oo long;
Still true to reason, though intent on sport,
His wit ne'er drives his wisdom out of court;
A brooklet now, a noble stream anon,
Careering in the meadows and the sun;
A mighty ocean next, deep, far and wide,
Earth, life and Heaven, all imaged in its tide!
Oh! when the master bends him to his art,
How the mind follows, how vibrates the heart;
The mighty grief o'ercomes us as we hear,
And the soul hurries, hungering, to the ear;
The willing nature, yielding as he sings,
Unfolds her secret and bestows her wings,
Glad of that best interpreter, whose skill
Brings hosts to worship at her sacred hill!

[Footnote 1: The Italian.]

[Footnote 2: Norman.]

[Footnote 3: The French.]

IV.--SPENSER.

It was for Spenser, by his quaint device
To spiritualize the passionate, and subdue
The wild, coarse temper of the British Muse,
By meet diversion from the absolute:
To lift the fancy, and, where still the song
Proclaimed a wild humanity, to sway
Soothingly soft, and by fantastic wiles
Persuade the passions to a milder clime!
His was the song of chivalry, and wrought
For like results upon society;
Artful in high degree, with plan obscure,
That mystified to lure, and, by its spells,
Making the heart forgetful of itself
To follow out and trace its labyrinths,
In that forgetfulness made visible!
Such were the uses of his Muse; to say
How proper and how exquisite his lay,
How quaintly rich his masking--with what art
He fashioned fairy realms and paints their queen,
How purely--with how delicate a skill--
It needs not, since his song is with us still!

V.--MILTON.

The master of a single instrument,
But that the Cathedral Organ; Milton sings
With drooping spheres about him, and his eye
Fixed steadily upward, through its mortal cloud,
Seeing the glories of Eternity!
The sense of the invisible and true
Still present to his soul, and in his song;
The consciousness of duration through all time,
Of work in each condition, and of hopes
Ineffable, that well sustain through life,
Encouraging through danger and in death,
Cheering, as with a promise rich in wings!
A godlike voice that, through cathedral towers
Still rolls, prolonged in echoes, whose deep tones
Seem born of thunder, that subdued to music
Soothe whe