the authorised Canon, there would have been no more suggestive fields for the heresy-hunter than in the perplexed philosophy and probationary scepticism of the great poets who produced these works; and if the professional gauger of dogmatic truth has been unable to square off several passages in the 'In Memoriam' with the received standard of the particular sect to which he belongs, there are many, on the other hand, who are of opinion, that if the poem has troubled Israel at all, it has troubled it as the angel troubled the waters at Bethesda, so that those who come to wash therein find strength and refreshing to their souls. In common with the sacred writers above mentioned, who left orthodoxy to take care of itself, the poet, in giving battle to his own doubts, and expression to his own sorrow, has lifted up 'a cloud of nameless trouble' from many a weary and darkened life, and the poem will not hold any less sure or less grateful a place in the memory of men, because it is not built upon the set lines of any doctrinal system, but rather, clearing itself from all such earthly lendings, stands out to the eyes of the imagination a spiritual Camelot

built

To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever.

MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY

MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY.

If mysticism, like sublimity, be not Hebrew by birth, it is at all events not English. The characteristic more strongly marked than any other in the tongue that Shakspeare spake'-as Wordsworth called that glorious vehicle of ours-is perhaps its forcible and terse directness, and the facility it affords in either speaker or writer for the exercise of that eminently English faculty called 'coming to the point.' Of the nation too, as well as the language, one may safely risk the assertion that mysticism is entirely out of character. The French proverb, ‘Ce qui n'est pas clair, n'est pas Français,' applies if possible even more forcibly to English than to French. How it should have come to pass then, notwithstanding these peculiarities of race and language, and in an age, too, whose matter-of-fact utilitarianism has been both well marked and well abused, that such large proportions of that branch of our literature in which we are supposed to rival the best productions of any other nation, should come to exhibit so much that is supersubtle in manner

F