adapted to human mansions and palaces; and diffuses over the dwellings or secular haunts of men an air of good taste and refinement. But it is unspiritual. Its columns and façades have nothing in their contour or arrangement, which can awaken any moral association, any heavenward aspiration, any thought of infinity, immensity, or eternity. It could have con ́nected itself with no other religion, than that with which it was allied, the votaries of which worshipped gods who were altogether such as themselves.

Far otherwise the Gothic order. Its element is nature's noblest temple, the grove; its pointed vaults and arches are derived from the lofty embraces of giant oaks; and its whole character bears the same marks of grandeur with the primeval forests, among which it had its birth. Its essential feature is that, in which lies the very essence of the sublime, namely, that its proportions are too vast to be measured by the observer's eye, and therefore are virtually infinite. In this order, the spires and turrets losing themselves in the clouds, the deep recesses, the dizzy height of the ceilings, the shadowy rows of clustered columns, the mellow light making the whole perspective dim and phantom-like in the distance, all help to constitute a shrine meet for the lowly, awe-stricken worship of Him, who is in part unseen, in part but dimly seen; all awaken the sense of an infinite presence, of power immense, of greatness unutterable. Such a pile, in its solemn grandeur, makes man feel his nothingness before Him, to whom the temple is reared. The Gothic order is thus, in its very idea, aspiring, spiritual, Godward tending. It is the offspring, no less than the perennial fountain, of devotion; and its gorgeous cathedrals and abbeys, the wonder of all lands and climes, are so many gifts of the genius of Christianity to the world, which it is regenerating.

It is a singular fact, and one strikingly illustrative of the foregoing remarks, that, during the brief reign of Atheism in France, the (so called) men of taste instituted a crusade against Gothic architecture, and strove to supplant it by the introduction of Grecian models. Either their disbelief in an Infinite Supreme rendered them incapable of appreciating a style, which is, if we may so speak, man's least finite copy of the infinite; or else they too well knew, that where Gothic temples reared their towers, devotion could not long want a home. But, with the restoration of the ancient worship, returned a taste for the

antique architecture; and the public buildings, erected during the reign of terror, are now pointed at as ignoble monuments of a grovelling age.

We pass now to poetry, and would fain show, at greater length than our limits will permit, how much this most creative of all arts is indebted to the sacred volume.

And we would first remind our readers, that the Bible itself contains the purest and noblest poetry. Not a gem of fancy sparkles in the diadem of uninspired song, than which a richer and purer of its kind may not be drawn from the treasury of inspiration. An obscure Scotch peasant, calling on business at a gentleman's house in Edinburgh, saw a bust of Shakspeare, and these lines from the Tempest inscribed beneath it.

"The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like the baseless fabric of a vision,
Leave not a rack behind."

The gentleman, seeing the peasant's eyes attracted by these lines, asked him if he had ever seen anything equal to them in sublimity. His reply was just and striking. "Yes, I have. The following passage in the book of Revelation is much more sublime. And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat upon it, from whose face the earth and the heavens fled away, and there was found no place for them." But the poetry of Scripture is an exhaustless subject. We will not mar its beauties by attempting a hasty enumeration of them; but will rather consider the influence which the Scriptures have had on modern poetry.

In the first place, the Bible has made poetry what it is in its design and essence, a universal language. The poetry of the ancient world is strictly local and national. Homer and Pindar, Virgil and Horace are indeed read with interest in every country. But how? After so long and thorough a process of training in classic mythology and antiquities, that the student not only imbibes the spirit of the times, but almost cherishes the then current belief, and glows with the then current emotions, in fine, becomes, as it were, an alien from his own age and land, and gifted with the citizenship of Athens or of Rome. And he, who reads the classic poets with any preparation short of this, will find his labor lost. But modern poetry may be

read everywhere with interest. It appeals to the heart of man as man; it throbs in unision with the general pulse; it strikes chords which can vibrate in every soul. For Christianity is the religion of humanity; it reveals man to himself; its truths, though undiscoverable by unaided reason, yet, when brought to light, commend themselves to the common sense and feeling of our race. Thus Christian ideas are universal ideas; and the colors, which they give to nature, society, the past, and the future, are familiar and congenial to every eye and taste. Thus even descriptive, epic, or historical poetry, though it treat of unknown scenes and personages, if its general tone of imagery and sentiment be of the Christian school, is understood and felt at once by every cultivated mind. In testimony of this, it will suffice to specify the fact, that persons of taste in our own country, though almost utterly ignorant of localities in continental Europe, read with fresh and vivid interest the most strictly local poetry of every European nation.

Again, the social and domestic affections are the finest and purest elements of poetry; and these affections owe almost all their intensity and elevation to the religion of the Bible. It is Christianity that assigns to woman her equal and honored rank in the social scale, that gives inviolable permanence to the conjugal tie, that affords the shelter and delights of a holy home, with chastity, modesty, and love for its guardian angels, that turns the hearts of fathers to children and of children to fathers, that makes of neighborhoods and communities bands of brethThese are privileges, for which we are indebted to Him, who revealed the common parentage and common destiny of all men. To his religion therefore do we owe all that poetry, whether ostensibly religious or not, which paints the affections in their utmost degree of refinement and purity.

ren.

In this point of view the classics are most of all deficient. Their sketches of the most momentous epochs, and the most pathetic incidents in life, are generally cold and spiritless, betray no feeling in the writer's, awaken none in the reader's soul. To this remark we are well aware that there are striking aud beautiful exceptions. But even in these exceptions there is wanting the most lovely element of modern poetry, the breathings of a living faith and an immortal hope. Sorrow refuses to be comforted, nor looks to powers above for relief or solace. Parting friends part without a word of a happy meeting beyond the chances of mortality. The ashes are laid

in the urn, and the funeral hymn is chanted, as over dust that has returned irrevocably to dust, while the spirit has ceased to be. Almost every one is familiar with that celebrated scene in the Iliad, where Hector, about to expose himself anew to the perils of battle, takes an affectionate farewell of his wife and child. What a rayless gloom broods over that parting! How barren is it of those sentiments and emotions, which play like sunbeams amid the shades of sorrow, and which alone have power to wake the imagination, and to touch the heart in pictures of fictitious woe! How devoid of noble thought, of fortitude, of magnanimity, of the virtues of a truly high-souled woman, are Andromache's wailings! And Hector's reply, how tame, how unmanly, how mean-spirited, how far in richness and power of sentiment does it fall below that impassioned enthusiasm of patriotism, unwavering trust, and undying hope, which modern bards have put into the lips of their heroes!

"Andromache, thy griefs I dread,

I see thee trembling, weeping, captive led,
In Argive looms our battles to design,
And woes, of which so large a part was thine;
To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring
The weight of waters from Hyperia's spring.
There, while you groan beneath the load of life,
They cry, Behold the mighty Hector's wife!
Some haughty Greek, who lives thy tears to see,
Embitters all thy woes by naming me;
The thoughts of glory past, and present shame,
A thousand griefs shall waken at the name.
May I lie cold before that dreadful day,
Pressed with a load of monumental clay;
Thy Hector, wrapped in everlasting sleep,

Shall neither hear thee sigh, nor see thee weep."

Now, in contrast with this, we will not quote from any of the laurelled names of modern days; but we will cite a strictly parallel passage, bearing the almost forgotten name of Graham, "the Sabbath Bard." The piece represents the same parties as the extract from Homer, a husband, a wife, an infant. The husband and father is about to embark with his wife and child on a perilous voyage.

"Then come, my lovely bride,

And come, my child of woe;

For, if we've nought on earth beside,
What matter where we go?

Then wherefore should we grieve?

Or what have we to fear?

Though home, and friends, and life we leave,
Our God is ever near.

Then come, my gentle bride,

And come, my child of love,

What though we've nought on earth beside?
Our portion is above.

There is no need of comment. Our own hearts tell us which of these extracts breathes most of the true spirit of poetry. And the former, be it remembered, is from the most lauded specimen of the poetry of the affections, which antiquity has left us, while the latter is chosen almost at random, and bears a name hardly known to fame.

It is in elegiac verse, that we most of all need the inspiring thoughts and hopes, which the Scriptures breathe. The ancients have left us numerous elegies and funeral songs; but all of them cold, dreary, repulsive, redolent with a charnel-house atmosphere, giving only those lugubrious pictures of wounds, disease, and death, at which the soul sickens, unless they be relieved by the dawnings of a higher sphere and a nobler life.