378 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



things, to study and theorize upon poetry and the arts generally. He 

 could hardly have failed to know the most recent efflorescence of Eng- 

 lish poetry, living as he did in circles where the varied merits of the 

 new poets were largely and keenly discussed. He had lived also for 

 some time in France, and was widely read in French poetry. He had 

 never passed through the ordinary course of Greek and Latin at school 

 and college, but he had been taught by his father to read these lan- 

 guages, and had been accustomed from the first to regard their litera- 

 ture as literature, and to read their poetry as poetry. These were 

 probably the main elements of his knowledge of poetry. But it was not 

 his way to dream or otherwise luxuriate over his favorite poets for 

 pure enjoyment. Mr. Mill was not a cultivator of art for art's sake. 

 His was too fervid and militant a soul to lose itself in serene love and 

 culture of the calmly beautiful. He read poetry for the most part 

 with earnest, critical eye, striving to account for it, to connect it with 

 the tendencies of the age ; or he read to find sympathy with his own 

 aspirations after heroic energy. He read De Vigny and other French 

 poets of his generation with an eye to their relations to the convulsed 

 and struggling state of France, and because they were compelled by 

 their surroundings to take life au serieux, and to pursue with all the 

 resources of their art something different from beauty in the abstract. 

 Luxurious passive enjoyment or torpid half-enjoyment must have been 

 a comparatively rare condition of his finely-strung, excitable, and fer- 

 vid system. I believe that his moral earnestness was too imperious to 

 permit much of this. He was capable, indeed, of the most passionate 

 admiration of beauty, but even that feeling seems to have been inter- 

 penetrated by a certain militant apostolic fervor ; his love was as the 

 love of a religious soldier for a patron saint, who extends her aid and 

 countenance to him in his wars. I do not mean to say that his mind 

 was in a perpetual glow ; I mean only that this surrender to his im- 

 passioned transports was more characteristic of the man than serene 

 openness to influx of enjoyment. His " Thoughts on Poetry and its 

 Varieties," while clear and strenuous as most of his thoughts were, are 

 neither scientifically precise, nor do they contain any notable new idea 

 not previously expressed by Coleridge except, perhaps, the idea that 

 emotions are the main links of association in the poetic mind ; still, 

 his working out of the definition of poetry, his distinction between 

 novels and poems, and between poetry and eloquence, is interesting as 

 throwing light upon his own poetic susceptibilities. He holds that 

 poetry is the " delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of 

 human emotion." It is curious to find one, who is sometimes assailed 

 as the advocate of a grovelling philosophy, complaining that the chi- 

 valrous spirit has almost disappeared from books of education, that the 

 youth of both sexes of the educated classes are growing up unromantic. 

 " Catechisms," he says, " will be found a poor substitute for the old 

 romances, whether of chivalry or faery, which, if they did not give a 



