perfectly clear and whose language has been simple, -poems which have addressed themselves to the direct intelligence of men. Homer, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare need no mystical commentary to explain their meaning; like Mark Antony, they "only speak right on." If a poem is obscure, after a reasonably intelligent reading, you may know by that mark alone that it is not worth your while to vex your brain over it. If a poet has not made himself clear, it is his fault and not yours, if you are a person of intellectual capacity. Sunlight, air, water, these are not for the few; nor is poetry to be cooped and confined any more than these. True poetry has a far nobler mission than to puzzle, or to amuse, or even to excite; it is the voice of all that is best in humanity, speaking from man Not all of us can thus speak, but we can hear, and incorporate the poetic spirit in our best and fullest life, day by day. to man. What is that spirit? Many have been the attempts to define it; but, after all, we can only say, in the words of Shelley, "All feel, yet see thee never." Or again, is not poetry to be described, as nearly as we can describe it, in two more lines from the same fine song of the "Voice in the Air "? 66 Lamp of Earth, where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness." Matter is ruled by mind, and the best power of mind is sentiment. The Kingdom of God, said the founder of the Christian religion, is within you. It is the mission of poetry, by means of noble words in fit metrical forms, to show to man the supernal beauty of the world of things and thought and action, and to lead him therewith to broaden his own life and other lives in the eternal upward march. Let us turn, for an illustration of the place of sentiment in the intellectual life, to the heart of that great quickening movement in the world's history which we call the Renaissance, or New Birth. Of all the cities in the world, none is so rich as Florence in memorials of mind. As one stands beneath the magisterial pinnacle of the Palazzo Vecchio, beholds the unrivalled proportions of Brunelleschi's dome, marks the serious yet cheerful unity of Giotto's tower, studies the stories on the bronze gates of the Baptistery, reads the mortuary inscriptions in the somewhat monotonous nave of the church of Santa Croce, bares his head in the cell of Savonarola, springs heavenward with the thought and the vision of Fra Angelico's angels, is touched with the humanity of Andrea del Sarto's tenderly sweet Madonna on the frescoed wall, or roams through the incomparable riches of the Uffizi and the Pitti, the glory of the City of Flowers seems an epitome of all that man has ever done or dreamed. On the steps of Santa Maria Novella, Boccaccio's gay refugees, in all the lust of life, stood preparing their flight from the plague-smitten town; through Florentine streets walked Petrarch with the soul of Laura imprisoned in his heart; and in the shade of the cathedral is still shown that Sasso di Dante where sat the greatest poet of medieval Europe as he gazed with sad eyes on the men and women and children passing by. And all these towers and domes, these narrow streets and unspacious squares, these rich treasures of church and convent and gallery, make up the Florence of power-power displayed in the loves and hates a half-a-thousand years agone. Indeed, if all these treasures of the Florentine past were to perish save one alone "Though the many lights dwindle to one light, if only a single picture in a single art gallery remained, it would still tell us (if that picture were the "Primavera " of Botticelli) what it was that informed this strange city of the past, and made poem, palace, dome, tower, gate, cell, fagot, angel, Madonna, and Tribuna the things they were and are. On a westward wall of the Academy of Fine Arts, one of the lesser galleries of prodigal Florence, hangs what the guide-books call' an "allegorical representation of Spring; on the left Mercury and the Graces, Venus in the middle, and on the right Flora, with a personification of Fertility and a god of wind." Possibly so; perhaps, as others think, an allegory of the four seasons; but surely the first great picture in which there was the unmistakable and perennial glory of pure imagination, amid the conventional mythology or hagiology of the time. With this picture before him one exclaims with Dante: Incipit vita nova; here indeed is an epitome of the Renaissance, as Florence is an epitome of the mediæval world. Life, after all, these lovely figures seem to say, is a poor and cruel thing without beauty of doing and of being; nor can beauty really be, without the heart that makes-the sentiment that shapes and consecrates. And the poet or the painter in our age, as in Botticelli's, is he who puts these lessons of the beautiful before the ears and eyes of man. "We usually," says Ruskin, "fall into much error by considering the intellectual powers as having dignity in themselves, and separable from the heart; whereas the truth is, that the intellect becomes noble and ignoble according to the food we give it, and the kind of subjects with which it is conversant." So we relearn an old lesson from an old text. The opening years of the twentieth century are in some ways strikingly similar to the beginning of the eighteenth. The reigns of the Georges, in our motherland, were a period of rationalism; the first years of Edward's rule are a time of materialism, in which the ancient truths of art and righteousness must be restated for an "engineering age." Feeling can never die while man lives, nor can art cease to strive to portray what man has seen or dreamed; but in the history of the world a period of imagina tion is ever followed by a time of criticism and comment or perhaps dull negation. After Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton came Pope and Johnson and the echoes of Voltaire; after Scott and Tennyson Spencer and Huxley. Just a hundred years ago appeared the lyrical ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, that "new world" of romantic poetry; and thus genius is ever reincarnated from time to time. The new man must ever and anon be summoned forth by the new prophet; the poet must cry out in the arid waste of a mere life that is not true living. A time of national expansion is the very time for us to exclaim anew that we are children of ideas, and that ideas are born of sentiment. When a scientist declares that literature is a "frill" which ought not to have any place in a modern college curriculum, so crowded with scientific and really useful studies, there is need to go back to Botticelli for a fresh start and a little elementary instruction; for to-day, as in his picture, the cold north wind is cruelly blowing upon the gaysomehearted spirit of creative beauty, and clutching her with his freezing fingers. He who despises, or deems superfluous in a practical age, the "frills" of Dante or Tennyson, should read for his reproof and instruction in righteousness such wise words as those lately spoken by an American who stood alike for letters and for right living: "Commonly, a man is said to be practical who looks out keenly for his own interests, and succeeds in getting possession of much property. He may do this by industry and thrift, or he may do it by taking advantage of the weakness of his fellows. In either case success entitles him to the reputation of being practical. Or a man may be entitled to this epithet if he concerns himself only with material things, and if the product of his effort is strictly utilitarian. In short, a man is practical if he gets what he wants, and keeps it. This is a low view of life, and wholly leaves out of consideration the most important part of it. The true and broad meaning of practical' is a wise adaptation of means to the end in view, and the end in view is an essential part of the practicality. A man who succeeds in making a good sonnet is as practical as a man who manu |