a voice, as they can a sound. Or would they most approve of soldiers, that defend the life of their countrymen, either by the death of themselves or their enemies?

"If philosophers please them, who is it that knows not that all the lights of example to clear their precepts are borrowed by philosophers from poets; that without Homer's examples, Aristotle would be as blind as Homer. If they retain musicians, who ever doubted but that poets infused the very soul into the inarticulate sounds of music—that without Pindar and Horace, the Lyrics had been silenced for ever? If they must needs entertain soldiers, who can but confess that poets restore that life again to soldiers, which, they before lost for the safety of their country; that without Virgil, Æneas had! never been so much as heard of. How can they, for shame, deny common-wealths to them, who were the first authors of them; how can they deny the blind philosopher that teaches them, his light; the empty musician that delights them, his soul; the dying soldier that defends their life, immortality after his own death. Let philosophy, let ethics, let all the arts bestow on us this gift, that we be not thought dead men whilst we remain among the living; it is only poetry can make us be thought living men when we lie among the dead. And, therefore, I think it unequal to thrust them out of our cities, that call us out of our graves, to think so hardly of them that make us to be so well thought of, to deny them to live awhile among us, that make us live for ever among our posterity."

If Fletcher's sermons were composed in this style, their loss deserves to be lamented.

The poem is divided into four cantos, and opens with a stanza so antithetically constructed as, in some mea

sure, to impair the solemnity of the subject; but Fletcher soon rises into a nobler strain when he thinks of those

Sacred writings, in whose antique leaves

The memories of heaven entreasured lie*.

Milton's Invocation to the Holy Spirit in the Paradise Regained is considered by Mr. Dunster "supremely beautiful;" it does not surpass the solemn and enraptured piety of Fletcher:

O thou that didst this holy fire infuse,

And taught this breast, but late the grave of hell,
Wherein a blind and dead heart lived, to swell

With better thoughts; send down those lights that lend
Knowledge how to begin, and how to end,

The love that never was, and never can be penn'd.

In the first canto, Christ's Victorie in Heaven, the poet traces the redemption of man to the pleadings of Mercy, who dwelt in the quiet of that Sabbath where "saintly heroes" rest from their labours. When Mercy beheld the ruin of that "Golden Building," once illuminated with every "star of excellence," she is represented lifting up "the music of her voice" against the decrees of fate.

The interposition of offended Justice is grandly conceived:

But Justice had no sooner Mercy seen

Smoothing the wrinkles of her Father's brow,
But up she starts, and throws herself between;
As when a vapour from a moory slough
Meeting with fresh Eöus, that but now

Open'd the world which all in darkness lay,

Doth heaven's bright face of his rays disarray,
And sads the smiling orient of the springing day.

My quotations are made from the original edition of 1610. The orthography only is modernized.

She was a virgin of austere regard,

Not as the world esteems her, deaf and blind,
But as the eagle, that hath oft compar'd

Her eye with heaven's, so, and more brightly shin'd
Her lamping sight; for she the same could wind
Into the solid heart, and with her ears

The silence of the thought loud speaking hears,
And in one hand a pair of even scales she wears.
No riot of affection revel kept

Within her breast, but a still apathy
Possessed all her soul, which softly slept,
Securely, without tempest; no sad cry
Awakes her pity, but wrong'd Poverty

Sending her eyes to heaven swimming in tears · And hideous clamours ever struck her ears, Whetting the blazing sword that in her hand she bears.

The winged lightning is her Mercury,

And round about her mighty thunders sound;
Impatient of himself lies pining by

Pale Sickness, with his kercher'd head up wound,
And thousand noisome plagues attend her round

But if her cloudy brow but once grow foul,

The flints do melt, the rocks to water roll,

:

And airy mountains shake, and frighted shadows howl.
Famine and bloodless Care, and bloody War,
Want, and the want of knowledge how to use
Abundance, Age, and Fear that runs afar
Before his fellow Grief, that aye pursues
His winged steps; for who would not refuse

Grief's company, a dull and raw-boned spright, That lanks the cheeks and pales the freshest sight, Unbosoming the cheerful breast of all delight.

Before this cursed throng goes Ignorance,
That needs will lead the way it cannot see;
And, after all, Death doth his flag advance,
And in the midst Strife still would roguing be,
Whose ragged flesh and clothes did well agree ·

And round about amazed Horror flies,

And over all, Shame veils his guilty eyes,

And underneath Hell's hungry throat still yawning lies. Justice is portrayed leaning her bosom upon "two stone tables spread before her;" and the poet, in order to impress more deeply the fearful horror of that "scroll" on the mind, makes the terror and darkness of the Appearance upon Mount Sinai to rush upon our memory, when the affrighted children of Israel, like

A wood of shaking leaves became.—

The grandeur and dignity of Justice are expressed by the hush and stillness of the entire universe, waiting in awe for the opening of her lips*. In this silence of heaven and earth, Justice proceeds to accuse and convict man of wickedness and ingratitude. But in this part of the poem Fletcher forgot the sublimity of the occasion; he amuses himself with a sort of metaphysical ingenuity, as when speaking of Adam's covering of leaves he asks, for who ever saw

A man of leaves a reasonable tree?

And in some of the verses he sems to have studied that epigrammatic brevity and rapidity of interrogation, which so delighted his brother's eccentric friend, Quarles; but though the author of the Enchiridion might hang a garland at "the door of those fantastic chambers," every true lover of Fletcher's poetry will regret to see him lingering within their threshold.

I must not, however, omit the 28th stanza :—
What, should I tell how barren Earth is grown
All for to starve her children? Did'st not thou
Water with heavenly showers her womb unsown,

*Milton saw the force of this conception; at the conclusion of the speech of the "Eternal Father" to the Angel Gabriel,

all heaven

Admiring stood a space, then into hymns

Burst forth.

Par. Reg., b. 1, v. 170.

And drop down clouds of flowers? Did'st not thou bow
Thine easy ear unto the plowman's vow;

Long might he look, and look, and long in vain,

Might load his harvest in an empty wain,

And beat the woods to find the poor oak's hungry grain.

The effect of the address of Justice is given with great sublimity :

She ended, and the heavenly Hierarchies
Burning in zeal, thickly imbranded were:
Like to an army that alarum cries,
And every one shakes his ydreaded spear,
And the Almighty's self, as he would tear

The earth, and her firm basis quite in sunder,

Flam'd all in just revenge, and mighty thunder, Heaven stole itself from earth by clouds that moisten'd under.

The awful grandeur of celestial indignation seems to lift itself up in the majesty of these lines. The sudden preparation of the heavenly warriors, the clangor of arms and the uprising of the Deity himself, are splendid images, which are known to the reader of Paradise Lost not to have escaped the notice of Milton. The pause at the beginning of the stanza is a note of solemn preparation.

The reappearance of Mercy in the midst of darkness and tumult is very picturesque; her face soon glimmers through, and paints the clouds with beauty

As when the cheerful sun, elamping wide,
Glads all the world with his uprising ray,
And woo's the widow'd earth afresh to pride,
And paints her bosom with the flow'ry May,
His silent sister steals him quite away:

Wrapt in a sable cloud from mortal eyes
The hasty stars at noon begin to rise,

And headlong to his early roost the sparrow flies.