"What makes a hero ?-Not success, not fame, Inebriate merchants and the loud acclaim

We will quote another remarkable passage | part, however, it is slow, serious, profound; in which Thought and Sentiment are enliven- soft, yet irresistible; consummating; not ed by Passion-Passion in a subordinate ca- killing, but making alive; no volcanic outpacity, as sustaining moral declamation, and break, but that far mightier fire from the contradistinguishing poetic eloquence from heart of things which is revealed only in its versified rhetoric. It is the conclusion of benefits, and which, equably diffusing itself, the poem "written after the return of Sir quickens the sacred growth of fruit and Henry Pottinger from China," and sums up flower. There is no subject which poetry a vindication of Captain Elliot, Sir Henry's can worthily treat without passion, for it is predecessor in the Chinese command: by love only that it penetrates into the life of things, and knows them. The wondering faith of the child, and the ardor of manly passion, are united in that keen poetic sensibility to all beauty, without which the poetic faculty itself lacks a vocation and remains mute. It is not merely when he touches personal relations that Mr. Wordsworth is impassioned, as in his "Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman," or in that poem, "There is a change, and I am poor," in which so little is expressed, and so much implied; or when, records the "Thought of a Briton on the lifting up his heart to embrace nations, he Subjugation of Switzerland," or breathes that devout dirge over "The Extinction of the Venetian Republic." It is to be found also in all his loftier communings with nature, when he interprets her lonely sighs, or deciphers her hieroglyphics, or "counts for old Time,"

Of glutted avarice-caps tossed up in the air,
Or pen of journalist with flourish fair,
Bells pealed, stars, ribands, and a titular name,
These, though his rightful tribute, he can spare;
His rightful tribute, not his end or aim,
Or true reward; for never yet did these
Refresh the soul or set the heart at ease.
-What makes a hero? An heroic mind
Expressed in action, in endurance proved;
And if there be pre-eminence of right,
Derived thro' pain well suffered, to the height
Of rank heroic, 'tis to bear unmoved,
Not toil, not risk, not rage of sea or wind,
Not the brute fury of barbarians blind,

But worse-ingratitude and poisonous darts
Launched by the country he had served and
loved:

This with a free unclouded spirit pure,
This in the strength of silence to endure,
A dignity to noble deeds imparts

Beyond the gauds and trappings of renown;
This is the hero's complement and crown;
This missed, one struggle had been wanting still,
One glorious triumph of the heroic will,

One self-approval in his heart of hearts."

Another form of poetic truth is the truth of passion. Without reality, poetic passion must ever be insincere. The passion of purely ideal poetry plays in the air with flame that has no heat; and in poetry of a meaner sort, rhetoric and exaggeration are, in fact, a device to hide its absence. Poetic

passion is a subject but little understood. The cravings of ungovernable appetite, and the ravings of impotent self-will, expressed in swelling sentences hysterically broken, pass for passion with very inflammable, or with very cold readers. Passion, however, like that nature from which it springs, is not often in convulsion; and, like that truth which is its sanction, does not always speak in a loud voice. He has no eye for passion who can describe only its agonies. There are indeed seasons when it is "perplexed in the extreme," and when, mounting to its height, it manifests itself in ruin. Even then there is in it a retributive strength, and a light that illumes the waste. For the most

ledged, its equal, if not greater importance in verse has been too frequently disregarded by modern poets. With the merely technical rules of style poetry has indeed little concern; just as in its diction it is able (the more apprehensive method of the imagination superseding such aid) to dispense with many parti cles and copulatives, which are yet necessary in prose as links to unite the leading parts of speech, and define their mutual relations. Those who "build the lofty rhyme" are thus enabled to discard the small stones and rubble, and to rear Cyclopean walls, of materials simple, solid, and proportionally beautiful. But this very independence of what is trivial in style renders attention to its essential principles yet more obligatory. Without a pure and masterly style, a poet may

is based on the relations between passion and truth. Suffering and wrong, so far as they initiate a soaring spirit into the mysteries of a painful, yet purifying, reality, are among the wholesome bitters on which the poet feeds. They give him that tender, yet austere and sharp seriousness, without which the imagination cannot work through the sphere which it must penetrate before it issues into the perfect day. The error, how-be popular, but he will never become classiever, into which Mr. Shelley fell, and to a far greater degree Lord Byron, (who, as the former tells us, suggested the lines which we have just quoted,) was the assumption-a most unreasonable one-that the poet must himself be the victim of suffering and wrong. The world is always full of these trials; and surely, if the poet's sympathies be but large enough, he may kindle into a wise indignation, or "share the passion of a just disdain," though he should have no personal injuries to resist or to revenge. Sympathy is essentially connected with reality; egotism, therefore, to a certain degree, must be the antagonist of both. Yet egotism-even the egotism of the most limited egotist-is often mistaken for passion. Lord Byron would in many poems have been thought cold but for the energetic exhibition of self-love-with some persons, to be sure, the least inconstant form of affection. The same is true of Rousseau, who felt much more for himself than others, and whose egotism is commonly reflected in that of his readers, when not re

sented by it. Rightly to sympathize, the poet ought to be endowed in equal measure with unselfishness and with sensibility; and poetic passion favors this twofold endowment, for it merges the poet's merely individual being, in proportion as it melts it into that of surrounding things.

Truth of passion, though rooted in the soil of a truthful and poetic heart, (and where the moral ground of poetry is shallow, its intellectual growths will ever be stunted,) is in no small degree promoted, as well as guarded, by another species of truth--truth of style. While the importance of style in prose compositions is universally acknow

cal. It is also that branch of the poetic art
in which the poet meets with the largest re-
turn for his expenditure of care; for art, in
its higher departments, works unconsciously,
and but sophisticates itself when it works by
rule. His care, however, must be habitual,
conscientious, and temperate; and not the
overstrained and morbid labor which corrects
and re-corrects until the unity of the original
conception is lost, and all freshness has been
dissipated. Any excessive tension of the
faculties precludes the highest species of
art-art which hides itself. A truthful
style is a vigorous style; which of itself
gives individuality to character, vividness to
description, weight, purpose, and point to sen-
timent and to thought. A truthful style
shows itself in two different ways; truth of
conception--that is, of the logic and the
rhetoric of poetry--and truth of diction.
The logic of poetry is indeed distantly rela-
ted, if at all, to the syllogism of the under-
standing; but it is not the less certain, as
has been observed before now, that the im-

agination works by a logical method of its
own; and that he only who is impressed by
its laws is capable of those great acts of in-
duction, deduction, and inference, which are
to be found alike in Shakspeare and Bacon,
and without which a great poetic creation
would be as impossible as a course of scien-
tific discovery. The logic of poetry has,
however, humbler functions likewise.
just principle of division, and a sagacious
distribution of the subject matter, are neces-
sary, if poetry is to keep as well as to take
possession of the hearts of men, which sel-
dom continue permanently divorced from
their intellects; and it is for want of some
moderate appreciation of categories, that

A

When Mr.

there are to be found in many a popular | cious expressions, which, as it were, admire poem passages which were they not tricked themselves, and mar the context. out in gay apparel, would carry on their Shelley speaks of very faces the absurdity and incongruity which really belongs to them.

"That paradise of exiles, Italy,"

"The dome of thought, the palace of the soul,"

we neither deny the energy nor the cleverness of the expression. But would Homer, or Dante, or Shakspeare, have variegated their poetic robes with such purple patches? As soon would they have cut capers at a coronation. These are the sallies of an irregular ambition, catching at applause; and they are as inconsistent with that grave, unrapacious, scarcely conscious desire for sympathy, which ought to be a poet's external stimulus, as with that quietness and confidence which is his internal strength.

A deficiency of truthfulness in style is yet more noticeable in the bad rhetoric than in and Lord Byron describes the human skull as the false logic of ordinary poetry. It displays itself first by a superabundance of figures. A metaphor tells us what things are like, not what they are. In many cases indeed this is all that we can know; and the higher species of symbol, by tracing things apparently diverse, to a common law, is unquestionably an organ of philosophy. It is in fact the basis of that analogical argument upon which Bishop Butler has built so stately a fabric, and of that "Philosophia Prima,' spoken of by Bacon: as such, too, it is of the same kind with the parable, the great oriental method of instruction, which, in one form or another, has flourished on every soil. Where employed in its place it seems impossible to prescribe a limit to its use; for it is the most concise, the most piercing, and the most luminous method of imparting ideas at once comprehensive and subtle. But figurative writing has passed the limits within which it can minister to the purely beautiful, as often as it so penetrates the subject intended to be illustrated, as to destroy its apparent solidity, and to leave no quiet surface for the repose of light and shade. Nor do figures, when used out of place, simply fail in effect. They are exposed to a yet more serious charge. If brought in to make plainer what is already plain, they but confuse the understanding and divert the attention. The result is worse still, if they are introduced for the purpose of ornament; for they then betray an unsusceptibility on the part of the poet to that primal beauty of truth, which finds in obtrusive ornament only an incumbrance. But there is another form of error more mischievous than mere excess. It is, by incongruous images, and yet more by broken or absolutely false metaphors, that untruthfulness in the rhetoric of poetry is fatally evinced. In most such cases there will be a coldness about them, and probably a prolixity of expression, which prove that they were but after-thoughts. Another and more common defect in style is the use of quasimetaphors in its ordinary texture; a tawdriness which, without imparting significance, destroys all manly plainness, and produces nothing but what is incoherent and inconclusive. Analogous to this defect is that of showy lines, ambitious point, and over-viva

Another element in style alluded to above, is that of diction. Here, also, the first requisite is truth. Unequivocal words alone carry weight with them. Vivid truth prevents diffuseness also; for truth implies character, and it is through brief, select expression, that thoughts exhibit their characteristic features with a prominence unblunted by details. Clearness and intensity are thus found together; and to write with these is to write with force. Words are frequently called the dress of thought; but they stand to it in a much closer relation, clothing it consubstantially as the skin covers the body, or as the bark covers the tree. We think in language: as our thoughts are, our words will be; nor can we think truthfully without rejecting vague constructions, grammatical irregularities or feebleness, and excess in the use of poetical licenses. Their is a mystery in words; and it is impossible to explain the full power which they possess not only in consequence of their defined meaning, and through their associations, but also from those untranslateable ideas which are yet effectually insinuated into us by their harmony and cadence. Very stately processions of words are frequently marshalled with a very prosaic pageantry; and, on the other hand, where but two or three words are found together, the spirit of poetry may be in the midst of them. It is the singular felicity of our language that, by its two elements, the Latin and the Saxon, two different species of impression are conveyed. Words of a Latin origin address the intellect chiefly, and impart their meaning to it with

essential by becoming blind to the accidental. | In nature, as in art, the superfluous is ever at war with the beautiful, the strong, and the spiritual. Old truths have, therefore, still to be rediscovered, the good to be disinterred, and the beautiful to be revealed again. Though the arts that minister to nature can but give her of her own, yet that they can give; and poetic generalization, by simply wafting away, as with a purer breath, the cloud that obscures her countenance, imparts to her

"The light that never was on sea or land,

pardoned by all to whom poetry is but an amusement, an opiate, or a dram. False sentiment will find many to sympathize with it; false passion will pass with many who yet could well appreciate true passion; false logic and a general artificialness in style will meet with few sufficiently in earnest to demand truth in such matters, or who have faith enough even to be sceptics. But false description is a scandal to the outward senses; and if a poet plants his willows on the mountain side, or insists upon the yeomanly oak bathing its unbound tresses in the flowing stream, still more should his apples be bold enough to come "before the swallow dares," and his lambs begin to bleat for a better shepherd "when rivers rage and rocks grow cold," he may possibly, if not very much the fashion, fall in with readers who will object to being deceived with their eyes open. Untruthfulness in description is sometimes called want of keeping. We should have included this want by name in our black list of offenses against poetic truth, but that, properly understood, it is less a special offense than the essence of them all. For, truth of keeping is the largest form of truth. Where it exists, not only will truth be found in the various departments which we have enumerated, but those departments of poetry, and indeed all its elements, will be combined in just proportions. More than a certain amount of moral sentiment, for example, will not accord with more than a certain proportion of human passion, however genuine both of them may be. The diction, which would be prolix in dramatic or narrative verse, may be in admirable keeping with that meditative poetry in which a thought has a substantive value on its own fundamental anti-account-" filling its horn with light" as it advances from phase to phase, till it stands before us full-faced. Thus also the degree in which description should enter into a poem is a question of keeping. A picture by Raphael would not have been improved, if the landscape part of it had been more prominent.

The consecration and the poet's dream." The truth of these principles is confirmed by their congruity with the philosophy of the drama, by which it is shown that the ideal in character is attained without any sacrifice of the individual: they coincide, indeed, with that whole theory of art, as old as Aristotle, by which representation is distinguished from servile copying. On such grounds only can art vindicate its proper place, as something above that nature in the concrete, which is the sole domain of the sensual eye; and as rising therefore into harmony with that universal, creative, and exalted nature which the poetic insight alone can reach. It is only when we acknowledge the affinity of the beautiful and the true perceiving beauty itself to be but the outward manifestation of the highest truth which commeasures and reconciles the truth of idea and the truth of fact-that we can appreciate the dignity of art. Art, so considered, becomes the excellence of imagined beauty, yet not illusively; and is at once the widest reality of nature's truth, yet the freest from all participation in the common or the unclean. The "

thesis" under which successive facts are reduced to ideas, exists equally in the arts as in the sciences, where Dr. Whewell has used it for the expression of philosophical truth.

Untruthfulness in the delineation of outward nature is the fault by which a poet's insincerity is most easily detected; though this is a fault not likely ever to exist in one department only. Untruthfulness in the representation of character is of course observable only by those who have an eye for character; and its absence will be easily

It is not, indeed, the quantity and prominence of the landscape only, but its character also, which is determined by the general character of the picture; and it has been poetically pointed out, that those early masters whose predominant characteristics were aspiration and sanctity, chose, as a fit interpreter for the saintly forms in the Human Head and Countenance," (p. 35 and note E,) foreground, a sky whose purity and simtwo passages very applicable to our present purplicity should be expressive of the infinity of pose, from Cousin's "Philosophy of the Beautiful." "Art must devote itself to the production of the ideal and of nature equally."

*"Modern Painters," vol. ii. p. 40.