Ir is one thing to write poetry, another | other direction. A poet is not one only to be a poet; and some have indulged a who "sees into the inner heart of things" wish that none but poets would write to whom Beauty has has "unvailed the poetry. It is a wish, indeed, which must often rise in the heart of any one whose business leads him to read what new things are written in verse; yet certainly it could not be gratified without a grievous mutilation of our literature, and a terrible limiting of the pleasure we derive from it. For some of the sweetest strains, some of the most finished lyrics, and even some of the noblest poems, our language can show, and which have taken the strongest hold on the sympathies and memories of men, have been the productions of writers whom we can not call poets, because the bent of their nature was in an

"

depth of her glowing breast," and who walks the world startled ever afresh by some sudden revelation of its hidden glories and mysteries-in whom the most trivial of nature's wonders can raise thoughts that "lie too deep for tears:" he must be one who has a passion to reproduce all these things-who can not hold the golden treasure buried in his breast, but has an irresistible impulse to send it forth again upon the world, coined into new shapes, and stamped with a fresh image. The impulse to create is common, in some degree, to all men; but it makes a great difference whether it comes only in occasional bursts and sudden excitements, or whether it is the bent of the whole nature-the form of activity natural to a man's organization, and the le

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gitimate purpose of his life. But a poet | ceive that in writing verse he is untrue to must have more than the sense of beauty and the passion to create; he must have the gifts and tendencies, whatever they are, which lead him to select language as his instrument, and yet more than this, to select the rhythm of verse, and not that of prose. What is the exact difference between the two-what are the causes at work which give to verse its special hold upon the sense and the imagination-have never yet been accurately ascertained. Whatever they may be, Mr. Kingsley can not be said to possess them in that degree which alone entitles a man to the name of poet. He has the sense of beauty in a high degree; in a degree yet higher the command of language; but his genius naturally leads him to utter himself in prose, not in verse. Hence his prose writings are incomparably superior to his poems. One of the very greatest of all writers of poetical prose is Christopher North. It is curious to see how his powers sink below even the average level when he deserts his stronghold. The Island of Palms, The City of the Plague, the Address to a Wild Deer, read like the level and common-place breathings of uninspired mortality; they are to those half-divine strains which checker the Recreations as if the magician of strange powers had broken his wand and buried his books, and, willfully self-divested of the magic of his genius, chose to range himself an ordinary man amongst ordinary men. Yet he knew where his own strength lay; and in one of the "Walks by Grasmere" has eloquently defended the claims of prose as the highest medium for the expression of poetry, and wittily scoffed at the hampering limitations of verse and rhyme. If he were in carnest, no further explanation would be needed of his incapacity to wield verse, than this evidence of his want of power to appreciate its infinite superiority as the vehicle of art, and its unapproach able place as a power for moulding into the most refined, the most moving, and the most expressive harmonies, the feelings of the heart, and the harvests of the imaginative insight.

the natural direction of his powers, and that he has soared into an atmosphere not native to his wing. It is not only a want of command over the instrument he uses, and insufficient appreciation of the finer resources of rhythmical harmony, which leaves its shadow of disappointment in the perusal of most of Mr. Kingsley's poems; he has deeper disqualifications for the work to which, with that faulty estimate of the truest field for their energies to which all men are liable, he has devoted his highest efforts. To write sermons is a bad apprenticeship to tragedy. Now, whatever some strait-laced people, with whom we have no sympathy, may deem of fly-fishing and fox-hunting as concomitants of a cure of souls, there is one qualification which no one will deny to be eminently suited to that sphere of duty, nor question that Mr. Kingsley possesses it in the largest abundance. A passion for preaching is the central fire which heats his energies, and glows along all his activity. His is the genius of the prophet. Language with him is valuable, not as a plastic medium, through which in serene calm to re-create the aspects of things, and give a new and secondary life in art to the real life of the universe; but as an instrument of incitement and control over the minds and actions of men. With the control of mighty words he reins, and urges with a whip of eloquent invective the restive energies of men. Not what he simply sees and feels prompts him to speak, but what he would have done away with, and what he would have done. Deep purposes of moral change are what inspire him, and art with him is the channel of influence.

In Mr. Kingsley the contrast is not so great as in Wilson; his poetry approaches somewhat nearer to the level of his prose; yet, with all his energy of thought and imagination-with all his rarely-equaled command over the resources of the English language-it is impossible not to per

Undoubtedly it may legitimately be made so; yet we doubt if all forms of art are alike capable of being pressed into this service. In their higher and purer developments, where they are the most exquisitely adapted for the objects which art deems supreme, they are less capable of being allied with extrinsic objects than in some of their less refined and elevated conditions; and it is not too much to say that he whose function it is to rouse men to action has both a more efficient and a more fitting instrument in prose than in verse. It is possible that verse may have a deeper power to rouse those feelings from which action is to be generated, where such action is simple and immediate, but not where the motives are complicated, and

the course not obvious. The strains of moral teachings in staining by enforced Tyrtæus could never have weighed the consciousness and false slurs the purity balance against Philip so long and so hea- of the household affections, and had vily as the oratory of Demosthenes. And brought his play to a close with the death perhaps even the former assumption may or burial of Louis, delicate and difficult as be doubted; martyrs, indeed, have gone his subject-matter would still have been, singing to the stake, and hymns been on the he would yet have left a simpler impres lips of men marching into battle: but to the sion, and written a more perfect tragedy. men of action come instinctively the words The effect is impaired, and the inherent of action; and it may be questioned if any unity which art demands is destroyed, poem ever went so effectively and direct- when we are hurried to a new set of imly to its purpose as that sentence which pressions, and from the contest between was signaled from the Victory before the rich affections and the warped conNelson and Collingwood led their lines science, painted with deep passion and into the roar of Trafalgar. high genius, are transferred to the linger ing agonies of a canonization won by the false self-sacrifice that consists in self-degradation. It is not paradoxical to say that such a subject is too painful for tragedy. It reads like witnessing torture. When pain or suffering arise in a noble contest or by swift judgment, when it is accompanied by raised passions, it is not only that we know that by such accompaniment it is made tolerable to the sufferer, but the feelings of the reader too, roused by sympathy, give him the power to contemplate it. But the cold and slow withdrawals of support, the measured rising of the tide of misery, the gradual crushing of a noble nature, who can bear to see laid bare and anatomized? Wounds and death are within the sphere of the painter; wo can bear to gaze upon the writhings of the Laocoon; but who could tolerate a picture which should reveal on canvas the secrets of the hospital? And Mr. Kingsley drains the painfulness of his subject to the last dregs, and will not spare us, even after death, the loathsome enthusiasm of the saint's devotees. This is not tragedy, this is not the sphere of poetry; and if it was right to read the painful lesson-and far be it from us to say it was not-it should have been taught in another form. We do not say it should or could effectively have been read to us without the aid of the imagination; but then, both in the shaping of the whole and in detail, the imagination should have been made (as in choice of subject and treatment it is made) secondary to the truths to be inculcated. By embodying them in a drama, the author virtually undertakes to deal with his subject as a poet, and not as a preacher.

If these remarks be true, a tragedy is the last stage from which to preach to men a change in their modes of politicoeconomical action, or to stir them up against the false aspects of duties and mischievous inversions of human affection inculcated by the Church of Rome. The true defense of the Saint's Tragedy, that work of remarkable power, genius, and beauty, and which has deeply touched the hearts of so many readers, is, that, directly didactive and devoted to the purpose of immediate influence as it is, it is not a sermon invented for the occasion; but only a vivid enforcement of an actual lesson to be found in history, and where a life teaches a a great moral lesson, that it does so is not against, but in favor of its choice by the poet, who gives it that completeness of form, those graces of beauty, that charm of reconstructive art, which recommend it to men who might otherwise have passed it by, and who by the vigor and insight of his own imagination lays bare its deepest and most hidden meanings, giving thereby power to the imagination of lesser minds to grasp them and feel them real. Had Mr. Kingsley been content to do this simply, his play, fine as it is, would have been finer, and perhaps his lesson would have been deeper, though his sermon would have been less complete. He is too intent upon making the most of his text for his own purposes. His effort is to be exhaustive in teaching us all that can be learned from the sad career of Elizabeth, and the spiritual tyranny of Conrad; and he even goes beyond his text to give us a useful picture of the lay mind of the middle ages, and to make his interlocutors directly sarcastic and argumentative in modern schools of thought. Had he contented himself on his own ground in depicting the results of the Romish

There is no need at this late day to dwell upon the beauties and merits of this play. It affords in many of its passages a very remarkable evidence of the truth of

It is in purely original poetry that Kingsley is most liable to fail. Nobody can doubt the originality of his genius, and his thorough genuineness; but in poetry he requires something to mould