the Good and the
Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.'

In no way can the imagination be more effectually or safely exercised
and improved than by the constant perusal and study of our best Poets.
Poetry appeals to the universal sympathies of mankind. With the
contemplative writers, we can indulge our pensive and thoughtful tastes.
With the describers of natural scenery, we can delight in the beauties
and glories of the external universe. With the great dramatists, we are
able to study all the phases of the human mind, and to take their
fictitious personages as models or beacons for ourselves. With the great
creative Poets, we can go outside of all these, and find ourselves in a
region of pure Imagination, which may be as true to our higher
instincts--perhaps more so--than the shows which surround us.

If it be as truthfully as it has been happily expressed by the prince of
dramatic Poets, that

'He who has no music in his soul
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,'

it should be a paramount duty with every one who loves his species, and
cultivates a generous philanthropy, to patronize every effort to diffuse
widely through society, Poetry of genuine character, and to cultivate a
taste for it as an element of a literary, religious, and moral
education. We commend, as a standard of appreciation of the true
character of the gifts of the Poetic Muse, the following critique from
Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham:

''Tis not a flash of fancy, which sometimes,
Dazzling our minds, sets off the slightest rhymes,
Bright as a blaze, but in a moment done;
True wit is everlasting, like the sun,
Which, though sometimes behind a cloud retired,
Breaks out again, and is by all admired.
Number and rhyme, and that harmonious sound
Which not the nicest ear with harshness wound,
Are necessary, yet but vulgar arts;
And all in rain these superficial parts
Contribute to the structure of the whole,
Without a genius too--for that's the soul;
A spirit which inspires the work throughout,
As that of Nature moves the world about;
A flame that glows amidst conceptions fit;
E'en something of divine, and more than wit;
Itself unseen, yet all things by it shown,
Describing all men, but described by none.'

We neither intend nor desire to institute any invidious comparisons
between Old Britain and Young America. We are one people--one in blood,
one literature, one faith, one religion, in