and tell us whether it be not rude and clumsy in comparison? Let the English china-maker place the manufactures of Worcestershire and Yorkshire on the same table with those of Sévres or of Dresden, and the superior beauty of the foreign article is visible at once. We are beaten out of the market whenever it comes to a question of taste. The reason is generally acknowledged to be this,—that on the continent the artist has freer access to that which is beautiful in taste and art. In the designs which adorn the Parisian clocks, you may trace the forms of beauty which existed originally in the minds of Raffaelle and Titian, and transfused themselves upon the work insensibly through every touch of one whose fancy had been inspired and kindled at the living sources of the beautiful.

A few years ago I was engaged in chamois hunting among the crags and glaciers of the Tyrol. My companion was a Tyrolese chamois hunter, a man, who in point of social position, might rank with an English labourer. I fear there would be a difficulty in England in making such a companionship pleasurable and easy to both parties; there would be a painful obsequiousness, or else an insolent familiarity on the one side, constraint on the other. In this case there was nothing of that sort. We walked together

and ate together. He had all the independence of a man, but he knew the courtesy which was due to a stranger; and when we parted for the night, he took his leave with a politeness and dignity which would have done no discredit to the most finished gentleman. The reason, as it seemed to me, was that his character had been moulded by the sublimities of the forms of the outward nature amidst which he lived. It was impossible to see the clouds wreathing themselves in that strange wild way of theirs round the mountain crests, till the hills seemed to become awful things, instinct with life-it was impossible to walk, as we did sometimes, an hour or two before sunrise, and see the morning beams gilding with their pure light the grand, old peaks on the opposite side of the valley, while we ourselves were still in deepest shade, and look on that man with his rifle on his shoulder and his curling feather in his high green hat, his very exterior in harmony with all around him, and his calm eye resting on all that wondrous spectacle, without feeling that these things had had their part in making him what he was, and that you were in a country in which men were bound to be polished, bound to be more refined, almost bound to be better men than elsewhere.

Mr. Wordsworth, one of the great teachers of

our nation's feeling, has explained to us in many a passage how all these forms of God's outward world of beauty are intended to perform an office in the refinement of the heart. He has painted his country girl educated by the sky above her, the colours of the hills, the sound of the waterfalls

"Till beauty, born of murmuring sound,
Shall pass into her face."

Now there are two things in your Institution which might educate taste of this kind: works of poetry and works of fiction. By poetry, we do not mean, simply, verse or rhyme. In a hundred thousand verses there might be not one thought of poetry. Neither does poetry mean something which is fanciful and unreal. By poetry we mean invisible truth as distinct from that which is visible. Not every invisible truth; not, for example, the invisible truths which are perceivable by the understanding, as mathematics; but the invisible realities which are recognized by the imagination. We will take an illustration. You look at this England, intersected with its railways, and say it is becoming a dull, prosaic thing. The sentimentalist will tell you it has broken up all the poetry of the scene, because it has run through our pleasure-grounds, sadly cut up our

old retreats and solitudes, and destroyed all classical associations. So it may have done. It has destroyed that which was associated with the poetry of the past; but it has left us the real poetry of the present. Let men look upon that railroad, and one will see nothing but the machine that conveys the travellers to their destination. This is a truth, but only a visible one. The engineer comes and sees in it another class of truths. It suggests to his mind the idea of broad and narrow gauge, he talks of gradients, &c. Another truth; that which is appreciable by the understanding. Then let the poet come with that eye of his "glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and his imagination creates another class of truths; the suggested meaning of it to him is the triumph of mind over matter; the gradual annihilation of time and space. He sees in these railroads stretched throughout the country the approaching times of peace and human union; and so he bursts out into his high prophetic song of the time—

"When the war drum throbs no more, and the battle flags are furled,

In the parliament of man, the federation of the world."

All this is truth; neither seen, nor reasoned truth, but truth to the imagination. Truth just as real

in its way, as the others are in theirs. And this is poetry. For this reason is poetry a thing needful for the working man. His whole life, if he could be taught to feel it, is full of deep, true poetry. The poet teaches him by suggestive inspiration the hidden meaning of common things, transfiguring life, as it were, by shedding a glory on it; and if you will force the poor man to see nothing but the wretched reality that is around him, if you will not let his mind be enlightened by the invisible truth of things, if you will not let him learn from the master thinkers of the past how in his work, in his smoky cabin, in his home affections, there is a deep significance concealed, connecting him, when he once has felt it, with the highest truths of the invisible world, you condemn the worker to a desolate lot indeed.

It

You have a second class of means in your Institution for refining taste,—works of fiction. is in vain to rail at these with indiscriminate censure. Read they will be, and read they must be; and if we are asked the reason why works of fiction are matters of importance, the best reply which has been suggested is, that they enlarge the heart, enabling us to sympathize with the hearts of a larger circle of the human race than that into which our own experience admits us. You are all familiar with the works of Dickens.

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