sity to
pass into poesy, and can hardly help being passionate and metrical? If
so, might not the omission of poets, purely as being such, from a
conspectus of the speculative writers of any time, lead to erroneous
conclusions, by giving an undue prominence in the estimate of all such
philosophizing as could most easily, by its nature, refrain from
passionate or poetic expression? Thus, would philosophy, or one kind
of philosophy in comparison with another, have seemed to had been in
such a diminished condition in Britain about the year 1830, if critics
had been in the habit of counting Wordsworth in the philosophic list
as well as Coleridge, Mackintosh, Bentham, and James Mill? Was there
not more of what you might call Spinozaism in Wordsworth than even in
Coleridge, who spoke more of Spinoza? But that hardly needs all this
justification, so far as Mr. Tennyson is concerned, of our reckoning
_him_ in the present list. He that would exclude In "Memoriam" (1850)
and "Maud" (1855) from the conspectus of the philosophical literature
of our time, has yet to learn what philosophy is. Whatever else "In
Memoriam" may be, it is a manual for many of the latest hints and
questions in British Metaphysics."

The soi-disant philosophers and classifiers of the sciences and arts
who will not permit such poets as Shelley and Tennyson to be put in
the category of philosophers, remind one very forcibly of the passage
in Macbeth: "The earth has bubbles, as the water has, and these are of
them!"

As a poet and not as a poet, as an acknowledged legislator for the
race, as a philosopher, (a searcher after, or lover of wisdom) and as
a political and social reformer, it is my intention to treat Shelley
this evening, and having finished my prefatory remarks, will now
regard him in those attributes which peculiarly should enshrine him in
your hearts and mine.

The philosophical theories of advanced thinkers are always tinged with
the reflex of that which called them forth, or impeded them in their
development, consequently social bondage and the "anarch custom" being
always present to Shelley, the great idea ever uppermost to him was
that true happiness is only attainable in perfect freedom: the
atrocious system of fagging, now almost extinct in the English Public
Schools and the tyrannical venality of ushers, deeply impressed
themselves on the mind of Shelley, and he tells us, in the beautiful
lines to his wife, of the remembrance of his end