7. Now all is changed; and here, as in the wild, ROGERS. CXLVI. SELECT PASSAGES IN VERSE. 1. THE PLEASURES OF HOPE. - Campbell. More pleasing seems than all the past hath been; From dark oblivion, glows divinely there. Nor Fame I slight, nor for her favors call; Ε Then teach me, Heaven! to scorn the guilty bays, O, grant an honest fame, or grant me none! Why start at death? Where is he? Death arrived he 's never here! Ere hope, sensation fails; black-boding man The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave, The terrors of the living, not the dead. Man makes a death which Nature never made; - Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear, 5. THE CAPTIVE'S DREAMS. Mrs. Hemans. I dream of all things free! of a gallant, gallant bark, I follow some wild river, on whose breast no sail may be ; Clime of the unforgotten brave! · Approach, thou craven, crouching slave! These waters blue that round you lave, These scenes - their story not unknown - They tell us of an Indian tree, Downward again to that dear earth, 8. GAYETY.-Cowper. Whom call we gay? that honor has been long Whose headaches nail them to a noonday bed; And save me, too, from theirs whose haggard eyes The mouth with blasphemy, the heart with woe. CXLVII. SHAKSPEARE'S POWER OF EXPRESSION. 1. To say that he was the greatest man that ever lived is to provoke a useless controversy, and comparisons that lead to noth ing, between Shakspeare and Cæsar, Shakspeare and Charle magne, Shakspeare and Cromwell; to say that he was the greatest intellect that ever lived is to bring the shades of Aristotle, and Plato, and Bacon, and Newton, and all your other ΕΙ ΕΙ systematic thinkers, grumbling about us, with demands for a definition of intellect, which we are by no means in a position to give; nay, finally, to say that he is the greatest poet that the world has produced (a thing which we would certainly say, were we provoked to it) would be unnecessarily to hurt the feelings of Homer, and Soph'ocles, and Dantë, and Milton. What we will say, then, and what we will challenge the world to gainsay, is that he was the greatest expresser that ever lived. This is glory enough, and it leaves the other question open. 2. Other men may have led, on the whole, greater and more impressive lives than he; other men, acting on their fellows through the same medium of speech that he used, may have expended a greater power of thought, and achieved a greater intellectual effect, in one consistent direction; other men, too (though this is very questionable), may have contrived to issue the matter which they did address to the world in more compact and perfect artistic shapes. But no man that ever lived said such splendid extempore things on all subjects universally; no man that ever lived had the faculty of pouring out on all occasions such a flood of the richest and deepest language. He may have had rivals in the art of imagining situations; he had no rival in the power of sending a gush of the appropriate intellectual effusion over the image and body of a situation once conceived. 3. From the jewelled ring on an alderman's finger to the most mountainous thought or deed of man or demon, nothing suggested itself that his speech could not envelop and enfold with ease. That excessive fluency which astonished Ben Jonson when he listened to Shakspeare in person astonishes the world yet. Abundance, ease, redundance," a plenitude of word, sound, and imagery, which, were the intellect at work only a little less magnificent, would sometimes end in sheer braggardism and bombast, are the characteristics of Shakspeare's style. Nothing is suppressed, nothing omitted, nothing cancelled. On and on the poet flows, words, thoughts, and fancies, crowding on him as fast as he can write, all related to the matter on hand, and all poured forth together, to rise and fall on the waves of an established ca'dence. 4. Such lightness and ease in the manner, and such prodigious wealth and depth in the matter, are combined in no other writer. How the matter was first accumulated—what proportion of it was the acquired capital of former efforts, and what proportion of it welled up in the poet's mind during and in virtue of the very act of speech it is impossible to say; but this, at least, may be affirmed without fear of contradiction, that there never was a mind in the world from which, when it was pricked by any occa sion whatever, there poured forth on the instant such a stream of precious substance intellectually related to it. By his powers of expression, in fact, Shakspeare has beggared all his posterity, and left mere practitioners of expression nothing possible to do. 5. There is, perhaps, not a thought, or feeling, or situation, really common and generic to human life, on which he has not exercised his prerogative; and wherever he has once been, woe to the man that comes after him! He has overgrown the whole system and face of things, like a universal ivy, which has left no wall uncovered, no pinnacle unclimbed, no chink unpenetrated. Since he lived, the concrete world has worn a richer surface. He found it great and beautiful, with stripes here and there of the rough old coat seen through the leafy labors of his predecessors; he left it clothed throughout with the wealth and autumnal luxuriance of his own unparalleled language. QUARTERLY REVIEW. CXLVIII. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ELOQUENCE. 1. RELIGION ESSENTIAL TO MORALITY. - Of all the disposi tions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles. -Geo. Washington. 2. UNAPPRECIATED OBLIGATIONS. We live in the midst of blessings till we are utterly insensible of their greatness, and of the source from whence they flow. We speak of our civilization, our arts, ur freedom, our laws, and forget entirely how large a share is due to Christianity. Blot Christianity out of man's history, and what would his laws have been, what his civilization? Christianity is mixed up with our very being and our very life |