petty plans or temporary objects. Neither will he disgust us by smooth obsequious flatteries and an inexpressive, lifeless gentleness. He will be free and make free from the mechanical and distorting influences we hear complained of on every side. He will teach us to love wisely what we before loved well, for he knows the difference between censoriousness and discernment, infatuation and reverence; and, while delighting in the genial melodies of Pan, can perceive, should Apollo bring his lyre into audience, that there may be strains more divine than those of his native groves.

TO THE AURORA BOREALIS.

ARCTIC fount of holiest light
Springing through the winter night,
Spreading far beyond yon hill
When the earth is dark and still,
Rippling o'er the stars, as streams
Ripple o'er their pebble-gleams -
Oh, for names, thou vision fair,
To express thy splendors rare!

Blush upon the cheek of night,
Posthumous, unearthly light,
Dream of the deep-sunken sun,
Beautiful, sleep-walking one,
Sister of the moonlight pale,
Star-obscuring, meteor-veil,

Spread by heaven's watching vestals,
Sender of the gleamy crystals,
Darting on their arrowy course

From their glittering, polar source,
Upward where the air doth freeze,
Round the sister Pleiades -
Beautiful and rare Aurora,

In the heavens thou art their Flora,
Night-blowing Cereus of the sky,
Rose of amaranthine dye,

Hyacinth of purple light,

Or their Lily clad in white!

Who can name thy wondrous essence,

Thou electric Phosphorescence?

F.

Lonely apparition fire!
Seeker of the starry quire!
Restless roamer of the sky,
Who hath won thy mystery?
Mortal science hath not ran
With thee through the Empyrean,
Where the constellations cluster
Flower-like on thy branchy lustre!

After all the glare and toil,
And the daylight's fretful coil,
Thou dost come so mild and still,
Hearts with love and peace to fill;
As when after revelry

With a talking company,
Where the blaze of many lights
Fell on fools and parasites,

One by one the guests have gone,
And we find ourselves alone,
Only one sweet maiden near,
With a sweet voice low and clear
Murmuring music in our ear—
So thou talkest to the earth,
After daylight's weary mirth.

Is not human fantasy,
Wild Aurora, likest thee,
Blossoming in nightly dreams
Like thy shifting meteor-gleams?

But a better type thou art
Of the strivings of the heart,
Reaching upwards from the earth
To the Soul that gave it birth.
When the noiseless beck of night
Summons out the inner light,
That hath hid its purer ray
Through the lapses of the day—
Then like thee, thou northern Morn,
Instincts which we deemed unborn,
Gushing from their hidden source,
Mount upon their heavenward course,
And the spirit seeks to be
Filled with God's Eternity.

C.

NOTES FROM THE JOURNAL OF A SCHOLAR.

Nunc non e manibus illis,

Nunc non e tumulo, fortunataque favilla
Nascuntur violæ ?

HOMER.

PERSIUS.

HOMER I read with continually new pleasure. Criticism of Homer is like criticism upon natural scenery. You may say what is, and what is wanting, but you do not pretend to find fault. The Iliad is before us as a pile of mountains, -so blue and distant, so simple and real,-even so much an image of majesty and power.

He is as prolific as the earth, and produces his changing scenery with the ease and the finish and the inexhaustible variety of nature. Homer never mistakes. You might as well say, there was untruth in the song of the wind.

I notice Homer's mention of an interview with a great

man.

It is with him always among the memorabilia to have seen a great man. An embassy of Ulysses, a breakfast with Tydeus, any meeting with any heroic person, which barely gave time to note him, is text for memory and comparison.

Homer is pious.

Homer, says Goethe, describes that which exists, not its effect on the beholder. He paints agreeable things, not their agreeableness.

Homer writes from no theory as a point of vision. He tells us what he sees, not what he thinks.

Homer is an achromatic glass. He is even less humorsome than Shakspeare.

Two or three disinterested witnesses have been in the world, who have stated the facts as they are, and whose testimony stands unimpeached from age to age. Such was Homer, Socrates, Chaucer, Shakspeare; perhaps Goethe.

A larger class state things as they believe them to be; Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, Luther, Montaigne, George Fox. A still larger class take a side, and defend it the best they can; Aristotle, Lucretius, Milton, Burke.

SHAKSPEARE.

O my friend! shall thou and I always be two persons? Any strong emotion makes the surrounding parts of life fall away as if struck with death. One sometimes questions his own reality, it so blenches and shrivels in the flame of a thought, a relation, that swallows him up. If that lives, he lives. "There either he must live or have no life."

This afternoon we read Shakspeare. The verse so sunk into me, that as I toiled my way home under the cloud of night, with the gusty music of the storm around and overhead, I doubted that it was all a remembered scene; that Humanity was indeed one, a spirit continually reproduced, accomplishing a vast orbit, whilst individual men are but the points through which it passes.

We each of us furnish to the angel who stands in the sun a single observation. The reason, why Homer is to me like dewy morning, is because I too lived while Troy was, and sailed in the hollow ships of the Grecians to sack the devoted town. The rosy-fingered dawn as it crimsoned the top of Ida, the broad sea shore dotted with tents, the Trojan hosts in their painted armor, and the rushing chariots of Diomed and Idomeneus, all these I too saw; my ghost animated the frame of some nameless Argive. And Shakspeare in King John does but recal to me myself in the dress of another age, the sport of new accidents. I, who am Charles, was sometime Romeo. In Hamlet, I pondered and doubted. We forget what we have been, drugged with the sleepy bowl of the Present. But when a lively chord in the soul is struck, when the windows for a moment are unbarred, the long and varied past is recovered. We recognise it all. We are no more brief, ignoble creatures; we seize our immortality, and bind together the related parts of our secular being.

Shakspeare was a proper Pagan. He understood the height and depth of humanity in all its tossings on the sea of circumstance, now breasting the waves, mounting even to heaven on their steep sides, and now drifting before the wrath of the tempest. In himself he embraced this whole sphere, the whole of man struggling with the

whole of fortune. But of religion, as it appears in the new dispensation of Christianity, as an element in the soul controlling all the rest, and exhibiting new phenomena of action and passion, he had no experience; almost I had said, he had no conception. The beauty of holiness, the magnanimity of faith, he never saw. Probably he was an unbeliever in the creed of his time, and looked on the New Testament as a code that hampered the freedom of the mind which was a law unto itself, and as intruding on the sublime mystery of our fate. Hence, he delighted to get out of the way of Christianity, and not to need to calculate any of its influences.

"What's brave, what's noble,

Let's do it after the high Roman fashion."

This was as he felt, and in Cleopatra it is just sentiment; but his men and women in the English plays often talk in the same ante-Christian style as Cæsar or Coriolanus. Now, our sign boards tell of Titian; and society everywhere attests in one mode or other the effects of Christianity. Certain fundamental truths sink and sow themselves in every soil, and the most irreligious man unconsciously supposes them in all his life and conversation. Shakspeare had in its perfection the poetic inspiration; applied himself without effort to the whole world, the sensible, the intelligent. Into all beauty, into all suffering, into all action, into all affection, he threw himself, and yet not himself, for he seems never committed in his plays; but his genius. His genius was thus omnific and all-sympathizing. He seems to have sat above this hundred-handed play of his imagination, pensive and conscious. He read the world off into sweetest verse as one reads a book. He in no way mixed himself the individual with the scenes he drew, and so his poetry was the very coinage of nature and life. The pregnant cloud disburdened itself and meaning became expression. In proportion as the prophet sees things from a personal point of view, and speaks under the influence of any temperament, interest, or prepossession, his eye is not clear, his voice is husky, the oracle philippizes. The perfect inspiration is that which utters the beauty and truth, seen pure and unconfused as they lie in the lap of the Divine Order.