shepherd's first love song was the first lyric poem. The artist, the poet, the musican, were thus originally one and the same; all seek to express the beautiful, the harmonious, the complete, and all equally point on towards absolute Truth.

Weaving the wild flowers into a garland was the second step in art; weaving the lyric love songs into an heroic poem was the second step in poetry; and the author singing his lines, or accompanying the song on piping reeds (plucked from where they whistled in the wind), was the similar step in music-whilst the light shaft of the cedar and the shadow on the wave suggested the first sculptor's column and the painter's first design. As songs of love and happiness, or of death and sorrow, multiplied, the persons whose memories and virtues they preserved, grew into heroic characters-as trees or hills grow into mountains in the mist, or as mountains magnify as they recede. And as rude men listened to these songs and praises in honour of the brave and the good, they were emulated to become brave and good themselves-the one hero thus becomes a model, and inspires a whole army of heroes; and the one lyric song or hymn is added to till it becomes an Edda, or an Iliad like Homer's. And in this way mankind was educated, and made nobler and more thoughtful and refined, and raised above the brutes-I am speaking here of the very beginning of our race, and when the world was young, and when man had no books, and no schools, and no teachers, and no divine revelation even-had nothing but the light of nature. Thus we see the poet, by observing nature, was the father and preserver of art and of all civilisation and refinement for the best art and the highest civilisation are those that are most natural to man, and likest Mother Nature-" Consider the lilies."

The poet seeks the beautiful, the symmetrical, the harmonious, the complete, and what goes to form "the equilibrium of absolute truth." An ugly, unsymmetrical, truncated form does not please the artist's eye, nor the poet's mind. An artist would not paint a man without a head, or eyes, or limb-it would be his torture. Neither could an epic poet, with his coloured words, delineate a life ignoble, twisted, vile. All the greatest

poets of the world have sought heroes for their song. Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, King Arthur, or some baron bold, some Hector or Achilles, have been the themes of the highest poet's songs. And if the hero were in himself defective, the poet, "the maker," the recreator, could not leave him so, but covered the defects and blotches with a loving hand, suppressed the bulges, and made his hero as complete and perfect as the poet's mind could desire or imagine a hero to be.

But when the poet saw his youug hero full of promise and of opening greatness, saw him cut down suddenly by accident and death, he could not leave him thus truncated with his mission unfulfilled. The poet could not believe that nature meant a lie, or made promises without fulfilment sometime, somewhere; for the poet's mind cannot rest satisfied till he find the harmony and beauty and completeness natural and necessary to all perfection; his own instincts of justice and finality make him prolong the broken column, and round off the unfulfilled career, and continue the arrested life; just as when we see the curve of the young moon, or when half or three-quarters full, we guess instinctively to what it points, and our mind rests not till it completes the circle, and fills out the orb-for the circle, or ellipse ("the curve that nature loves "), has always been the symbol of perfection and completeness.

That very law which moulds a tear,
And bids it trickle from its source,
That law preserves the earth a sphere,

And guides the planets in their course.

Thus, long before the days of Moses, or of any revelation to the heathen world, the poetic minds of India and Egypt, and of other peoples where men had time to think, had begun to perceive that this life alone did not suffice for the fulfilment of its promises, and for the perfecting and completion of the ideal heroes, who were here untimely slain. Death, indeed, was natural, for it brought "dust to dust," and thus completed the circle, ending where it began. But Life was equally natural, bringing spirit back to spirit, and thus completing its superior circle also; but the eye of sense could not behold this eternal consummation, except by analogy of

reasoning or faith. The heathen seer or poet looked on nature everywhere, and saw it complete and beautiful, for it was perfect and harmonious, without haste or rest always completing its cycles; he saw the sea was complete and beautiful, for it was ever-living, infinite, and endless; the starry sky and worlds beyond were beautiful and perfect, for they were eternal and serene and limitless and grand. And thus at length those infinite skiey worlds supplied the poet's mind with spacious realms and argent fields of light for the complete and rounded-off existence of the noble men and womenwhose career on earth was broken off too soon.

What

Thus the poet's mind evolved again from Nature the idea of eternity, and his longing for a beauty and completeness in the life of man, led him to the conception of an immortality and a life made perfect in the heavens. Hence the explanation of those old mythologies, which every nation had, before their final revelation. meant, think you, those heathen myths, those crude and vast mythologies of India, Egypt, Persia, China, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Scandinavia, or Britain? What meant the Signs of the Zodiac, or the naming of the Stars, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the crossing of the River Styx, the Elysian Fields, Walhalla's Plains, the Iggdrasil Tree of Life, the Parsee Fires, or the Vestal Candles on the tombs ?

They were each and all the outcome of the teaching of the poets among the early nations of the world. They all implied the human longing for another hope, another chance for a higher standard of life and justice, of love and truth, than were meted out in this "brief span of life below; they all implied the human longing for a place of recompense for good deeds done, and of completion for deeds left unfinished here; they all implied the longing of the human soul for its full inheritance in the light and life immortal, which "this vital spark of heavenly flame" in every age and clime felt heir to, and felt destined sometime somewhere to attain.

Hence Love, not able to be fully satisfied on earth, was translated by the poets, and rendered immortal as the Venus or Urania of the sky; hence Justice, too subject to corruption here, was elevated and deified as

Jupiter; and Virgin Beauty, too perishable and evanescent here, was perpetuated and rendered immortal as the blushing Heavenly Pallas; and Cassiopeia, the faithful and constant Ætheopian queen, was transformed into a constellation beside the constant or fixed Polar Star; and the seven fair daughters of Atlas and Ocean, when chased from the earth, were transmuted into the Pleiades, or cluster of stars, and said to have married gods, and the only one which does not shine being she who had married a mortal, and left her affections on earth! And manly strength was deified in Hercules and Thor, and messenger swiftness in Mercury and Hermod; and the early heroes of Homer and Hesiod were counted as gods, like Castor and Pollux, taking an active interest still in the affairs of men. And young

Marcellus, the hope of Rome, on his too early demise, was sung of by Virgil as being among the gods, continuing his beneficent reign: and thus the anguish of loss on earth was healed by the hope of gain in heaven. And the northern heroes, falling in battle, revived when touching the earth, and were borne aloft to Walhalla by the Angel Walkyries, where Iduna dispensed the golden apples of the Tree of Life, which conferred immortal youth. And the poetic minds of Thebes and Memphis discovered a better Egypt and another Nile, with cataracts and inundations like their own, with fields and pleasure grounds, attended by the ever-living dead, who had passed beyond the stars.

Lo! the poor Indian! whose untutored mind

Sees God in clouds or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud science never taught to stray,
Far the solar-walk or milky-way;

Yet simple nature to his hope has given,

Behind the cloud-topp'd hill an humbler heaven.-POPE.

Thus the imagination and intuition of the poet assisted his reason and the reasoning of later philosophers, and led him to round out the broken arch of human life, and to grope his way from his earthly dungeon into the Light and Truth of Eternity. And this poetic intuition is the more remarkable seeing that the Jewish nation-outside the Book of Job and the Psalms, themselves the work of poets-had scarcely one

distinct intimation of a life beyond the grave. And thus in that long night of ages, from the fall of Adam till the birth of Christ, the poet alone offered consolation and beauty and hope to the feeble and fainting children of the Fall; the poet first and alone induced the nations to legislate against vice and immorality and wrong (in Shakspere no villain escapes unpunished), because these qualities were ugly and twisted and vile, and destroy any nation; and induced the nations simultaneously to protect virtue and justice and truth, because these alone were perfect and eternal and beautiful and true, and exalt and establish a nation.

Now, perhaps, you say, all this latter part, or epilogue, is a beautiful picture, but where is Shelley in it? Well, I have shown how Shelley, like the great poets of antiquity, preached truth and justice and goodness and beauty; how his poems are full of Music; how he reverenced Art; and how, in his "Laon and Cythna," his "Prometheus," and his "Adonais," he inculcated Immortality, and placed high up in heaven the mortals he has made immortal. And I now complete the circle, ending where I began, and showing Shelley in the centre. For in this myth-making, or original, creative, philosophic poetry, Shelley is a worthy rival of any of the bards sublime of ancient Greece, or the poets of Hindostan, who sang in their sacred Vedas of a single Dyaus, or Deity, above the blue vault of the sky, and of a future life of the soul, some three thousand years before the birth of Christ, by whom, "in the fulness of time," life and immortality were brought from this thin poetic and exclusive intuition into the full light of the glorious Gospel for all the children of men.