the feelings of the young poet, born of sensibilities the most exquisite, experience a painful and humiliating recoil. The secret of his seclusion is thus made known and resented. That he should presume in tastes and pleasures, superior to the rest,-in which they can neither mingle nor contend,— is sufficiently offensive. That he should aim at objects, imposing even in the eyes of grown men, is heavy provocation. As they are not willing to believe in his superiority, they set it down for presumption. As he stands alone in his objects, he is soon isolated among his associates. This isolation produces gloom, a fervid sense of injustice, a morbid feeling of resentment. The young poet, naturally, is shy, not sulky,-sensitive and shrinking, not stern or haughty. They do not enter into his sensibilities any more than his genius. His reserves increase their hostility, which finally breaks out into open rage. They pronounce him a fool,-they mock him as a pretender, they mock him with a degree of anger which declares the lurking apprehension that he is, after all, not so great a pretender as they call him. A little time soon settles this question. As he grows strong, equally in years and intellect, they mock him no longer. They feel that he is no fool. He has wit beyond his years. He reasons cunningly. It is not easy to foil him at these weapons, and his satire is more than a counterpoise to their brutality. They change the mode of attack. Hateful to themselves, they study how to make him hateful to others. Has he committed a boyish error?-has he shown a weakness?-it is remembered against him ;-remembered with additions, and swollen into crime and odium by the painstaking pertinacity of malice. They accuse him of all sorts of offences. He is vain, he is presumptuous. His conceit is insufferable. In this all agree, for all are agreed that the superiority which proves itself at their expense, can be nothing short of presumption and conceit. And thus they grow, and thus he grows;-the first in fixed hostility, the last in equally fixed scorn and defiance. And hence the reluctance of a community to acknowledge the plant of its own raising, and hence the capricious moods, the erring will, and the frequent excess and degradation of those endowments, which, met with denial, are profligately spent in desperation. The parties destined by heaven to work in common behoof, are thus made to war against each other in miserable discrepancy.

This is the history of boy with boy,-the young genius with his school-boy associates. That the seniors by whom they are surrounded, should not see more deeply into the matter, is owing to several causes, one only of which it will suffice to name. They have too little sympathy with the boy in his hours of amusement. They share too little in his plays. They see too little of the moral nature of the young, which is always more prominent and perceptible in their sports than on any other occasion. If this were otherwise, how soon would the peculiar mental organization of the highly endowed lad arrest the attention. How soon would they see that he himself is an object to be studied,that he has a nature of his own, which he cannot but obey,— against which he vainly struggles, and which leads him waywardly apart even from the enjoyments which his blood would most affect. This very sacrifice of the usual pleasures of boyhood,-the fact that he enjoys none of the games of his comrades,-that he is shy when they are frank; sad and thoughtful when they are uproarious; solitary when they crowd together,--these, alone, should suffice to indicate to any but the wilful blind, the imperious exigencies of a peculiar moral constitution, from which the possessor, still striving, still reluctant, is himself unable to get free. Were we more bent to study this peculiar nature, and regard its requisitions, we should seldom be shocked with that monstrous anomaly in society, a dissolute and abandoned man of genius. It is the teacher that makes the profligate,-not nature, not the pupil himself. God makes no monsters. We yield too little to nature, and seek to impress ourselves upon the intellect whose prime characteristic is its individuality. Failing to shape, we pervert it. Failing to subdue, we denounce, deride and destroy it. We are not willing to recognize that mental superiority which refuses to surrender itself wholly to our will; and, in the vexation of self-esteem, we fasten upon the innocent object of our dislike, an opprobrium which not unfrequently drives him to desperation. We wring his heart, war against his endeavor, mock his hopes, goad his sensibilities to the quick, and deny with bitterness all the cravings of his ambition. It is only by going into voluntary exile that he lives. And this, too, is a daily history, and here we see some additional reasons why it is that the genius of the age does not often constitute its spirit. It is not denied that a man of genius,-a poet, for exam

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ple, may be felt somewhat by the spirit of the time in which he lives, even though that period may be one of comparative civilization. He is felt by it, and used by it, even though it leaves him unrecognized and unhonored. His philosophies will sink into the hearts of favored individuals, by whom they will be conveyed to the hearts of others. They will strike leading notes in the thoughts of minds of great practical tendency, and will thus give tone and colour to the objects and the eloquence of practised statesmen. They will steal into the affections, and find a place in the memories of the young, and thus be preserved for full development in the progress of the rising generations. This is a natural history, which derives a beautiful and forceful illustration from the known customs of the aboriginal nations. When a treaty is made in which savage tribes are concerned, they call young children into the presence of the high contracting parties, and make them the witnesses of their deeds. The warrior and the priest recount to the young the leading events in the national or family history. Every incident and era is associated with some physical symbol, and these are regularly transmitted, by the same process, from generation to generation. The triumphs of civilization render no such pains-taking necessary, and, by a natural law, the unperfected minds of youth catch up divine authorities, in art and morals, from those who have been repudiated by their mulish and bigoted sires. The seer upon whom the latter turns his back in disdain, feels his garments plucked by the eager but trembling fingers of the more reverent boy. "Heaven," says Wordsworth, "lies about us in our infancy;" and the spirit of the child, as yet ignorant in the world's fashion, is keenly susceptible to im-' pressions of a divine origin. It is in this way that one age makes amends for the injustice of another. In this way, what has been the denied genius of one, becomes the received spirit of another century. Speaking of Wordsworth, we are reminded how completely and rapidly this history has been realized in his case. How entirely have the critical judgments of the fathers, in respect to his poetry, been reversed by the sons. In his youth,-nay, in his manhood, and to middle age, an object of derision; at seventy,—still living, he is honored as one of the greatest masters of his art, certainly the prince of all contemplative poets,-an authority steadily enlarging in strength, purity and splendor.

Or

But, the case of Wordsworth is really a peculiar one. dinarily, it is not thus. Directly, and upon the time in which he lives, the mere man of letters, whatever his degree of endowment, does not exercise much, if any, apparent influ ence. It is gradually only, and insensibly, as the holy dews that fall by night,-unseen, unheard,—in the sleeping hours of earth's children,-when they are least conscious of any benign interposition,-that the blessed and refreshing influ ences of poetry and art, descend to refresh and vivify the heart and morals of a people. Were it otherwise,—were they more visibly seen and felt,-they might lose something of their sacred powers to preserve the hopes, the health and the histories, of an otherwise merely mortal race.

But even were this book rightly named in the sense in which we have denied its propriety, it would be objectionable in another point of view. It considers only the claims of British Literature. It takes no concern of the authors of France and Germany, to say nothing of any other region,as if the spirit of the age were wholly framed and fashioned by that of Great Britain. This is not only an injustice. It is in bad taste. It is too much in the mood and spirit of political Bullism. We expect from the literature of a country something more of liberality, in its intercourse with other nations, than usually distinguishes its politics, or even its criticism. And from one who, like Mr. Horne, claims, not only as a philosopher, but as a poet, we have a right to look for the most gratifying extension of the courtesies and amenities of the social nature. If the spirit of our time be that of its literary genius, shall we omit the names of Goethe, of Lessing and of Schiller, from the pages which are set to record the influence of Sidney Smith, and Carlyle, and Harriet Martineau ?-and is there to be no place for Cousin, Michelet and Guizot, in the volume which assigns so much place to Macaulay, Henry Taylor and Lord Ashley? Shall Eugene Sue be wholly omitted from the record which counts Charles Dickens first; and Victor Hugo, and Balzac, be excluded from a catalogue in which we find James, and Marryatt, and Trollope? We say nothing of what might be reasonably claimed for Americans, past and living;-for expostulation on this head, in relation to the judgments of the modern English upon ourselves, would be as idle as an entreaty to the same quarter for political justice, unenforced by the more cogent arguments of hot shot and heavy VOL. VII. NO. 14.

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frigates. We can only get our rights in moral matters allowed, as we have secured all other rights,-by making ourselves felt, and feared, and necessary, in literature as in other respects. But, we may argue the claims of continental nations. We may ask, with some propriety, that in any decision upon the spirit of the age, England must not omit or slur over the pretensions of the master minds among her immediate neighbors. She must not claim, with that arrogance in letters which has always marked her political temper, that she is supreme. Great as she is in song and elo quence and philosophy, the world has other lights, and wisdom will not wholly die from the earth in the hour which sees her glories become extinct.

Mr. Horne, who modestly styles himself the editor of the work immediately before us, is, we are persuaded, responsible for the greater portion of its contents. We are inclined to believe that it issues from one hand. There is a uniformity of tone and thinking throughout the several essays, which lead to this conclusion; and there is nothing, in what we know of this gentleman's mind, that would impair the force of this conjecture. He is a poet, a writer of nice critical judgment, a contemplative and speculative moralist, fully capable, we should say, of all that this volume contains. As a writer, he is, however, very little known to the American public;-and this is to their misfortune. It is one of the unhappy conditions in which our people are placed in regard to foreign literature, that, while our publishers require that we shall live on that alone, they take not the slightest pains to give us the better portions of it. They are wondrous solicitous, so they declare,-that we shall be supplied ;— one would suppose, indeed, from the professions of some among them, that they published, at considerable personal sacrifice, purely for the good of the public. But they do not appeal to the higher tastes of their readers. They do not ask, in their selection of books for reprint, what is best,— only what is most likely to have the largest circulation. Good European books are proposed to them in vain; but they seize with avidity on the licentious novel,-on any thing, in short, with which to make a sensation.

Mr. Horne's writings, with the exception of the volume under review, have never been honored with an American dress. Yet they are all worthy of reprint, if not because of their perfectness, at least because of the proofs which they