and mere sense cannot see the divine.

The two powers,

however, are connected, and the realities which they regard are bridged by the imagination. Imagination is the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, a musical ladder from sense to spirit.

But while imagination is a fellow-worker both with spirit and with sense, it must evidently have a different manner of working with each. God is always far more than we can think of, whereas Nature does not always come up to our wish. If, therefore, on the one hand, it has to raise nature, on the other, it must rise to God. Bacon says, that while the imagination is employed in adapting the shows of things to the heart's desire, it is the part of reason to buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. But this is only true for the things of sense the province of the imagination in spiritual things is to buckle and bow the mind to embrace these as they are. It has thus always a twofold work to accomplish a subjective as well as an objective raising; in the one case, exalting the realities of sense to our human ideal; in the other, elevating our human thought to a mount from which, as from Carmel and Pisgah, or on which, as on Horeb, Sinai and Tabor, spiritual realities may be witnessed.

If this judgment be well grounded, it will enable us to see the one-sidedness and utter weakness of Johnson's daring assertion, that there can be no religious

poesy; a statement put so plausibly that such men as Christopher North, John Keble, and James Montgomery have thought it worth their while to sift it in detail, and almost word by word; and which, often as it has been thus called in question, has not often been fairly rebutted. Johnson carries all before him, if you but admit that his definition of poetry (the same as that of Bacon) is sufficiently broad; if you admit that poesy always pleases "by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the mind than things themselves afford." The essential part of this definition says, that in poesy a grateful ideal is presented to the mind; it is unessential whether that ideal be more or less than reality. In saying that it must always be more, Johnson begs the whole question; and if this be granted, all is lost; for truly Omnipotence cannot be exalted, Infinity cannot be amplified, Perfection cannot be improved. Reply, however, that religious poesy seeks not to heighten the Divine, but to raise our minds to the perception of the Divine, and he in turn is foiled. His theory is thus at fault à priori; and à posteriori it fares no better. For although it be most true that pure spirit can easily as a sunbeam soar to altitudes which, from want of buoyant air, the wings of imagination can never approach, yet whenever it ventures to employ language (and Johnson would most assuredly not allow that worship ceases to be spiritual when it ceases to be silent) it must evidently have descended into that cloudy region which

belongs to imagination even more than to itself; and there, what wonder if the shiny visions of spirit, and the lark-like music of fancy, cross, blend and thrill through each other, as living warp and woof. A distinction however must be noticed between the poetry of heathen worship and that of Christian, since according as our ideal happens to be above or below reality, the work of imagination will be more or less essential. With heathen poets the imagination runs riot and enters the soul of the most spiritual conceptions; for with the most intense anthropomorphism they adapted the nature of their gods to their own desires. The Christian poets endeavour to reach an uncreated God and allow imagination go with them only to the door.

SENSUOUS Concords-which we must run over very rapidly-may be classed under the five senses. Some philosophers would make six, seven, and even eight senses; but the common reckoning is the most trustworthy.

Of all our senses, hearing seems to be the most poetical; and because it requires most imagination. We do not simply listen to sounds, but whether they be articulate or inarticulate, we are constantly translating them into the language of sight, with which we are better acquainted; and this is a work of the imaginative faculty.

Of seeing, it is nothing beyond a truism to observe

that the mere view of any one thing, however agreeable to the eye, is not poetical. Beauty is never a unit; it is plural. (Compare Book III., Part I., Chap. I.) Apart from the associations which belong to them, the sight of a cloudless sky, of a waveless sea, of a green grass plot, does not make poetry. But let any of these be combined with other objects-a sky with clouds or stars, a sea with ships or porpoises, a grassplot with daisies or buttercups; and there is a vision before you which, without help of imagination, you cannot look at so as truly to see it, that is, so as to be able afterwards to picture it before your mind's eye. You cannot behold two things together and recognise them as joined, without imagination; and it is for this reason, that, with all their staring, many see so little. If not one nor two, but dozens and scores of things are mingled together in one picture, as they mostly are, it is not difficult to understand how any gazer whose glance will take them all in, or so much as a tithe, is beholden to imagination even more than to sense. So that the mere survey of anything, especially anything beautiful, whose outline is filled with details not a few, is an act which requires so much imagination as will of itself almost suffice to raise that act to the rank of poetry. And when it is furthermore remembered that the exercise of imagination in one way will be followed by its exercise in many other ways, and must in this instance give motion, by the known laws

of association, to innumerable trains of thought, all beginning in the present show, and connecting it with the past, with the absent and with the future, it will readily be acknowledged that the act must needs be poetical. No man can really behold a landscape, so that, when he turns away, it shall hang like a picture in his mind, and he could sketch it, if he had the art of pencilling, but the mood of his mind so engaged is entitled to the name of poetry.

Smell, however agreeable, is not of itself poetical, but along with other sensations, as the sight of whence it comes, it approaches poetry. And it may be put generally, that any two or more blending sensations enliven and ennoble each other; the sight and hearing of a waterfall, the sight and smell of a rose, the sight and feeling of fire, the sight, taste, and flavour of a pineapple. It is not simply that two pleasures are better than one, but that to encompass both in one act of the mind requires a more perfect, above all, a more active, faculty than mere sense.

Taste is more liable than any other sense to run into grossness, and we take great pains to avoid this. Every boy knows the bad policy of slipping his sugar plums one by one from his pocket into his mouth as fast as he can munch them; and very seldom will he do so, unless from sheer satiety. He understands right well that his pleasure will be heightened in kind as well as strengthened in degree, if he treat his eyes along with his pa