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A well known cause of grief, and one familiar to every poetic mind, is loneliness. In one sense it may be said that the poet is never alone; but let us ask how it is that he learns to make

-"him friends of mountains; with the stars,

And the quick spirits of the universe

To hold his dialogues

-?"

Perhaps there never was a poet who had not first sought to find in his own species that real sympathy, for which he becomes afterwards satisfied to substitute the ideal. It is impossible but that the elevated and finely constituted mind should often find itself alone, and if morbid and too sensitive, as such minds generally are, it must be always so in the common haunts of human kind. The poet who can be satisfied with nothing less than entire communion and sympathy of soul, is alone in the crowded city, where, amidst the rush of thousands of busy feet not one is found to pause because he is near--alone in the garden's flowery paths, where there is no eye to look for beauty and delight in the same objects with his-alone beneath the starry canopy of heaven, where none will join his midnight rambles-alone at the altar, where his peculiar faith is liable to be contemned-alone in the season of griefalone in the hour of joy-alone in all those ecstatic emotions which give the power of life and action to the highest faculties of our nature, raising it above the common level of ordinary existence-alone in those moments of weakness and dependence, when the soul is hungering after that intellectual sustenance which never yet was found in the selfish or sordid avocations of life, pining for the consolations of a higher sympathy than the world affords, and ready to lean upon the veriest reed for its support. To feel all this without the power either of communicating or receiving what is most intimately connected with the soul, is true loneliness; and therefore the poet, escaping from the

contact of uncongenial minds, flies to his own peculiar home in thebosom of nature, where, if the intercourse he meets with be ideal, it is sufficient to satisfy a mind etherealized like his; especially as it differs from that of the world, in being such as will neither mock nor mar the harmony of his own breast. But this intercourse is not in reality ideal. The Author of our being has so constructed the world, animate and inanimate, that there are laws of sympathy and association unmarked by the obtuse perceptions of sensual beings, which connect the different, and to us apparently incongruous parts of the universe, so as to form an entire and perfect whole.

We read of a solitary prisoner immured within the bare walls of a dungeon, who tamed a spider, and even loved it; because the principle of love was strong within him, and he had no other object for his affections. Love is but one of the many stimulants that urge us on to seek through the world for objects on which these affections can be lavished, and situations in which they may be indulged; and if deprived of the power of gratifying our tastes and wishes by change of scene or circumstance, imagination will do her utmost to transform what is repulsive in itself, into an object of tenderness, interest or admiration for such are the bonds which connect our intellectual nature with the material world, that the mind must lay hold of something to grapple with, appropriate, or destroy. It cannot exist alone and separate from association.

As it is the nature of all grievances to awaken suggestions of their own remedy, so the poet, after deeply experiencing the grief arising from loneliness, learns to satisfy his soul in its pining after a spiritual communion with all that is pure, and lovely, and sublime, by an ideal converse with nature. Having found the objects of his search but seldom, or where they existed, but faintly revealed amongst the children of men, he returns with fresh ardour, and renewed desire to the.

solitude of the sequestered valley, the heights of the trackless mountain, or the echoing shores of the ever restless sea; not because he actually believes, what his muse sometimes fantastically describes, that "myriads of happy spirits walk the air unseen," delivering their earthly errand to his privileged and attentive ear; but because there exists in his bosom an insatiable love of what is sweet, and calm, and soothing, which he finds in the freshness and repose of nature--an intense enjoyment of what is elevated, and majestic, which crowns his labour in climbing to the mountain's brow -a deep sense of power, and grandeur, and magnificence, which leads him to the ocean's brink, to pour his soul forth in its native element-the true sublime.

The last character under which we shall attempt to describe the poetical nature of grief, is that of pity--a sentiment so admirably adapted to the relief of the wants and sufferings of humanity, that we regard it as one of our greatest blessings; because we owe to pity half the kind offices of life, never feeling the pain it awakens in ourselves, without feeling also some laudable impulse, and seldom witnessing the signs of it in others, without hailing them as omens of good. Indeed so powerful is the influence of pity, that it is the first refuge of innocence--the last of guilt; and when artifice would win from feeling what it wants merit to obtain from discretion, it never fails to appeal to pity with an exaggerated history of suffering and distress.

But for the gentle visitations of pity, the couch of suffering would be desolate indeed. Pain, and want, and weakness would be left to water the earth with tears, and reap in solitude the harvest of despair. The prisoner in his silent cell, would listen in vain for the step of his last earthly friend; and the reprobate beneath the world's dread stigma, involving in wretchedness and ruin, would find no faithful hand to lift the pall of public disgrace, and reclaim the lost one from a living death. But more than all, without pity, we should

want the bright opening in the heavens through which the radiance of returning peace shines forth upon the tears of penitence-we should want the ark of shelter when the waters of the deluge were gathering around us-we should want the cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night to guide our wanderings through the wilderness.

The grief arising from pity is the only disinterested grief we are capable of; and therefore it carries a balm along with it, which imparts something of enjoyment to the excitement it creates ; but for its acuteness of sensation, we have the warrant of the deep workings of more violent passions, which pity has not unfrequently the power to overcome. History affords no stronger proof of this, than when Coriolanus yielded to the tears of his mother, and the matrons of Rome, what he had refused to the entreaties of his friends, and the claims of his country.

But if pity, connected with the power of alleviating misery, is mingled with enjoyment, pity without this power is one of the most agonizing of our griefs. To live amongst the oppressed without being able to break their bonds-amongst the poor without the means of giving-to walk by the side of the feeble without a hand to help-to hear the cries of the innocent without a voice to speak of peace, are trials to the heart, and to the will, unparalleled in the register of grief. And it is this acuteness of sensation, connected with the unbounded influence of pity, and the circumstance of its being woven in with the chain of kindness, and love, and charity, by which human suffering is connected with human virtue, that constitutes the poetry of grief in its character of pity--a character so sacred, that we trace it not only through the links of human fellowship, binding together the dependent children of earth; but also through God's government, up to the source of all our mercies, where, separate from its mortal mixture of pain, pity performs its holy offices of mercy and forgiveness.

THE POETRY OF WOMAN.

AFTER what has already been said of love and grief, we feel that to treat at large upon the poetry of woman, must be in some measure to recapitulate what forms the substance of the two preceding chapters; because, from the peculiar nature and tendency of woman's character, love and grief may be said to constitute the chief elements of her existence. That she is preserved from the overwhelming influence of grief, so frequently recurring, by the reaction of her own buoyant and vivacious spirit, by the fertility of her imagination in multiplying means of happiness, and by her facility in adapting herself to place and time, and laying hold of every support which surrounding circumstances afford, she has solely to thank the Author of her life, who has so regulated the balance of human joys and sorrows, that none are necessarily entirely and irremediably wretched. On glancing superficially at the general aspect of society, all women, and all men who see and speak impartially, would pronounce the weaker sex to be doomed to more than an equal share of suffering; but happily for woman, her internal resources are such as to raise her at least to a level with man in the scale of happiness. Bodily weakness and liability to illness, is one of the most obvious reasons why woman is looked upon as an object of compassion. Scarcely a day passes in which she has not some ache or pain that would drive a man melancholy, and yet how quietly she rests her throb

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