THE PLACE OF POETRY IN LIFE.

BY CHARLES FRANCIS RICHARDSON.

BEAUTY, Sooner or later, comes to its own; but no man perceives it all at once. Even the undying poetry of the world around us must be brought to the notice of growing minds. It is no wonder, then, that a taste for poetry in literature is often undeveloped.

Some people read a great deal of poetry, with constant zest and unfailing advantage; others, though they may be "great readers" of other classes of literature, find little pleasure or profit in poetry. Is it a duty to read poetry? Should those who seem to have no natural taste for it endeavor to cultivate a taste; or should they rest content with the conclusion that certain minds appreciate, and profit by, poetical compositions, while other minds have no capacity for their enjoyment?

It may not be a downright duty to like poetry, or to try to like it; but certainly it is a misfortune that so large and lovely a division of the world's literature should be lost to any reader. The absence of a poetic taste is a sad indication of a lack of the imaginative faculty; and without imagination what is life?

If a reader finds that the ideal has little or no place in his intellectual existence or in his daily

processes of thought and feeling, then he should consider, with all soberness, the fact that a Godgiven power is slipping away from him—a power without which his best faculties must become atrophied; without which he loses the greater part of the enjoyment of life, day by day; without which, in very truth, he cannot see all the glory of the open door of the Kingdom of Heaven. Children are poets; they find fairy-land in a poor broken set of toy crockery or in a ragged company of brokennosed dolls. Their powers of imagination ought never to be lost in the humdrum affairs of a worka-day world; their habit of discovering the ideal in the real is one which cannot be laid aside without great detriment to the individual life and character. There may, then, be persons who "have no capacity for poetry," and who cannot cultivate a taste for it; but this inability, if real, is to be mourned as a mental blindness and deafness, shutting out the greater part of the universe from sight and hearing ; for "the most real things in the world are those that neither men nor children can see."

There is, of course, a great deal of nobly imaginative literature which is not poetry, in the technical sense; but if one can read Hawthorne or the Waverley Novels with pleasure, he is quite sure to find no stumbling-block in "Ulalume" or "The Lady of the Lake." It is the poetic spirit that we should recognize and take to our hearts, whatever may be the outward form in which it may be enshrined. Poetry, said Poe, is "the rhythmical creation of beauty ";—that is, it is one of many ways of expressing in permanently beautiful form

man's ideas of what he has seen or imagined. No other division of creative art possesses such universality, such intelligibility, as does this art of song.

The beginning of the love of poetry lies in the individual mind; for its development one must seek his material from the treasures around him, and must work out his methods of utilizing that material with the same care that he applies to other departments of intellectual exercise. Let him, if he finds his taste in need of cultivation, begin with such poems as he likes; read them more than once; learn their teachings; apprehend their inner spirit and purpose. Whatever the beginning, it is sure to lead to something better, if the reader will but resolutely determine to know what the writer meant to say; to see the picture that he portrayed; and to share his enthusiasm and warmth of feeling.

This cultivation of the intelligence is essential to the highest success even in daily drudgery, in politics, and in the commercial business of the world. No one is too dull, or too prosaic, or too much absorbed in the routine of "practical life," to be absolved from the care of his imaginative powers; and no one is likely to find that this care will not repay him even in a practical sense. It is the old alternative of "eyes and no eyes." He who thinks wisely, he who perceives quickly that which others do not see at all, is better equipped for any work than one whose mind works slowly and feebly, and whose apprehensions have grown rusty from disuse.

Poetry is not for the few, but for the many, for all. The world's greatest poems, with few exceptions, have been poems whose meaning has been

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 to 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.

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 "?

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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,