ue Poet of
nature and of man.

We must know how to read that prophet, before we preach from any text in
his book of revelations.

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness."

Why spoke he thus? Because a deep darkness had fallen upon him all alone
in a mountain-cave, and he quaked before the mystery of man's troubled
life.

"He thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perish'd in his pride;
Of him who walk'd in glory and in joy,
Following his plough upon the mountain-side!"

and if they died miserably, "How may I perish!" But they wanted wisdom.
Therefore the marvellous boy drank one bowl drugged with sudden, and
the glorious ploughman many bowls drugged with lingering death. If we
must weep over the woes of Genius, let us know for whom we may rightly
shed our tears. With one drop of ink you may write the names of all

"The mighty Poets in their misery dead."

Wordsworth wrote those lines, as we said, in the inspiration of a
profound but not permanent melancholy; and they must not be profaned by
being used as a quotation in defence of accusations against human
society, which, in some lips, become accusations against Providence. The
mighty Poets have been not only wiser but happier than they knew; and
what glory from heaven and earth was poured over their inward life, up
to the very moment it darkened away into the gloom of the grave!

Many a sad and serious hour have we read d'Israeli, and many a lesson
may all lovers of literature learn from his well-instructed books. But
from the unhappy stories therein so feelingly and eloquently narrated,
has many "a famous ape" drawn conclusions the very reverse of those
which he himself leaves to be drawn by all minds possessed of any
philosophy. Melancholy the moral of these moving tales; but we must look
for it, not into the society that surrounds us, though on it too we must
keep a watchful, and, in spite of all its sins, a not irreverent eye,
but into our own hearts. There lies the source of evil which some evil
power perhaps without us stirs up till it wells over in misery. Then
fiercely turns the wretch first against "the world and the world's law,"
both sometimes iniquitous, and last of all against the rebellious spirit
in his own breast, but for whose own innate corruption his moral being
would have been victorious against all outward assaults, violent