COLLOQUIES

DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, BUT CHIEFLY UPON

POETRY AND POETS.

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

"There is Poetry that is not written. As I here use it, it is delicate perception; something which is in the nature, enabling one man to detect harmony, and know forms of beauty better than another. It is like a peculiar gift of vision, making the world we live in more visible. The poet hears music in common sounds, and sees loveliness by the wayside. There is not a change in the sky nor a sweet human voice, which does not bring him pleasure. He sees all the light and hears all the music about him—and this is POETRY."

MANY thanks, O charming MARY RUSSELL MITFORD! for a short and satisfactory definition of a theme, which, when certain of our Poets essay to elucidate, dilates delectably for perusal, but fills with despair the seeker after a summary signification. Look, for instance, at that masterly and stirring reply to What is Poetry? in an Appeal for Poets from the pen of Barton;-a glorious whole, which it were gothic to garble by quotation. A marvellous creature, by the

way, that Bernard Barton-worthy of love and honor! Hath Quakerism foregone its frigidness, or how came he in the cold cradle of his caste? and not he alone but others, whom that same "frozen bosom" hath strangely quickened with poetic breath, and sent forth in poetic guise, lovely as "yellow cowslip and pale primrose from flowery lap of May." The Howitts among these, and especially Saint MARY!-where is verse more suffused by Innocency than hers,-more guileless and gladsome,-more redolent with the air of the Garden anterior to the great Mother's misdeed? How easy-were the Law one whit less inexorablehow easy to conceive a mental reservation, made in Mary's favor, by Eve, before the Fall!

Among the multifarious subjects which, in our days, our fathers', and, perhaps, in annals yet more remote, have attracted, instructed, or diverted the public mind, what singular or individual subject has retained a potency so perennial as that of POETRY? Chronologers who descend to the minutiae of modern times, will, in all conscience, have need of flexible pens to pourtray faithfully the fluctuations of feeling and of general opinion which have characterised the age; -its web has indeed been of "a mingled yarn, good and ill together;"—and whether, in the judgment of posterity, glory or shame shall be deemed to pre