“ It is cleft in two by bereavement, and out of the rift comes forth, as by resurrection, the form and voice that shall never die out of the world. Angels sat at the grave's mouth; and so hymns are the angels that rise up out of our griefs and darkness and dismay.
"Thus born, a hymn is one of those silent ministers which God sends to those who are to be heirs of salvation. It enters into the tender imagination of childhood, and casts down upon the chambers of its thought a holy radiance which shall never quite depart. ”

“ The first and chief element in a poem is beauty of thought, and that beauty may relate to any department, material, mental, or spiritual, in which beauty can reside. Such poetry may describe a misty desert, a flowery mead, a feminine form, a ruddy sky, a rhythmic waterfall, a blue-bird's flutterings, receding thunder, a violet's scent, the spicy tang of apples, the thrill of clasped arms and a lover's kiss. Or it may rise higher, and rest in the relations of things, in similes and metaphors; it may infuse longing and love and passion ”

“ Childe Harold, Canto IV. LORD BYRON.
The more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages:
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.
* * * * *
Heaven gives our years of fading strength
Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth, a seeming length,
Proportioned to their sweetness.
The River of Life. T. CAMPBELL.
Yet Time, who changes all, had altered him
In soul and aspect as in age; years steal
Fire from the mind as vigor from the limb:
And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.
Childe Harold, Canto III. LORD BYRON.
Catch! ”

“ I have known more than one young lover of poetry who read nothing but Browning, and there are hundreds who have drowned all the poets of the past and present in the deep music of Tennyson. But is it not possible, with the whole wealth of literature at our command, to attain views broad enough to enable us to do justice to genius of every class and character? ”

“ It is garlanded with flowers which grew in our hearts. Born of the experience of one mind, it becomes the unconscious record of many minds.... Thus sprung from a wondrous life, hymns lead a life yet more wonderful. When they first come to us they are like the single strokes of a bell ringing down to us from above; but, at length, a single hymn becomes a whole chime of bells, mingling and discoursing to us the harmonies of a life's Christian experience."
Passing from this very human and sympathetic view of the profoundest use of poetry, note how the veteran Bryant confirms it. ”

“ SHAKESPEARE.
"I am a gentleman." I'll be sworn thou art;
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit,
Do give thee five-fold blazon.
Twelfth Night, Act i. Sc. 5. SHAKESPEARE.
Nothing to blush for and nothing to hide,
Trust in his character felt far and wide;
Be he a noble, or be he in trade,
This is the gentleman Nature has made.
What is a Gentleman? N.L. O'DONOGHUE.
And thus he bore without abuse
The grand old name of gentleman,
Defamed by every charlatan,
And soiled with all ignoble use.
In Memoriam, CX. A. TENNYSON.
His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen. ”

“ And yet, some of the highest and finest of known poetic flights have been in the expression of religious and philosophical truth; while on the other hand Wordsworth's characterization of poetry turns the cold shoulder to that which is neither knowledge nor science, the all-powerful passion of Love—probably the most universal fount and origin of poetry since the human race began to express its thoughts and feelings at all. Coleridge enlarges Wordsworth's phrase, and makes poetry "the blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thought, human passions, emotions, language." ”

“ Therefore it is that the mythological poetry of the ancients is as cold as it is beautiful, as unaffecting as it is faultless....
"The admirers of poetry, then, may give up the ancient mythology without a sigh. Its departure has left us what is better than all it has taken away: it has left us men and women; it has left us the creatures and things of God's universe, to the simple charm of which the cold splendor of that system blinded men's eyes, and to the magnificence of which the rapid progress of science is every day adding new wonders and glories. ”

“ Familiarity with poetry thus becomes to the attentive reader an insensible training in language, as well as an elevation of mind and spirit. Superiority of spirit and of form, then, offers good reasons why the intelligent—whether for stimulation, consolation, self-culture, or mere amusement in idle hours—should avail of a due proportion of this finest expression of the sweetest, the highest, and the deepest emotional experiences of life, in the realms of nature, of art, and of humanity itself. ”

“ Who falls from all he knows of bliss
Cares little into what abyss.
The Giaour. LORD BYRON.
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To lose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow.
Mother Hubberd's Tale. E. SPENSER.
A thousand years a poor man watched
Before the gate of Paradise:
But while one little nap he snatched,
It oped and shut. Ah! was he wise?
Oriental Poetry: Swift Opportunity. ”

“ We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us....
"But if we conceive thus highly of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence. ”

“ In the ejaculations of delight, fear, or wonder of primitive man at the phenomena of nature—in his imaginative efforts to explain the mystery of power behind light, darkness, the seasons, storm, calm—lie the beginnings of poetry; and religion grows from the same seed—the desire of the finite to lay hold on the Infinite. Every man is a potential poet, just so far as he responds to these yearnings after some expression of the ideal and the ineffable. ”

“ To keen the wit, and to sublime the heart,
In all supreme! complete in every part!
It was not thence majestic Rome arose,
And o'er the nations shook her conquering dart:
For sluggard's brow the laurel never grows;
Renown is not the child of indolent repose.
* * * * *
Toil, and be glad! let Industry inspire
Into your quickened limbs her buoyant breath!
Who does not act is dead; absorpt entire
In miry sloth, no pride, no joy he hath:
O leaden-hearted men to be in love with death! ”

“ Thus, poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive, partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief and despair, vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies suggesting higher phases of these feelings ”

“ Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought.
Raphael. J.G. WHITTIER.
ASPIRATION. Oh! could I throw aside these earthly bands
That tie me down where wretched mortals sigh—
To join blest spirits in celestial lands!
To Laura in Death. PETRARCH.
Happy the heart that keeps its twilight hour,
And, in the depths of heavenly peace reclined,
Loves to commune with thoughts of tender power,—
Thoughts that ascend, like angels beautiful,
A shining Jacob's ladder of the mind! ”

“ Begone, dull Care, thou and I shall never agree.
Begone, Old Care. PLAYFORD'S Musical Companion.
CHANCE. That power
Which erring men call Chance.
Comus. MILTON.
Chance will not do the work—Chance sends the breeze;
But if the pilot slumber at the helm,
The very wind that wafts us towards the port
May dash us on the shelves.—The steersman's part is vigilance,
Blow it or rough or smooth.
Fortunes of Nigel. SIR w. SCOTT.
I shall show the cinders of my spirits
Through the ashes of my chance.
Antony and Cleopatra, Act v. Sc. 2. SHAKESPEARE.
And grasps the skirts of happy chance. ”

“ It is not true that the poet paints a life which does not exist. He only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys: and in this he does well; for it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratifications, but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher being. ”

“ Another point in connection with the language of poetry is that, compelled by their limitations of rhythm, rhyme, and the compression of much thought and feeling into brief space, the poets have become the finest artists in the use of words. The examples of word-use in the dictionaries are largely drawn from the poets. Joseph Joubert, the French epigrammatist, says:
"Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of flowers, or like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet has a breath that fills out words, gives them light and color. ”

“ A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms.
"It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself.... Impelled by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he struggles forward into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now pronounced imperishable."
But why should one read poetry, at all, where there is so much good prose to be read? ”

“ AMBITION. Ambition is our idol, on whose wings
Great minds are carried only to extreme;
To be sublimely great, or to be nothing.
The Loyal Brother, Act i. Sc. 1. T. SOUTHERNE.
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.
Paradise Lost, Bk. I. MILTON.
Rather than be less
Cared not to be at all.
Paradise Lost, Bk. II. MILTON.
Lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face ”

“ We believe that poetry, far from injuring society, is one of the great instruments of its refinement and exaltation. It lifts the mind above ordinary life, gives it a respite from depressing cares, and awakens the consciousness of its affinity with what is pure and noble. ”

“ And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted dreams,
And into glory peep.
Ascension Hymn. H. VAUGHAN.
When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream as in a fairy bark
Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
To purple daybreak—little thought we pay
To that sweet bitter world we know by day.
Sonnet: Sleep. T.B. ALDRICH.
Dreams are the children of an idle brain. ”

“ The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. A clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, is the most precious benefit which we can gather from a poetical collection such as the present."
Macaulay in his brilliant essay on Milton, which, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, gave him instant recognition as "a new literary power," set up an interesting theory. ”

“ When called with angels to be blest?
Happy Day. P. DODDRIDGE.
Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord,
What may thy service be?—
Nor name, nor town, nor ritual word,
But simply following thee.
We bring no ghastly holocaust,
We pile no graven stone;
He serves thee best who loveth most
His brothers and thy own.
Our Master. J.G. WHITTIER.
JEWEL. These gems have life in them: their colors speak,
Say what words fail of. ”

“ Until, by Heaven's sweetest influences,
Slowly and slowly spreads a speck of green
Into a pleasant island in the seas,
Where, mid tall palms, the cane-roofed home is seen,
And wearied men shall sit at sunset's hour,
Hearing the leaves and loving God's dear power.
Sonnet VII. J.R. LOWELL.
A drainless shower
Of light is poesy: 't is the supreme of power;
'T is might half slumbering on its own right arm.
Sleep and Poetry. J. KEATS.
For dear to gods and men is sacred song. ”

“ O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
Faustus. C. MARLOWE.
The dimple that thy chin contains has beauty in its round
That never has been fathomed yet by myriad thoughts profound.
Odes, CXLIII. HAFIZ.
Beauty stands
In the admiration only of weak minds
Led captive. Cease to admire, and all her plumes
Fall flat and shrink into a trivial toy,
At every sudden slighting quite abashed.
Paradise Regained, Bk. II. MILTON.
ADORNMENT. The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air. ”