sions and opinions, as were Byron and Shelley. But he lives in London, and so his poetry preserves a respectability of self-possession often wanting in his great predecessors.

Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "Let us take a walk down Fleetstreet." For in a city walk is rest and refreshment, and strengthening for body and mind. On the one hand, in disregard of action, is Shelley's Scylla of nightmare, and horror, and disbelief. On the other, whirls in disregard of thought, the athlete's Charybdis of a football match. In the midst is Fleet-street, the way of salvation.

I have said so much concerning the poetry that city dwellers find in the country, that I crave your indulgence while I remark, however briefly, the mines of poetry that are to be found in the city itself.

Little fragments of the golden ore turn up here and there: Tennyson's "golden cross that shines over city andriver"; Swinburne at Siena; Wordsworth in his chamber at Cambridge; Matthew Arnold at Oxford, "that sweet city with her dreaming spires"; Rossetti in the museum galleries, or perchance in Jenny's boudoir; Browning at the Parisian Morgue; Hugo looking down at night from a Parisian roof upon the lighted streaming crossways of what is still the world's capital; Goethe wandering with Faust through the endimanchés promenaders of the public festival; Clough's revolted Oxonian, to whose democratic fervour

"Even the whole great wicked, artificial, civilised fabric,

All its unfinished houses, lots for sale, and railway outworks,
Seems reaccepted, resumed to primal nature and beauty.”

But these are fragments—the morning stars that herald the uprising sun. Only one singer of our century has grasped the total poetry of man's life, city and country, indoors and outdoors. You know whom I mean, for there is but one name in the nineteenth century to rank in any way beyond Goethe and Hugo, and our far-reaching poet-king, Tennyson. I mean Walt Whitman, "of mighty Manhattan, the son."

F

Dweller in Mannahatta, his city, he is "a lover of populous pavements"; at the same time he thinks "he could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained"; and he "could come every afternoon of his life to look at the farmer's girl, boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking short cake." But, true to the principles I have laid down, he is enamoured of growing out-doors.

"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,

I call to the earth and the sea, half held by the night.

Press close, bare-bosomed night! magnetic, nourishing night!
Night of south winds, night of the few large stars!

Still, queenly night! mad, naked, summer night.
Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees,

Of departed sunset, of the mountains misty-topt,

Of the vitreous light of the full moon, just tinged with blue;
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river,
Of the limpid grey of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake;
Far-sweeping large-armed earth, rich apple-blossomed earth,
Smile, for your lover comes.

Prodigal, you have given me love!
Therefore I to you give love!

O unspeakable, passionate love."

THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM.

“Αναρχον και ατελευταιον το Παν.”

It is fashionable, in Encyclopædias and other such embodiments of condensed wisdom for the masses, to ascribe the rise, development, and spread, of Pantheistic philosophy to a subjective motive. Man, we are told, will not be satisfied to remain in ignorance of that which is unknowable; his too proud intellect will not rest in any philosophy that does not satisfy all the problems of nature, and resolve all the contradictions between those sets of phenomena which he calls his Soul, and the World, and the idea which he calls God; and, as a matter of course, he always tries to reach these solutions by the shortest way. Hence when, in the course of the wanderings of human thought, some philosopher hit upon the idea that all things in existence might be comprehended under one great head, other men were struck by the simplicity of the system; and because "one order of things is neater than two" or three, of course it was soon believed that there was only one order of things, and Pantheism spread and flourished, merely because of the combined pride and laziness of the intellect of man.

Without speaking too strongly, I think I may say that the above is a fair sample of the profound philosophical explanations of Pantheism given in Popular Encyclopædias, works on Theology, and Dictionaries of Sects. And the learned expositors generally take good care to avoid putting their philosophy in uncongenial company. In one page of a Theological work by an eminent living divine, a small part of which deals with Pantheism, I have found the statements

that Thales among the Greeks, the Manichæans among early heretics, and the Buddhists among Asiatics, professed the doctrine in question. It is scarcely necessary to say that Thales was not a Pantheist-not because he opposed the doctrine, but because he never troubled himself about it; that Manichæism and Pantheism are radically opposed in their first principles; and that the central doctrine of Buddhism more nearly resembles Nihilism. Having enlightened his readers with these and other facts, the Right Reverend Author most successfully disproves Pantheism, by proving a number of statements which no Pantheist is bound to deny. The psychology, the history, and the controversy, are admirable companions; none of them can accuse its fellow of being more inaccurate than itself.

For my own part, I may say that I have come to the conclusion that the cause of Pantheistic philosophy is more objective than subjective, and that man's pride of intellect has not been a more powerful agent in producing it than a feeling of individual littleness, of worthlessness when in isolation from the World and his fellows. It is quite true. that it has never arisen in any country until philosophy has turned from the contemplation of nature to the study of the human mind; but this is not because it is the mere fruit of unhealthy brooding, but because the study of mind brings with it a new element to the study of nature. The World we must study bit by bit, ever shaping the results of our science into fragmentary unities; but a man's mind is presented to him as a whole with every individual mental phenomenon, and he finds himself obliged to study each fact in its relation to the whole, from the very beginning. Hence the beginning of mental science must be the beginning of synthetic philosophy, and Pantheism is generally an early fruit of the synthetic study of Nature and the Soul.

Before this period, in the early era of observation, dualism generally reigned triumphantly. And there seemed a good deal to support it, for the Pythagoreans only formularised

what everybody saw, when they said nature was formed of opposites. In their own favourite numbers they found one and many, odd and even; in external nature, bounded and unbounded, light and darkness; in the races of animals and man, male and female, body and mind; in the body of man, health and sickness, life and death; in his soul, good and evil. And so far as mere observation goes, they were quite right; production by means of the two sexes is the type, and its analogy holds in all nature. It was not possible yet to see that the duality was only on the surface, for the surface was all men knew.

But the result of the first attempt at mental study must have shown the utter worthlessness of such halving of the realm of nature. From the very moment when a thought became an object of study, the philosopher must have seen that its mere existence laughed at all ultimate dualism of the Mind and the World. For what is a thought but the joint product of this very Mind and its radical opposite, the World, the practical unity of what men believed to be fundamentally two? So far from having nothing in common, mind and matter have in common the only thing we know about them— the objects of our knowledge. What right have we to assert their transcendental duality, when we only found that on their natural duality? and that, practically, is natural unity. And, on close inspection, the other opposites also vanished, as far as philosophy was concerned, in some unity; it became certain that, if there be two principles in nature, they are not opposing, but co-operating. The old type-production by sexes-might still remain; but it became quite evident that the two sexes were ultimately alike in their chief characteristics, differing only in function, and that by uniting to the same end. In the latter fact is their practical unity, while their transcendental unity might be traced in the fact that the man, par excellence—the logos, or reasoning soul-was neither male nor female. Thus the strongest form of dualism, which implies opposition of the fundamental principles