barren glacier ranges of pure art, for the fertile gardens
of practical and popular song, and write for the many, and with the
many, in words such as they can understand; remembering that that
which is simplest is always deepest; that the many contain in
themselves the few; and that when he speaks to the wanderer and the
drudge, he speaks to the elemental and primeval man, and in him
speaks to all who have risen out of him. Let him try, undiscouraged
by inevitable failures; and if at last he succeeds in giving vent to
one song which will cheer hard-worn hearts at the loom and the forge,
or wake one pauper's heart with the hope that his children are
destined not to die as he died, or recall, amid Canadian forests or
Australian sheep-walks, one thrill of love for the old country, her
liberties, and her laws, and her religion, to the settler's heart--
let that man know that he has earned a higher place among the spirits
of the wise and good, by doing, in spite of the unpleasantness of
self-denial, the duty which lay nearest him, than if he had out-
rivalled Goethe on his own classic ground, and made all the
cultivated and the comfortable of the earth desert, for the exquisite
creations of his fancy, Faust, and Tasso, and Iphigenie.

THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART {187}

Much attention has been excited this year by the alleged fulfilment
of a prophecy that the Papal power was to receive its death-blow--in
temporal matters, at least--during the past year 1848. For
ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming, the obsolete author,
who has so suddenly revived in the public esteem, than we have in
many other interpreters of prophecy. Their shallow and bigoted views
of past history are enough to damp our faith in their discernment of
the future. It does seem that people ought to understand what has
been, before they predict what will be. History is "the track of
God's footsteps through time;" it is in His dealings with our
forefathers that we may expect to find the laws by which He will deal
with us. Not that Mr. Fleming's conjecture must be false; among a
thousand guesses there ought surely to be one right one. And it is
almost impossible for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however
clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at some truth or
other. The interpreters of prophecy therefore, like all other
interpreters, have our best wishes, though not our sanguine hopes.
But, in the meant