upon which the poet may take his station to
survey the world and all that it contains. But it has long ceased to
be his function to set forth, in any kind of metre, systems of
speculative thought or purely scientific truths. This was not the
case in the old world. There was a period in the development of the
intellect when the abstractions of logic appeared like intuitions,
and guesses about the structure of the universe still wore the garb
of fancy. When physics and metaphysics were scarcely distinguished
from mythology, it was natural to address the Muses at the outset of
a treatise of ontology, and to cadence a theory of elemental
substances in hexameter verse. Thus the philosophical poems of
Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles belonged essentially to a
transitional stage of human culture.

There is a second species of poetry to which the name of
philosophical may be given, though it better deserves that of
mystical. Pantheism occupies a middle place between a scientific
theory of the universe and a form of religious enthusiasm. It
supplies an element in which the poetic faculty can move with
freedom: for its conclusions, in so far as they pretend to
philosophy, are large and general, and the emotions which it excites
are co-extensive with the world. Therefore, Pantheistic mysticism,
from the Bhagavadgita of the far East, through the Persian Soofis,
down to the poets of our own century, Goethe, and Shelley, and
Wordsworth, and Whitman, and many more whom it would be tedious to
enumerate, has generated a whole tribe of philosophic singers.

Yet a third class may be mentioned. Here we have to deal with what
are called didactic poems. These, like the metaphysical epic, began
to flourish in early Greece at the moment when exact thought was
dividing itself laboriously from myths and fancies. Hesiod with his
poem on the life of man leads the way; and the writers of moral
sentences in elegiac verse, among whom Solon and Theognis occupy the
first place, follow. Latin literature contributes highly artificial
specimens of this kind in the 'Georgics' of Virgil, the stoical
diatribes of Persius, and the 'Ars Poetica' of Horace. Didactic
verse had a special charm for the genius of the Latin race. The name
of such poems in the Italian literature of the Renaissance is
legion. The French delighted in the same style under the same
influences; nor can we fail to attribute the 'Essay on Man' and the
'Essay on Criticism' of our o