40 



look with something of a poet's spiiit on the conditions of our actual 

 existence, so as to find freshness and heauty in what we might other- 

 Avise deem duU and wearisome. 



With regard to descriptive poetiy, the poetrj' which deals with the 

 beauties of external nature, it may perhaps be said that it is applicable 

 to the common life of those only who live in the country, and habitu- 

 ally see nature in all her loveliness. But even those who live in a large 

 town sometimes visit the beauties of the country, and relish them more 

 intensely perhaps, from their rare and transient glimpse, than those 

 who live in the midst of them, and who are too often insensible of their 

 constant privilege. Wordsworth says, — 



" To me the meanest flower that blows can give 

 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 



And it has been truly said by another poet, that " a thing of beauty is 

 a joy for ever." What we have once seen we can retain with us by the 

 blessed power of memory, and make it a refuge and companion amid 

 less pleasing scenes. Thus Wordsworth says, in his beautiful poem on 

 revisiting Tintern Abbey — 1 can here give only tlie beginning of the 

 passage : — 



" These beauteous forms, 



Through a long absence, have not been to me 



As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : 



But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'midst the din 



Of towns and cities, T have owed to them, 



In hours of weariness, sensations sweet. 



Felt ia the blood, and felt along the heart; 



And passing even into my purer mind, 



^yith tranquil restoration." 



There is a sonnet by Keats, on the Grasshopper and the Cricket, which 

 pleasantly connects the fireside of the humblest home with the country 

 in the glories of summer : — 



" The poetry of eartli is never dead : 

 ■\Vhen all the birds are faint witli the hot sun, 

 And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run 

 From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead : 

 That is the grasshopper's : he talies the lead 

 In summer luxurj- ; he has never done 

 With his deUghts ; for when tii-ed out with fun, 

 He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. 

 The poetiy of earth is ceasing never : 

 On a lone winter evening, when the ft'ost 

 Has wrought a silence, fi-om the stove there shrills 

 The cricket's song, in warmth increasingievcr ; 

 And seems, to one in drowsiness half lost, 

 The grasshopper's among sonic grassy hills." 



