Touch it not but for worship; watch before
Its sanctuary; nor leave it till are closed

The temple-doors, and the last lamp is spent.”

The combination of the various elements of the language will be found most abundantly illustrated in the poems of Milton, but from such a theme, too large for me to venture on now, let me pass to a few other illustrations more readily to be disposed of.

The poetry of our own times has done high service to the language by expanding its metrical discipline, opening a larger freedom and variety, and yet keeping aloof from mere license. Observe, for instance, in these lines, the effect produced at the close by a change in the structure of the stanza and the single long line with which, at the end, the imagination travels forth;

O! that our lives, which flee so fast,

In purity were such,

That not an image of the past

Should fear that pencil's touch!

Retirement then might hourly look,

Upon a soothing scene;
Age steal to his allotted nook,
Contented and serene;

With heart as calm as lakes that sleep
In frosty moonlight glistening;
Or mountain rivers, where they creep
Along a channel smooth and deep

To their own far-off murmurs listening."

One of the most exquisite studies of the beautiful freedom of English verse is to be found in that poem, the music of which so fascinated the spirit of Sir Walter Scott and of Lord Byron, as to prompt them both to some of

Wordsworth.

their own finest effusions; I refer to Coleridge's Christabel, in which a variety of line and rhyme, and even blank verse is wrought into a marvellous unity-nowhere more than in that passage picturing Christabel in the forest, when she hears the moaning of the witch.

"Is the night chilly and dark!

The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.

The moon is behind, and at the full,
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chilly, the cloud is gray,
'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.
The lovely lady Christabel,

Whom her father loves so well,

What makes her in the woods so late,

A furlong from the castle-gate?
She had dreams all yesternight

Of her own betrothed knight:

And she in the midnight wood will pray
For the weal of her lover that's far away.

She stole along, she nothing spoke,

The sighs she heav'd were soft and low;
And naught was green upon the oak

But moss and rarest mistletoe;
She kneels beneath the huge oak-tree,
And in silence prayeth she.

The lady sprang up suddenly,

The lovely lady, Christabel!

It moan'd as near as near can be,
But what it is, she cannot tell;
On the other side, it seem'd to be
Of the huge, broad-breasted old oak-tree.

The night is chill, the forest bare:

Is it the wind that moaneth bleak.

There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek;

There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high

On the topmost twig that looks up to the sky.
Hush, beating heart of Christabel !"

There is one more principle in the study of language in poetic literature which I wish to notice, and that is the beauty of the adaptation in all true poetry of the metrical. form to the subject and feeling of the poem. "Every true poet," it has been well said, "has a song in his mind, the notes of which, little as they precede his thoughts-so little as to seem simultaneous with them-do precede, suggest and inspire many of these, modify and beautify them."* How this connection exists between the poet's thought and passion, and their apt tune in language, is more, perhaps, than philosophy can discover; but there is an interest in observing the fact; and this also is to be thought of, that the true poet awakens this spiritual song in the mind of his reader.

Even the same form of verse is very different in the hands of different poets, and has great and characteristic variety of excellence—the blank verse of Milton, of Cowper, and of Wordsworth, having each a beautiful melody of its own. It adds to our knowledge of our language and its powers, and also greatly to the cultivated enjoyment of poetical reading, if we take the pains to observe and appreciate the harmonious relation of the measure and

* Darley's Introduction to Beaumont and Fletcher, as quoted in "Chaucer Modernized," p. 48.

the subject. I will give an illustration of this relation, by quoting two pieces by the same poet, and then will detain you but a few minutes longer. The contrast between the pieces is a refined one, because in each there is an adaptation to deep pathos, but exquisitely varied to different forms of pathos, the emotion at the aspect of death in its gentleness, and of death in its terrible tragedy.

"We watched her breathing through the night,

Her breathing soft and low,

As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seemed to speak,

So slowly moved about,

As we had lent her half our powers

To eke her living out.

Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied;

We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.

For when the morn came dim and sad
And chill with early showers,
Her quiet eyelids closed-she had
Another morn than ours."*

What perfect tranquillity and sense of resignation there is in these purely simple English words and their gentle flow. Turn from them to that other poem of the same author, "The Bridge of Sighs,"-a poet's feeling rebuke of the vice and inhumanity of a great metropolis, and of sympathy with its poor, degraded victims, driven to suicide in the midnight waters of the city's river. The tranquil, soul-subduing music of the former piece is

* Collected Edition of Hood's Poems, vol. ii., p. 98, and vol. i., p. 264.

changed to a short and abrupt measure, in which the passions of pity, bitter anger, and grief are stirring for utterance.*

It is thus in a nation's poetry (that is, of course, when it is really poetry of a high and worthy kind) that the language will be found in its highest perfection, in its truest cultivation; for a poet can never suffer his style to fall short of a well-sustained purity. It is, therefore, in the poetry that a language may best be studied, even for prose uses; that is, when any one would know to what state of excellence the language may be carried, he must look to that chiefly, but, of course, not exclusively, in the poetical literature.

We are living at a period when the language has attained a high degree of excellence, both in prose and verse,—when it has developed largely, for all the uses of language, its power and its beauty. It is one of the noblest languages that the earth has ever sounded with; it is our endowment, our inheritance, our trust. It associates us with the wise and good of olden times, and it couples us with the kindred peoples of many distant regions. It is our duty, therefore, to cultivate, to cherish, and to keep it from corruption. Especially is this a duty for us, who are spreading that language over such vast territory; and not only that, but having such growing facilities of intercommunication, that the language is perpetually speeding from one portion of the land to another

* I have not thought it worth while to reprint at length a poem so familiar as the "Bridge of Sighs;" but those who heard this lecture will not easily forget the beautiful and tearful manner-his own gentle nature agitated by uncontrollable sympathy-in which HE recited its beautiful stanzas. W. B. R.