thoughts of beauty that may be capable of union with it, raises it to the ideal. The naive poet merely expresses the simple inspiration of harmony and delight, excited by the view of that which, while it is real, equals the ideal-the starry host, the beauteous garb of nature, or the simplest promptings of the heavenly passion. The only difficulty in the way of every man's becoming a naive poet, is, that cultivation, civilization, and mutual intercourse, render it difficult for any man to separate his thoughts from thoughts of earth. Thus the untutored savages, almost universally, are naive poets, and hence the beauty of their thoughts and style of language so often commented upon by modern travellers. The superiority of the sentimental poet, who elevates by the power of his thought the things of earth, over one who merely relates impressions as they rise, is thus most evidently manifest. Shakspere, and all the greatest poets of the world, were eminently sentimental; a perfectly naive poet in a civilized country is impossible, although the sentimental poet, if his mind be pure, as the mind of a poet of necessity should be, is frequently naive at times. Shakspere is (if we may say it without profanity) the poet's bible: for every illustration of poetry we had best look to him. Let us select, almost at random, an illustration from his works of the power of sentiment. The volume opens upon this:-in the Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon is telling Puck of the charmed infatuation of Titania for the metamorphosed Bottom; he thus ennobles the idea of a coronet of flowers round an ass's head :

"For she his hairy temples then had rounded
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers;
And that same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flow'ret's eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail."

We do not write for those who are insensible to the exquisite beauty of this sentiment,—this interlacing of things heavenly with things of earth, ennobling the one by its companionship, and yet leaving the other undegraded.

From these remarks the proper test of poetry will readily appear. The first question will be, Is it sentimental or naive? Is the poem sentimental, we must ask, Are the thoughts with which the subject is associated, new? If not, the poem is but a faint echo of a voice. If new, are they ennobling? are they thoughts derived from beauty,

beauty that is of heaven? do they leave an impression of a lovely and exalted feeling? If they do not, the new thoughts are associations with earth,-are wit, if they be imaginative, or else but common-place. Thus, the stars are heavenly objects, but a treatise on astronomy in verse, associating them with the necessities and infirmities of earth would not be poetry, nor wit, but common-place; although wit or poetry, in single passages, might be employed in illustrations. By this rule, Pope, and many others, in the majority of their writings, cease to be poets, but none can doubt they had imagination to a high extent; yet their subjects and their similes are of earth, and they are wits: furbelows and china tea-pots have no place in heaven. We trust we shall be excused, if, in our anxiety to illustrate what we have stated, we quote more at length than may otherwise seem needful. If what we have stated be correct, it will be evident that poets can without difficulty be wits, but wits are never poets. In the old sense of poet, indeed, (according to its derivation from π- No! we will not be so pedantic as to figure Greek, where ladies may perhaps be readers) an inventor, a maker of something new, we have no distinction between poet, wit, and punster. Thus Farquhar and many dramatists and others, merely wits, went by the name of poets. But in the present day, there is a tendency to distinguish between these, and the name of poet conveys a peculiar idea; let it then be given only where it is fairly due. As all nature is heavenly, nature itself, or the abstract attributes of heaven, are proper and ennobling fields of poetry. But the fables of an earth-born mythology, except in so far as they coincide with these, are fit only for the purposes of wit. The motto to this paper, from Waller, one of the sweetest of our elder poets, is perfectly and characteristically poetical: in the following lines, saving an incidental thought or two, he appears only as a wit :—

OF A TREE CUT IN PAPER.

"Fair hand! that can on virgin-paper write,
Yet, from the stain of ink, preserve it white:
Whose travel o'er that silver field doth show
Like track of leverets in morning snow.
Love's image thus in purest minds is wrought,
Without a spot, or blemish to the thought.
Strange that your fingers should the pencil foil,
Without the help of colours, or of oil!

For, though a painter boughs and leaves can make,

"Tis you alone can make them bend and shake:

Whose breath salutes your new-created grove,
Like southern winds, and makes it gently move.
Orpheus could make the forest dance, but you
Can make the motion and the forest too."

That this is an elegant idea there is no doubt, neither is it of a style of wit such as usually is met with. For wit, being in the central position between poetry and common-place, partakes of the elements of either; we have thus poetical wit and common wit. The former, to which the poem quoted is to be referred, has been long since recognised as a peculiar form of thought, distinct from others, under the name of a conceit. The old poets all abound in these. Not that they were not imbued with the true spirit of their calling, but in their times wit and poet were convertible terms; the poets being invariably called wits, and looked up to as the sources both of wit and poetry. Dryden and Cowley especially abound in these conceits, which, while they delight and astonish, never elevate the mind.

Sir W. Scott, the best novelist we boast of, although he had done much better, had he resisted the temptation of telling some of his good tales in rhyme, offers an excellent illustration of the union in one person of all three qualities of verse; the mass being generally common-place, enriched with much naive poetry, and now and then a sentiment. In one short piece we often have all three united; let us take this for example; of which be it noted, first, that the general idea is not original. The first verse is poetical, naive:

"The sun upon the Wierdlaw hill,

In Ettrick's vale, is sinking sweet';
The westland wind is hush and still;
The lake lies sleeping at my feet.

Yet not the landscape to mine eye

Bears those bright hues that once it bore;

Though evening, with her richest dye,

Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick shore."

The next verse, after subtraction of the stale idea, is commonplace:

"With listless-look, along the plain,

I see Tweed's silver current glide,

And coldly mark the holy fane
Of Melrose rise in ruined pride.

The quiet lake, the balmy air,

The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree,-
Are they still such as once they were,

Or is the dreary change in me?"

Of this, the original idea was naive before it was worn out, and, for new illustration, listless look, silver current, holy fane, ruined pride, quiet lake, balmy air, and dreary change, are common-place enough. The original illustration is reserved for the next verse, which contains, omitting the common-place allusion to Araby and Eden, in the two first thoughts wit, and in the third something more allied to poetry.

"Alas, the warped and broken board,

How can it bear the painter's dye!
The harp of strained and tuneless chord,
How to the minstrel's skill reply!
To aching eyes each landscape lowers,
To feverish pulse each gale blows chill;

And Araby's or Eden's bowers

Were barren as this moorland hill."

There are many who would have been first-rate essayists that have totally gone astray as to the aim and nature of divine poesy. They might have been right welcome, if they preferred the pains, to indite their tales and thoughts in verse; but pray let them forbear to call them poems. One of these is Crabbe, a writer of great eloquence and force, but than whom no man ever more completely misunderstood what is intended by the name of poetry. If the reader has acceded to our views, what will he call this?—

Something one day occurred about a bill

That was not drawn with true mercantile skill,
And I was asked and authorized to go

To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.;

Their hour was past-but when I urged the case,
There was a youth who named a second place;
Where, on occasions of important kind,

I might the man of occupation find

In his retirement, where he found repose
From the vexations that in business rose.

I found, though not with ease, this private seat
Of soothing quiet, wisdom's still retreat."

Still more offensive to the muses is the offering that follows; a

THE

KING'S COLLEGE MAGAZINE.

DECEMBER, 1842.

CHAPTERS ON GENIUS.

II.

UNTIL it can be demonstrated that genius has some faculty peculiar to itself, by which it performs the wonders it gives rise to, we must both believe and assert that it can only differ from talent in having the mental attributes in greater force. The man of genius and the man of talent may only vary from each other in the degree of mind which they possess, whilst their works may be totally opposite in their characters. The understandings which effect them are of similar construction, however dissimilar they may be in action, in so far as the number and nature of the faculties which compose them are concerned; but they may disagree altogether in relation to the extent to which one, several, or all of those faculties may be developed. A conspicuous feature in the mind of Shakspere was imagination,—in that of Demosthenes, language,-but the vilest of the poet tribe has the one, and the most discordant and irrational street-brawler is gifted with the other; they possess to a certain extent those same faculties for which these illustrious persons were so pre-eminently famed.

To determine accurately where talent terminates and genius commences, is a question of no small difficulty; it is a knot, sometimes as puzzling to untie, as that which the distinction between instinct and reason has presented to certain ingenious gentlemen, who, instead of loosening it, have fastened it the tighter. Where the talent is bordering close upon mediocrity, or the genius is exceedingly vast and comprehensive, there can be no room for hesitation; but between the extremes, how many points are there which furnish problems hard to be explained! Were several men of decided ability to select from the teeming history of the past, such individuals as they might deem worthy the appellation of