the very Presence, more instinct with the Holy Ghost?

Share the heart-break, touch with her the terrible mystery, of her "Little Mattie;" then turn to "Only a Curl" and "De Profundis;" and then remember that it was written long ago, "Thy heart shall live forever," "My people shall be satisfied with my goodness," "It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom," "He is not the God of the dead, but of the living," "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes," "There shall be no more pain," and recollect that in the Apocalypse it was "the kindreds" that stood redeemed before the Throne; and say whether the highest human strain is not an accord and echo of the celestial.

Yet see what the singer herself says about "The Soul's Expression," and of "Seraph and Poet," in those two sonnets, and own with her that the soul and secret of poetry are beyond all lettering; are even that "eternal life" which "proceedeth from the Father and the Son," and is "to know God, and the Christ whom He hath sent."

Grandly representative among the seers, the

message-bearers, are the Brownings, just because of this consciousness of the infinite more

that they can never say. They speak to us at the "end of the age" its crowning words of truth; its farthest reach of that to whose fullness humanity must grow on forever. You need not reproach them, nor yourself, if you fail of the whole grasp, as they confess to do; the greatest poet falls short of himself ; is stricken suddenly dumb in the temple, before the visiting angel; but if you may only touch with him the hem of the garment of the ineffable, that which flows down from the highest into the least will reach you with something of the "sacred unction" that makes the soul “of all things to be heir and King."

Read "Pippa Passes." Find the apostolic succession in the little silk-winding girl who walks in the Spirit, lovely and unconscious, through the earthways; skirting temptation and foulness knowing them not; and leaving the holy trail of angelhood all along her path to antidote the serpent slime. Sing with her, -and sing always afterward,

"God's in his heaven,

All's right with the world!"

Read "Evelyn Hope;" read "Prospice." Your heart will swell with that of the PoetProphet in the swift joy of the certainties replacing all "scheme" and dogma-of Redemption and Resurrection.

If you never know any more of Browning, you will have become his disciple.

To sum all up, Poetry is not a skill, a pleasantry, a device, an art; it is the secret life and light without which not anything was made that is made. It is the sacredness of being.

sense, soul,

In it there are these three: spirit- Nature, Life, Revelation. Trinity of Inspiration. A perfect natural, human, and divine.

Such is the

poem is

If you want really to know poesy look for whatsoever the thing or the saying — holds all these in it. Search diligently, heedfully; when you have found them you will wholly, in your own threefoldness, respond and rejoice; it will be with you as it is with the Church upon her Trinity Sunday, when she has been led up through all the first chronicles and

teachings of her Gospels to the sublime apprehension of the "excellent glory," the "power of the Divine Majesty," in the Unity of the Universal Spirit, the Human Word, and the Infinite Fatherhood of all.

VII

ABOUT SOCIETY

SHALL we pass from our talks about books to a talk about society? Is this a jarring, difficult transition?

Sometimes much reading makes people unsocial; much thinking sometimes shuts people up. Is this the fault of books and thought, or is it because of the fact that the two planes of mental sympathies and outside human intercourse — do not always rightly join? I think the latter; it is like a fault a dislocation in the geological strata of the earth. To use another simile, it is like the trouble and confusion of sight, when a person's two eyes do not see as one. There is "want of accommodation," astigmatism." They have to be fitted with glasses having two different lenses. And that is the way most of us do have to be fitted, in taking ourselves if there is anyout of our separate life into the

thing of us

world.

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