not take the step. "A creating and informing spirit which is with us, and not of us, is recognised everywhere in real and in storied life"; which is said to come to the least of us, as a voice that will be heard, telling us what we must believe, framing our sentences, lending a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence to the dullest of us, so that, like Katerfelto with his hair on end, we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves but at this divine visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwelling-place, and invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech or song. "The poet always recognises a dictation ab extra; and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we talk of his inspiration."1

In the preface to his famous Cancionero, or collection of the poets, Juan de Baena, himself a poet of some mark, of the fifteenth century, is so enraptured with the charms of verse, that he maintains, in honour of the true "maker,” poietes, that he who can produce so much delight must be high born, and "must be inspired of God," his the vision and the faculty divine. It is a commonplace that the poet is born, not made; and it is in connection with this truism that Mr. Dallas urges our inability to command the imagination; we must bide its time: the poet lies in wait for the dawn, and cannot poetise at will. Shelley calls poets the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which ring to battle, and feel not what they inspire, being themselves inspired. Wordsworth's was, avowedly,

1 "And so the orator-I do not mean the poor slave of a manuscript, who takes his thought chilled and stiffened from its mould, but the impassioned speaker who pours it forth as it flows coruscating from the furnace : the orator only becomes our master at the moment when he himself is surprised, captured, taken possession of, by a sudden rush of fresh inspiration. How well we know the flash of the eye, the thrill of the voice, which are the signature and symbol of nascent thought, thought just emerging into consciousness, in which condition, as is the case with the chemist's elements, it has a combining force at other times wholly unknown!"— Mechanism in Thought and Morals, by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Connected in a mighty scheme of truth,

Have each his own peculiar faculty,

Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive

Objects unseen before ;"

and himself he describes as one who, though "the humblest of this band," yet dares to hope

"That unto him hath also been vouchsafed

An insight that in some sort he possesses,

A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things,
Creative and enduring, may become

A power like one of Nature's."

The inspiration of the muse was not, in old times, as Mr. Mill observes, a figure of speech, but the sincere and artless belief of the people; the bard and the prophet were next of kin; Demodocus, at the court of King Alcinous, could sing the Trojan war by revelation from Apollo or from a muse; and Hesiod, in the Theogony, could declare respecting himself that he knew, by the favour of the muses, the past, the present, and the future.1 We read in the records of AngloSaxon poetry how Cadmon, the greatest of Anglo-Saxon poets, who flourished during the youth of Bede, and whose "profoundly religious mind," as Dean Milman characterises it, could not endure the profane songs then current of adventure and battle, fell asleep one evening after withdrawing from the hall as usual in silence and in shame at his inability to sing, when a form appeared to him in a vision, and said, "Sing, O Cædmon!" Cædmon replied that he knew not how to sing, he knew no subject for a song. "Sing," said the visitant, "the creation." The thoughts and the words flashed upon the mind of Cædmon, and the next morning his memory retained the verses, which Bede thought so sublime in the native language as to be but feebly rendered in the Latin. The wonder reached the ears of the

"In a rude age, the suggestions of imagination and strong feeling are always deemed the promptings of a god.”—J. S. Mill, Early Grecian History and Legend.

famous Hilda, the abbess of Whitby; it was at once ascribed to the grace of God. Cædmon was treated as one inspired. 1

Burke, as a young man, is said to have been so deeply impressed by the Night Thoughts of Young, that he not only made a copy of that work his vade mecum, but penned this couplet, not quite worthy of his prose, on the fly leaf:

"Jove claimed the verse old Homer sung,2
But God Himself inspired Young."

"So marvellous did the songs of Cadmon, pouring forth as they did the treasures of biblical poetry, the sublime mysteries of the creation, the fall, the wonders of the Hebrew history, the gentler miracles of the New Testament, the terrors of the judgment, the torments of hell, the bliss of heaven, sound to the popular ear, that they could be attributed to nothing less than Divine inspiration."-Latin Christianity, vol. ii., book iv., chap. iv. The latter day transcendentalist teaches that good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. "The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the eternal mind, than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet." The feeling of all great poets, Mr. Emerson affirms, has accorded with this. They found the verse, not made it. The muse brought it to them.-See the chapter on "Art," in his latest collection of essays.

2 Schleusner enumerates poets among the persons to whom the term OEÓTVEVOTOS may be applied. A highly influential and equally unorthodox divine among ourselves contends, that when the writers of Greece or Rome intimate the pretensions of a poet, a pythoness, or an augur, to divine authority, and when the Israelites affirm the inspiration of their prophets, the two claims are identical; that both parties mean the same thing, viz. that the sentiments and feelings of their great national authorities have a superhuman origin; and that the only difference (except that which attends the polytheistic nature of the one religion and the monotheistic of the other) is, that we reject the first claim and admit the second. But this must not beguile us into an excursus on the technical distinction established between "classical" and "theological" inspiration. If not as well established as that distinction, not less generally accepted is the indefinite use of the term in the sense indicated by Cicero, where he says that no man was ever really great without some portion of divine inspiration; nemo vir magnus, sine aliquo afflatu divino, unquam fuit. Cicero himself is reverenced by the Christian philosopher Lactantius, as having expounded (Hooker like) the functions of "holy, heavenly law" with "a voice almost divine." And Lactantius professes to regard such persons, "speaking thus the truth without design,'

as

"divining by some kind of inspiration." Or, in the sense again claimed by Columbus, when "animated by a heavenly fire" he came to plead his cause before Ferdinand and Isabella, and by them was treated as worthy of all acceptation: "Who will doubt that this light was from the holy Scriptures, illumining you [the sovereigns] as well as myself with rays of marvellous brightness." He held that his " understanding had been opened by the Deity, as by a palpable hand," so as to discover the navi

Burke's own oratory, supreme as it was in its kind, was scarcely of the kind that in Chatham seemed so like inspiration; for so vivid and impetuous, we are told, were the elder Pitt's bursts of oratory, that they appeared to be even beyond his own control; instead of his ruling them, they often ruled him, and flashed forth unbidden. "As in the oracles of old," says Earl Stanhope, "it appeared not that he spake, but the spirit of the Deity within." But to the poets again. Here is one of

them, modern in time and tone, avowing his

"Belief that God inspires the poet's soul,-
That He gives eyes to see and ears to hear
What in His realm holds finest ministry
For highest aptitudes and needs of man,
And skill to mould it into forms of art

Which shall present it to the world he serves.
Sometimes the poet writes with fire; with blood

gation to the Indies. "He considered himself under Divine inspiration," says one of his biographers, "imparting the will of Heaven, and fulfilling the high and holy purposes for which he had been predestined." What Swedenborg laid claim to, we are told, was not "inspiration," but to an opening of his spiritual sight, and a rational instruction in spiritual things, which was granted, he said, "not for any merit of his," but to enable him to convey to the world a real knowledge of the nature of heaven and hell, and thus of man's future existence. Of constant occurrence in miscellaneous literature, both sacred and secular, orthodox and heterodox, old and new, are such incidental passages as this in one of Dr. Channing's letters: "I will send my books with pleasure. I know they contain some great truths, written, not from tradition, but from deep conviction, from the depths of my soul, may I not say, from inspiration? I mean nothing miraculous, does not God speak in us all? But in the 'earthen vessel there is still a 'heavenly treasure.' Of this I am sure. I will therefore send my books, with all their imperfections," etc. Elsewhere he speaks of his consciousness of a mysterious energy (in composition) which comes and goes, by what laws he cannot tell. But "I should be ungrateful not to feel that it has sometimes visited me," and it "is welcomed as an inspiration from above. I hope it will not desert me; but I do not presume upon it."

Professor Maurice pronounces the greatest blot in Abelard's celebrated treatise, Sic et Non, to be, his declaring that the fathers of old had the Spirit of God, and that he and his contemporaries were bound to pay them reverence because they had not: "a disclaimer which no Christian man has a right to make." If the fathers wrote whatever was good and universal in their works, whatever was not the result of the crudities of their minds or of their age, under the guidance of a higher Spirit than their own, Abelard, contends the author of the Religions of the World, could only divine their meaning, could only enter into sympathy with them, in so far as he was illuminated by that same Spirit.

Sometimes; sometimes with blackest ink.
It matters not. God finds His mighty way
Into his verse."

But note like this stirs not the wind of every day, exclaims Sydney Dobell's impassioned monk: and 'tis the ear to know it, woo it, wait for it, and stand amid a Babel deaf to other speech, that makes a poet. The good man hears the voice in which God speaks to men :

The poet

In some rapt moment of intense attendance,
The skies being genial and the earthly air
Propitious, catches on the inward ear
The awful and unutterable meanings
Of a Divine soliloquy."

It is in his capacity of literary critic that Professor Moir, treating of the poetry of the Hebrews, which he describes as standing apart from all the rest in solitary grandeur, like a pillar of fire in the poetical wilderness, defines its characteristics to be unequalled majesty of thought and expression, a fervour and flow, which, more than in any other poetry in existence, "suggest the idea of an inspiration or Divine afflatus," dictating through the poet as a mere organ the sublimest ideas in words of corresponding weight and grandeur.

Much has been speculated about what Archer Butler calls that "singular accompaniment" (the demon), which to many minds has invested with the dignity of supernatural inspiration the deeds and words of Socrates; especially when they remember that it was "just about the period when the Hebrew prophets were ceasing, that this celestial light arose in another land." Xenophon's assertion that Socrates pretended to nothing but what was included in the creed of every pious man is dismissed by Mr. Grote as a "not exact" statement of the matter in debate; for it slurs over at least, if it does not deny, that speciality of inspiration from the gods, which those who talked with Socrates believed, and which Socrates himself believed also. By very many, the greatest of the disciples of Socrates, Plato, is accounted among the distinctively inspired.