the silence of nature. Such poetry is indeed _got by
heart_; and memory is then tenacious to the death, for her hold on what
she loves is strengthened as much by grief as by joy; and, when even
hope itself is dead--if, indeed, hope ever dies--the trust is committed
to despair. Words are often as unforgetable as voiceless thoughts; they
become very thoughts themselves, and _are_ what they represent. How are
many of the simply, rudely, but fervently and beautifully rhymed Psalms
of David, very part and parcel of the most spiritual treasures of the
Scottish peasant's being!

"The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green: he leadeth me
The quiet waters by."

These four lines sanctify to the thoughtful shepherd on the braes every
stream that glides through the solitary places--they have often given
colours to the greensward beyond the brightness of all herbage and of
all flowers. Thrice hallowed is that poetry which makes us mortal
creatures feel the union that subsists between the Book of Nature and
the Book of Life!

Poetry has endeared childhood by a thousand pictures, in which fathers
and mothers behold with deeper love the faces of their own offspring.
Such poetry has almost always been the production of the strongest and
wisest minds. Common intellects derive no power from earliest memories;
the primal morn, to them never bright, has utterly faded in the smoky
day; the present has swallowed up the past, as the future will swallow
up the present; each season of life seems to stand by itself as a
separate existence; and when old age comes, how helpless, melancholy,
and forlorn! But he who lives in the spirit of another creed, sees far
into the heart of Christianity. He hears a divine voice saying--"Suffer
little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the
kingdom of heaven!" Thus it is that Poetry throws back upon the New
Testament the light she has borrowed from it, and that man's mortal
brother speaks in accordance with the Saviour of Man. On a dead
insensible flower--a lily--a rose--a violet--a daisy, poetry may pour
out all its divinest power--just as the sun itself sometimes seems to
look with all its light on some one especial blossom, all at once made
transparently lustrous. And what if the flower be alive in all its
leaves--and have in it an immortal spirit? Or what if its leaves be
dead, and the immortal spirit gone away to heaven?