Ideals-To the reproach o may be said, that they do not alwa to us the highest ideals. As one of ber* has said of them

"If reason be nobility in man,

Can aught be more ignoble than the
Whom they delight in, blinded as he
By prejudice, the miserable slave

Of low ambition, or distempered love

Carlyle, also, has a few suggestive w this subject of the poet's infidelity to office. "Alas," he says, "when sac are arguing about black and white and sacred poets have long professedl Truth, and gone to wool-gathering aft and such like!" Somewhat to the s are these lines of Lowell

"In the old days of awe, and keen-eyed wo The poet's song with blood-warm truth

Lachrymose Poetry For the lachrymose school of poetry-the school of the lugubrious Dr. Young, the despairing Lord Byron, the tearful Mrs. Hemans, the love-sick, sentimental, and disconsolate Miss Landon, and others of the whining tribe plaintive as bleating sheep - I have little respect. These poetical Paganinis, playing upon their one string of sorrow, are to me as monotonous in their whining as the droning of a bagpipe, an instrument which it is highly interesting to hear once in a lifetime. What I object to is, not the poetry of sadness, but the sadness of poetry. Many of the poets

make out the fountain of poetry to be only a fountain of tears. "Tell me," says M. Houssaye" tell me, what do our sad geniuses sing to their fair ones? Is it love, beauty, grace, youth? They sing, that is to say, they bewail over, the bitterness of life; they weep for their vanished illusions; they groan over the rough

road of life; in fine, instead of singi it may be said they sing of death. might, here and there, see a tolera blue eye, if a tear did not rise to but this tear which veils the blue eye

Youth and Poetry-It is a mistal pose that Nature has appointed you peculiar season of poetical sensibility. only to those who plunge into busine a sea, and become intellectually drow With these Fancy folds her wings, an agination droops like a sick bird. this is not a necessity, is clear from th stance that nearly all the world's stand has been written in mature years. N harmony with Nature's highest lawof progressive development. Under like the westering sun, should grow more resplendent to its close.

It is possible to be too polite to be acceptably so. Civil to all, true to none. The overpolite profess too much for us to believe them. Their courtesies are so elaborate, and they take so much trouble to be kind, that we suspect them to have a design in it, or that they are making themselves agreeable more on their own account than on ours.

POLITICS.

UT of politics comes more uproar than progress. It is indeed surprising how little, comparatively, this noisy department of human affairs contributes to the world's prosperity. Political commotions upon the grandest scale, political events of astounding suddenness, political characters of the greatest ability, abound, but still, permanent results are rare, and we look in vain for a measure of public good corresponding in extent to the hideous rout which ushers it in. Progress but turns upon its pillow, and goes to sleep again.

But this, it may be, is only a Quietist's view of the subject. Another, more rational, may be,