by Mr. F. T. Palgrave, Oil " The Reign of Law"

in relation to religious faith. It is curious, and not in itself insignificant, how much of the true poetry of the day is philosophy in verse,—not such dry and abstract stuff as Coleridge used to write under the name of "Religious Musings," but a genuine balance of the spirit of life against the spirit of thought, in vivid lyrical feeling. In England, poetry has never before exhibited anything like this tendency to enter the region of speculative thought without at the same time losing that intense spirit of life in the absence of which there is no such thing as poetry. Indeed, poetry has usually been a sort of act of self-assertion of the human soul against every yoke which threatened to crush its vitality. The Greek poetry wai one long fiiotest _against the yoke of necessity or fate which loomed on the keen - intellect of that wonderful people. The Jewish poetry was a passionate outburst against that shadow of arbi- trary will which the sacerdotal order tried to identify with Jehovah. The poetry of Dante was a revOlt against the tyranny of ecclesias- tical rule. The poetry of Chaucer was a revolt against the iron monotony of medimval life. The poetry of Shakespeare was a sort of general budding of that new spring-time of human hope which followed the revival of learning and the discovery of the New World ; it might be called_ a general assertion of the right of man to be as various and as wonderful a creature as God had made him, everything to the contrary thereof in anywise not- withstanding. Every great spring-tide of poetry, down to Shelley's and Wordssvortles, has been a revival of some sort of pleasurable energy of soul reasserting its right to live against some weight of external pressure ; and hence the early tendency of all great poetic genius to some sort of animal, intellectual, or spiritual revolution. Now, at last, we are getting, in poems like one or two of the most characteristic of Tennyson's, almost all of Mr. Clough's, and Mr. Matthew Arnold's, and this new one of Mr. Palgrave's, on which we have something further to say, —poems which try, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to hold the balance between the new spirit of human life which they assert and the opposing force against which they assert it,—to adjudicate the controversy, as well as to plead the human side of it,—to appear both for man and the destiny which oppresses him, and to adjust the balance truly in their poems. We believe this to be a significant turn in the poetry of the time, for reasons which will presently appear. First, let us say something of the subject of

Mr. Palgrave's poem and of the way in which he has treated it.

It is a representation of the dialogue which goes on in so many minds of. to-day between the intellect which has bowed down to Mr. Darwin's great theory, and the spirit which asserts, against this mere law of natural selection, that, true or false in its place, - the Darwinian theory, is no adequate account_ of the laws of the spirit. The sceptical speaker in this dialogue says that the dawn of the day which sees death fall like a

thunderbolt upon us is like the dawn of any other day, and that. to hope for any restoration of life against the general law, or even. for a knowledge of the source and the goal of human spirits, is

utter vanity

"We know but what we see— Like cause, and like event ; Ono constant force runs on; Transthuted but unspent; Rica they ire; they are;- The mind may frame a plan,

'Tis from herself she draws. . . 4 A special thought for man : The natural choice that brought its hither, Is silent on the whence and whither.r.

To which, however, the spirit replies that if this be all in all,— " All essence, all design, it '

Shtif outtfrom Mortal ken ; t Wo bo..iy_tii Nature's fatty,. And drop the style of men. The summer dust the wind wafts hither Is not more dead to whence and whither."

If, on the other hand; howeVer; this lie not

" But if our life be life, . And thimitlWand will, and love, Not vague unconscious airs

That o'er wild harpstrings 1110T0 —if,

"To matter or to force, The All is not confined, Beside the law of things Is set the law of mind ; One speaks in rock and star, And one within the brain, In unison at times, And then apart again ; And both in one have brought us hither, That we may know our whence and whither,"

—then, we may have a right to defy the Darwinian theory as a mere partial epitome of the lowest side of Nature,

"Then, though the sun go up His beaten azure way, God may fulfil His thought, And bless His world to-day; Beside the law of things, The law of mind enthrone, And for the hope of all, .

Reveal Himself in One; Himself the way that leads us thither, The All-in-All, the Whence and Whither."

This is but a poor epitome of Mr. Palgrave's meditative and

beautiful poem. Of course, there is in it no novelty of mere thought. What is striking in it is the even-handed poetical justice which balances so perfectly the oppressive yoke of the modern sciences over the imagination against the remonstrance of the human spirit that the sciences were made for man, and not man for the sciences ; and which reasserts the independent life 0

man against a despotism penetrating to the very cora of his. heart and will, and threatening paralysis to every nerve of effort. The truth is, no doubt, that it is, and always was, a mistake, to which thinking minds are very liable, to follow the clue gained from one department of thought into another where it explains nothing and confuses much. That poetical instinct is a perfectly true one which asserts that, failing the higher vision which may one day reconcile the two, the principles of mind must

take their independent place beside the laws of phenomena, and even assert their prior right, (because of their deeper source in a

nature which is at once the subject and the object of knowledge,

the knower and the known,) to be heard in evidence before the mere laws of external phenomena, on all questions which touch the inner principles of life—questions of origin and of destiny. It is a mistake to try to reconcile two entirely independent

spheres of experience, until some higher point of view is attained from which both can be commanded. Reconciliation of this premature kind always means the mere twisting and con- tortion of one sphere of experience, to make it fit into the princi- ples derived from the other. The error of the Middle Ages is being inverted in our own day. Then, we took principles derived from man's self-study, and applied them to external phenomena, and consequently misread the universe into a mere exaggeration

of human thought. Now, we are in imminent danger of making a mistake precisely opposite,—of taking principles derived from the study of external phenomena and applying them to the con- science and the spirit, and consequently misreading that spirit into a dwindled bundle of material forces. This mistake would, in- deed, be the more fatal of the two. Conceited and mischievous as it was to suppose that the finite human consciousness contained in itself the complete key to external facts, it is infinitely more mischievous, though less conceited,—self-humiliation is often far more dangerous than self-conceit,—to suppose that laws of ex- ternal fact contain in themselves the complete key to the human consciousness. It certainly was not in any sense so disastrous to fancy that by analyzing our own thoughts we could penetrate to the planetary laws or the principles of alchemy, as it is to fancy that by analyzing the laws of physiology or organization we can penetrate the principles of love and duty, and the law of self-sacrifice. Twist the principles which man finds by studying his own soul into an explanation of the universe, and you get, no doubt, into a tangle of con- flicts with Nature which exhaust human energy without any material fruits. But contort the principles of any natural philosophy, however deeply studied, like Mr. Darwin's, into an explanation of the inner life of man, and you get into a tangle of conflicts with the will, the conscience, and the spirit indefi- nitely more dangerous still. Let any man actually live for only a single day of the most ordinary life as if he were a mere bundle of necessary phenomena, "selected" by the result of an infinite number of natural processes from other less eligible phenomena, —a mere transmutation of physical forces which have gradually beaten other less advantageous forms of force out of existence, or rather absorbed them to swell their own importance,—and before the end of the day he would, if he had not ceased to exist altogether, have attained a profound conviction that no one distinctly human attitude,—be it mere business prudence, or strenuous will, or artistic preference, or disinterested love, or human trust,—can be justified or explained at all on the principles of purely physical science. If human self-knowledge, strained into a natural philosophy, sets up a perpetual succes- sion of miracles instead of the sublime order of nature,—the laws of nature strained into a moral philosophy involve a complete extinction of free-will, responsibility, originating thought and action. A universalized supernaturalism which traces everything back to motive and volition annihilates modern science ; but a universalized naturalism which traces everything back to necessary forces annihilates human nature. Until we can find the true and ultimate point of contact between freedom and necessity, where human freedom first begins to mould necessary laws to its own conscious purposes, and where necessary laws first encounter, modify, and discipline human freedom, we shall be wise not to attempt too much the " reconciliation " of totally different clues of principle, for this reconciliation is but too apt to mean practically the attempt to trample out one set of facts by minds preoccupied by another set of facts.

We think it a very significant sign that a school of poetry should arise which is deeply penetrated by both of these (not yet convergent) principles of thought, because it seems to show that the inner life of man is receiving into its very essence some feeling of the rhythm and music in the order of external nature, without ceasing in the least to insist on the higher rhytlun and music in the order of internal emotion, conscience, and faith ; and this surely should be the true sign, if there be a true sign, of the coming of a day at which the point of contact of which we have spoken may be at last discovered. And, indeed, physical science seems not unlikely to be the last of those outer laws against which man has constantly to reassert his inde- pendent force, after they have, by virtue of their first beneficent influence, so overridden his heart and imagination that what was first given to strengthen him appears to remain only to paralyze. The ceremonial or sacrificial law, educated the Jew and then op- pressed him, till it needed a divine revelation from the human side to restore the balance shaken by the preponderance of the absolute Will. Even after our Lord had restored the spring and elasticity to the soul, the combined weight of arbitraryecclesiastical authority, and that system of casuistry which was in some respects the moral successor to the elaborate jurisprudence of Rome, first educated and then overweighted human life till it needed the Reformation to re- assert the freedom which Christ had brought. But in some respects more dangerous, because less arbitrary and capricious than either of these yokes of external law, is the despotism threatened by physical science after it has passed that earliest stage in which it only strengthens men's hands, and gives them a vastly increased power over the external world, and reaches the stage at which it penetrates all their thoughts, and tries to persuade them that they are nothing but tossing atoms in its mighty Gulf Stream. The only alleviation of this last species of tyranny is that it is a tyranny and terror of imagination alone. The priests of science may push their own conceptions far beyond the truth, but they have no power, like the priests of religion, to translate their false conceptions into cruel facts. Hence, no doubt, the far earlier tendency to a durable peace between the poets who draw their inspiration from human life, and the priests of science who interpret the order of nature, than there ever was between the poets of earlier generations and the priests of either the Jewish or the Christian dogmas. Indeed, the poets of modern life may do as much to lead us to the true connecting link between science and faith, as they did in former times to achieve the victory of human feeling over intolerable yokes.