ment of a severe criticism. Raleigh, in his better days, was too much occupied in action to have cultivated all the powers of a poet; which require solitude and perpetual meditation, and a refinement of sensibility, such as intercourse with business and the world deadens. But perhaps it will be pleaded that his long years of imprisonment gave him leisure for meditation more than enough. It has been beautifully said by Lovelace that "Stone walls do not a prison make, so long as the mind is free. But broken spirits and indescribable injuries and misfortunes do not agree with the fervor required by the muse. Hope, that "sings of promised pleasure," could never visit him in his dreary bondage; and ambition, whose lights had hitherto led him through difficulties and dangers and sufferings, must now have kept entirely aloof from one whose fetters disabled him to follow as a votary in her train. Images of rural beauty, quiet, and freedom might, perhaps, have added, by the contrast, to the poignancy of his present painful situation; and he might rather prefer the severity of mental labor in unravelling the dreary and comfortless records of perplexing history in remote ages of war and bloodshed. We have no proof that Raleigh possessed the copious, vivid, and creative powers of Spenser; nor is it probable that any cultivation would have brought forth from him fruit equally rich. But in his poetry, I think we can perceive some traits of attraction and excellence which perhaps even Spenser wanted. If less diversified than that gifted bard, he would, I think, have sometimes been more forcible and sublime. His images would have been more gigantic, and his reflections more daring. With all his mental attention keenly bent on the busy state of existing things in political society, the range of his thought had been lowered down to practical wisdom; but other habits of intellectual exercise, excursions into the ethereal fields of fiction, and converse with the spirits which inhabit those upper regions, would have given a grasp and a color to his conceptions as magnificent as the fortitude of his soul. His "History of the World" proves the extent of his knowledge and learning and the profundity of his opinions: and this written with a broken spirit, in prison, and under the pining health produced by close air and want of exercise and every cheering comfort. How grand must have been his fiery feelings in the high hope of enterprise, bounding over the ocean, and with new worlds opening before him! Well might Spenser call him "The Shepherd of the Ocean." Raleigh was, above other men, one who had a head to design, a heart to resolve, and a hand to execute. He lived in an age of great men in every department; but, taking a union of splendid qualities, he was the first of that most brilliant and heroic epoch. He was not a poet of the order of Spenser and Shakspeare; but in what other gift and acquirement was he not first? JOHN MILTON Of this "greatest of great men," the private traits and whole life were congenial to his poetry. Men of narrow feeling will say that his political writings contradict this congeniality. His politics were, no doubt, violent and fierce; but it cannot be doubted that they were conscientious. He lived at a crisis of extraordinary public agitation, when all the principles of government were moved to their very foundations, and when there was a general desire to commence institutions de novo. His gigantic mind gave him a temper that spurned at all authority. This was his characteristic through life: it showed itself in every thought and every action, both public and private, from his earliest youth; except that he did not appear to rebel against parental authority: for nothing is more beautiful than his mild and tender expostulation to his father. His great poems require such a stretch of mind in the reader as to be almost painful. The most amazing copiousness of learning is sublimated into all his conceptions and descriptions. His learning never oppressed his imagination, and his imagination never obliterated or dimmed his learning; but even these would not have done without the addition of a great heart and a pure and lofty mind. That mind was given up to study and meditation from his boyhood till his death: he had no taste for the vulgar pleasures of life; he was all spiritual. But he loved fame enthusiastically, and was ready to engage in the great affairs of public business; and when he did engage, performed his part with industry, skill, and courage. Courage, indeed, mingled in a prominent degree among his many other mighty and splendid qualities. Who is equal to analyze a mind so rich, so powerful, so exquisite ? I do not think that tenderness was his characteristic; and he was, above all other men, unyielding. His softer sensibilities were rather reflective than instantaneous: his sentiments came from his imagination, rather than his imagination from his sentiments. The vast fruits of his mind always resulted from complex in 1"We venerate Milton as a man of genius, but still more as a man of magnanimity and Christian virtue; who regarded genius and poetry as sacred gifts imparted to him, not to amuse men or to build up a reputation, but that he might quicken and call forth what was great and divine in his fellow-creatures." -CHANNING. gredients; though they were so amalgamated that with him they became simple in their effects. It is impossible now to trace the processes of his intellect. We cannot tell what he would have been without study; but we know that he must have been great under any circumstances, though his greatness might have been of a different kind. He made whatever he gathered from others his own; he only used it as an ingredient for his own combinations. His earliest study seems to have been the holy writings: they first fed his fancy with the imagery of Eastern poetry; and nowhere could he have found so sublime a nutriment. But what is any nutriment to him who cannot taste, digest, and be nourished? It depends not upon the force and excellence of what is conveyed, but upon the power of the recipient; it is, almost all, inborn genius, though it may be under the influence of some small modification from discipline. Superficial minds, affecting the tone of wisdom, hold out that the gifts of the Muse are incompatible with serious business. Milton, the greatest of poets, affords a crushing answer to this. In the flower of his manhood and through middle age he was a statist, an active man of executive affairs in a crisis of unexampled difficulty and danger. His controversial writings, both in politics and divinity, are solid, vigorous, original, and practical; and yet he could return at last to the highest flights of the Muse, undamped and undimmed. The lesson of his life is one of the most instructive that biography affords: it shows what various and dissimilar powers may be united in the same person, and what a grandeur of moral principle may actuate the human heart; but at the same time it shows how little all these combined talents and virtues can secure the due respect and regard of contemporaries. It is absurd to deny that Milton was neglected during his life, and that his unworldly mindedness let the meanest of the people mount over his head. He lived poor, and for the most part in obscurity. Even high employments in the state seem to have obtained him no luxuries, and few friends or acquaintance: no brother poets flocked round him; none praised him, though in the habit of flattering each other. If intellect is the grand glory of man, Milton stands pre-eminent above all other human beings,-above Homer, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Spenser, and Shakspeare. To the highest grandeur of invention upon the sublimest subject he unites the greatest wisdom and learning, and the most perfect art. Almost all other poets sink into twinkling stars before him. What has issued from the French school of poetry seems to be the production of an inferior order of beings: and in this I include even our Dryden and Pope; for I cannot place these two famous men among the greatest poets: they may be among the first of a secondary class. It is easy to select fine passages from minor poetical authors; but a great poet must be tried by his entirety,-by the uniform texture of his web. Milton has a language of his own, I may say, invented by himself. It is somewhat hard, but it is all sinew: it is not vernacular, but has a Latinized cast, which requires a little time to reconcile a reader to it. It is best fitted to convey his own magnificent ideas; its very learnedness impresses us with respect; it moves with a gigantic step; it does not flow, like Shakspeare's style, nor dance, like Spenser's. Now and then there are transpositions somewhat alien to the character of the English language, which is not well calculated for transposition; but in Milton this is perhaps a merit, because his lines are pregnant with deep thought and sublime imagery, which require us to dwell upon them and contemplate them over and over. ought never to be read rapidly: his is a style which no one ought to imitate till he is endowed with a soul like Milton's. His ingredients of learning are so worked into his original thoughts that they form a part of them; they are never patches. He Besides his numerous and admirable criticisms on English poets, Sir Egerton Brydges has himself written some very beautiful sonnets. We will give one as a specimen.' ECHO AND SILENCE. In eddying course when leaves began to fly, As mid wild scenes I chanced the Muse to woo, Through glens untrod, and woods that frown'd on high, For quick the hunter's horn resounded to the sky! Not so her sister.-Hark! for onward still, With thousand mimic tones the laughing forest fill! 1 "The great labors of Sir Egerton Brydges in the cause of English literature will be duly appreciated by posterity. For some years past (1833) he has resided at Geneva, where he still devotes himself to his favorite pursuits with an enthusiasm which neither age nor sicknesz can subdue."-DYCE. ARCHIBALD ALISON, 1756-1838. ARCHIBALD ALISON was the son of Andrew Alison, of Edinburgh, and was matriculated at Baliol College, Oxford, in 1775. After completing his theological course of study, he was settled successively in two or three different parishes, and finally became the senior minister of St. Paul's Chapel, in his native city. In 1790 he published his admirable Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, the work for which he is most distinguished. In 1814 he gave to the public two volumes of sermons, justly admired for the elegance and beauty of their language, and their gently persuasive inculcation of Christian duty. He died at Edinburgh in the year 1838, at the advanced age of eighty-two.2 ON THE PLEASURE OF ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE. In every period of life, the acquisition of knowledge is one of the most pleasing employments of the human mind. But in youth there are circumstances which make it productive of higher enjoyment. It is then that every thing has the charm of novelty; that curiosity and fancy are awake; and that the heart swells with the anticipations of future eminence and utility. Even in those lower branches of instruction which we call mere accomplishments, there is something always pleasing to the young in their acquisition. They seem to become every well-educated person; they adorn, if they do not dignify, humanity; and, what is far more, while they give an elegant employment to the hours of leisure and relaxation, they afford a means of contributing to the purity and innocence of domestic life. But in the acquisition of knowledge of the higher kind-in the hours when the young gradually begin the study of the laws of nature, and of the faculties of the human mind, or of the magnificent revelations of the gospel-there is a pleasure of a sublimer nature. The cloud which, in their infant years, seemed to cover nature from their view begins gradually to resolve. The world in which they are placed opens with all its wonders upon their eye; their powers of attention and observation seem to expand with the scene before them; and, while they see, for the first time, the immensity of the universe of God, and mark the majestic simplicity of those laws by which its operations are conducted, they feel as if they were awakened to a higher species of being, and admitted into nearer intercourse with the Author of Nature. In this he maintains "that all beauty, or, | at least, that all the beauty of material objects, depends on the associations that may have connected them with the ordinary affections or emotions of our nature; and in this, which is the fundamental part of his theory, we conceive him to be no less clearly right than he is convincing and judicious in the copious and beautiful illustrations by which he has sought to establish its truth." 2 Read an article on Alison's Essays on Taste, in the Edinburgh Review, vol. xviii. 1; one on his Sermons, vol. xxiii. 424; and another upon his Sermons, in the Quarterly Review, vol. xiv. 429. |