THE POETRY OF LIFE; OR, HOW D'YE DO?

THIRD ARTICLE.

THAT is unquestionably a fine utterance, 'the open secret is the grand secreta divine oracle, full of deepest meaning and import. Compared with this, all masonic signs and symbols, grips' and pass-words, which bar the uninitiated from the mysteries and secrets of crafts and brotherhoods, are but the toys of children. It is in complete harmony with our definition of poetry, that it is subjective rather than objective, a thing of the inner life rather than of the outer world. It indicates that poetry, in the highest acceptation of the term, by which we mean the highest truth in its highest phasis of beauty and spirituality, may be lying naked and open around us, and yet be to us a profound secret, a spring shut up and a fountain sealed.' The open secret! We have called it a divine oracle, for it is a Hebrew and not a German utterance. It is shadowed forth, nay, explicitly taught, to him who has capacity for the highest teaching, in such expressions as The secret of the Lord is with those that fear him,' and 'The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned. We shall attempt, in this paper, to survey a few of the provinces of this wide-lying open secret, and endeavour to unfold some of its mysteries, under the conviction that the great work of life is to convert the open secret into an illuminated revelation.

The popular faith is, that there is far more of prose than poetry in life. Its wine is all drunk in boyhood and youth. Then come the vinegar and the lees, the wormwood and the gall. The boy has gone out of Eden into the wilderness, and cherubin and flaming swords bar return. Memories of the past come not to brighten and bless, but to make darkness visible, and mock him with his irrecoverable loss. The primeval curse is heavy upon him. Labour is a toil and & sorrow. Briars and thorns spring up instead of vines and fig trees; éockles grow instead of wheat, and thistles instead of barley. The springs of feeling are dried up, or its streams frozen over. The mind also loses its elasticity. Imagination and fancy, stars which rose with the young spirit, set before mid-day, and the trailing cloud of glory,' which erewhile rose from the womb of being, becomes murky cloud, instinct with lightning and thunder. If the intellect grows in strength amid the storms and ungenial weather of life, it lays up truth after truth with little more of joy or emotion than the well-to-do practitioner pockets a fee, or the capitalist, who has invested in all sorts of securities, counts and lays by his regularly recurring divi

dends.

season

mute for a moment. But no poet has written the epic, no no point of the great circumference was the spheral music composer the oratorio of life. No one has traced the course of that divine spark-The soul that rises with us, our life's star,' from its mysterious source in the fountains of morning, through its devious course in sun and shade, to where it sinks in the silent sea in the west, and given us the cheering report, that all was musical, or might be musical, in this orbit of humanity.

Thus the popular faith on this point is supported by the practice of the aristocracy of mind, and, we must admit, is attested by fact and experience. The great mass of mankind, Samson-like, grind in the prison-house of labour, with shorn locks and blinded eyes, and it is but at rare intervals that the spirit of the Lord comes mightily upon them, or they obtain a glimpse of the open secret of the universe. Nor are the lords of the Philistines, who look on, more to be envied. Examine their spiritual mechanism, the same great need, great greed, and little faculty are there; nay, ten to one but the toiling Samson, who has actually put forth his hand and operated on nature, is the more cunningly gifted of the two.' Examine the programme of amusements for the London 'season,' and if you are skilled in the higher laws of interpretation, you will find it summed up in this sentence-There are no perennial springs of poetry in the lives of idle lords. Their great need, great greed, and little faculty' are exhibited in the fact, that they have been known to give a stranger girl five hundred pounds to sing a song to them, one word of which they did not understand. To sum up all: the popular faith, the works of genius, and the frivolities of the London season, point to this issuethat if the elements and appliances for building up the loftiest and purest life of humanity are lying around every man in the richest profusion, but small use is made of them; there is but little harmony between the inner and the outer world, and but few have found out the key which unlocks the invisible gates of the open secret.

We would be understood as having struck the lowest note of our gamut, and will now endeavour to ascend; as having exhibited the dark side of the picture, and will now proceed to unfold its brighter aspects. We have spoken of the actualities, we will now speak of the possiabilities, of humanity. We have spoken of facts, we will now speak of truths. We would illustrate the difference between a fact and a truth by an incident with which every child is acquainted, and from which every man might learn wisdom. Once upon a time two pilgrims were imprisoned in the dungeons of Doubting Castle. We will suppose that this incident in Bunyan's beautiful allegory is a reality. It is a fact that the pilgrims were imprisoned, but not a truth. In reality they were not imprisoned at all. They had the means of escape in their own hands, only they were not conscious for a time of the treasure they possessed in the key called knowledge.' Thick stone walls and strong bolts and bars were around them, and Giant Despair kept watch and ward over them. Beyond them at a little distance lay the fair world and freedom, and the king's highway, leading direct to the celestial city. It was but a few steps from the dungeon to the highway, but that little distance was equal to immeasurable leagues or an impassable gulf so long as the prisoners were unconscious of the possession of their key. But how bolts and bars give way, how dungeon gates fly open, when the key is applied to them! How speedily the pilgrims pass from darkness to light, from bondage to liberty! How near the darkness and the light, the bondage and the liberty, are to each other! Hence we say that this allegorical incident illustrates the difference between a fact and a truth. The pilgrims were prisoners, but they needed not to be so. Unbounded liberty was in their power while they lay in their dungeon; but, unconscious of this truth, they began to give way to despair, and in that mood they would have told you, no doubt, that there was more sorrow and bondage than joy and liberty in the life of a pilgrim.

This is the popular faith, and it is sanctioned, indirectly but emphatically, by the sons of genius and the giants of literature. We do not know that any composer has written an oratorio of life. The Creation, the Messiah, Elijah, and others, have furnished splendid topics for musical genius; but the oratorio of life is yet to be written. The first-class poets have fixed upon the mountain-tops of things, and clothed them with the unsetting sunlight of their intelligence. They have chosen for their themes and illustrations the most attractive landscapes in creation, solemn passages in the scroll of Providence, striking chapters in individual life. We have odes on childhood without end; comedies, which pourtray the sentiment of young love, the flowering the heart; tragedies and epics, which strike deeper chords, and exhibit humanity as acting within an impassable circle of moral and physical laws, and impinged on every hand with moral and physical responsibilities. The sublime and beautiful, the lights and shadows, the good and evil, the strong contrasts in the world without and the world within us, are enshrined in notes and songs, and glow upon the canvass. And that is poetry. Yes, that is poetry, and we take it and are thankful. But, by implication, that is all that is poetical, especially in human life. Only a passage here and there, the intervals being made up of the dullest prose! We have poets who have walked in spirit with the sun and the stars round the circle of the seasons, and returned with the report that at

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We can never meditate sufficiently on the deep import of the truth which is here shadowed forth by the genius of John Bunyan. It typifies the condition and capabilities of

press this incident into our service, but rather as a companion-picture to the pilgrims in Doubting Castle, and both of them for the sound philosophy of life, and the mode of its development, which we find in them. In now proceeding to speak briefly upon this higher department of our subject, it may be proper to state, that we designedly pass over, with a reverential acknowledgment, that standing miracle of our own times, which constitutes the turningpoint of the life, and the starting-point of the true spiritual life, of every good man. The question to the threshold of which all that we have written in this series of papers has now brought us, is, How does a mind grow-in strength, in goodness, in purity, in blessedness? We have spoken of a knowledge which does not suppose a high degree of mental culture;' then what sort of knowledge do we want, and how shall we attain to it? We have spoken of poetry as the secular religion of the soul, and of the poetic and religious capacity as one; also of poetry as a condition of the mind, rather than a thing of the outer world; but we have just been speaking of an open secret' in the outer world, which, all-open though it be, most men cannot perceive. In this we might, at first sight, seem to be charge able with a little confusion, if not contradiction. But to careful readers we shall easily blow away the mist which misleads them to see confusion where there is merely complicated order, and show them that all the parts of our little system are in perfect harmony.

the life of every man. It presents us with its actualities and possibilities, and teaches us that if the one is dull and prosaic, the other is radiant with the light and beauty of the highest spirituality. Two worlds are sketched before us. One of them is a region of darkness and bondage, the other of light and liberty. They lie alongside each other, they overlap or run into each other, or rather the two worlds are one. Cast a thick covering over a man. Bind up his eyes and stop his ears. Lead him in that condition into the fairest landscape when nature is in her vernal or summer prime; place him in the loveliest earthly paradise; lead him into the vocal woods; or take him into a gallery of paintings, where the genius of the artist shines forth in high interpretations of nature; or into music halls, where melodies intermix, and the soul of harmony stirs the atmosphere as with the very spirit of life; or into lecture-rooms, where is to be heard the greatest and wisest discourse of life, death, and immortality, of the mysteries of being, and the solemnities of duty. What would all avail? The poor man saw no beauty, heard no melody, listened to no words of wisdom; not that he lacked capacity, but it was not unfolded. He had eyes, but saw not, for they were blinded; ears, but heard not, for they were closed. But beauty, and melody, and words of wisdom, spread and floated around him. Others saw and heard, because their eyes and ears were open. That made all the difference. Our theme is boundless in illustrations, both in the physical and spiritual worlds. How different all the world' of these days from all the world' of the ancients! Ages and empires rose and passed away; dynasties, systems of morals, government, philosophy, and religion flourished and faded in the old world, while the new world in the west, and the great Australian continent at the antipodes, were unknown to the inhabitants of these countries. The properties of matter were inherent in it from the beginning, but were unfolded slowly and after the lapse of ages to the human mind. The polarity of the magnet, the genius of modern navigation and discovery, the expansive property of water, the elemental spirit of modern mechanism, were truths from the beginning; but they became truths in the mind only as it were yesterday.propriation and reception is also the measure of their The lightning of heaven was seen by Adam; but Franklin was the first man who handled this thunderbolt of the Eternal; and only in our own days has it been made the medium of human thought between minds at the extremities of our island. This knowledge was hidden from the ancients. They lived in the midst of powers of which they knew nothing. They were subjected to physical laws whose nature they could not comprehend, but of whose presence they were made painfully aware by the recoil which always follows the breach of them. The stroke came from an unseen and unknown hand. In physics, as in morals, they felt themselves passive and helpless in the hands of an inexorable destiny or of capricious gods; and as regards the laws of matter, as well as of mind, they might have exclaimed, Wherewithal shall we come before the Lord!' It is so also in the spiritual world. The divinest truths are found in contact with the blackest night of ignorance. The land of promise lies alongside the great and terrible wilderness. One other illustration will suffice, and we shall take it from sacred writ. Once upon a time the hosts of the King of Syria surrounded the city of Dotham, with a view to capture a prophet of the Lord. The servant of the prophet was greatly afraid when he saw the horses and chariots of the enemy, but his master possessed his soul in patience. Why the difference? Because of the difference of their vision. The seer said unto his servant, Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And Elisha prayed and said, Lord, I pray thee open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire

round about Elisha.'

We shall do well to mark the process by which this young man was transformed from a state of fear and danger to one of confidence and security. It was merely by opening his eyes. It is not, however, as a miracle that we

How does a mind grow? Just as a body grows. The elements of growth are different, but the process is the same. The analogy is striking and complete. Bodies grow by appropriating and absorbing foreign but congenial elements into their own substance, and so do minds. The bread which we eat becomes part of ourselves; trees and flowers are the visible incarnations of the invisible gases, of the dews, the rains, and the sunlight. They have the capacity of receiving and appropriating the substances by which they are surrounded, and the measure of that capacity is the measure of their strength and beauty. So with minds. The elements of their strength and beauty lie around them in rich profusion, and their capacity of ap strength and beauty. A mind is strong just in proportion to the amount of absolute and relative truth which it has been able to receive-beautiful and pure, in proportion to the love with which it has received it. Moral beauty is simply the harmony which subsists between the percipient mind and the moral laws of the universe, as, inversely, moral deformity, or sin, is simply a discord or antipathy between things, which, as they exist together, ought to exist in harmony and peace. We might therefore speak of the transition from the wilderness to Canaan, from Doubting Castle to the king's highway, from the prose to the poetry of life, as the unfolding of the beatitudes and sublimities. They are the bridge by which we pass from the one to the other the horses and chariots of fire by which we are translated from the lower world into the vestibule of heaven. The servant of the prophet saw, and became a new man-received a feeling of security and a consciousness of strength. This is a type of all healthy mental processes. Our seeing is the measure of our being and our strength; that seeing, or vision, however, which, although receiving its credentials and attestations from the few things of sense which lie around us upon the narrow mole-hill of our individual experience, comes rolling upon the heart and soul from the long-drawn, dim religious vistas and mountain-tops of the past, and which, by the eye of faith, we descry on the more glorious mountaintops, and in the longer vistas of the future. But it is an essential condition of strong and vigorous life that our vi sion be clear as well as extensive. Like the eagle, we must be able to look upon the sun. The reason why our knowledge often serves so little purpose is, that it is but half knowledge, but half seeing. We live in a twilight, or rather, our eyes being but half open, we see men like trees walking. We have not mastered and matured the knowledge which we think we possess, and worked it into the texture of our life. We are content to know only its out.

ward signs and symbols-the words and logic of our creeds and confessions, without penetrating into the living soul which lies beneath, like fire in the hard and cold-seeming flint, of which the words and logic are but the visible vestures. Perhaps we shall best illustrate our meaning in these immediate remarks, as well as the general scope of this paper, by endeavouring, by the magic of words, to shed a light, such as bursts upon a nook of the summer landscape in a breezy, cloud-rolling day, upon one or two of the nooks and corners of this open secret and continent of truth, which stretches illimitably around us-which lies upon our right hand though we see it not, and upon our left though we cannot perceive it.'

matter.

There is no relaxation, no rebellion in this department of creation. They come from afar, but they come with power. We might speak of the strong influence as well as the sweet influence of the pleiades.' They come from afar, from the sun, moon, and stars, but the seasons hear their voice and are prompt to obey. The sea wears away the rocks only in submission to the power which is upon its waves. The rivers overflow their banks in obedience to the law which teaches them to find their level; but they never run backwards or stand in heaps, unless at the behest of Him who sits king on all their floods, when he, to subserve the highest moral purpose, steps from behind the veil of phenomena, makes bare his right hand, or utters his voice, and thus, by a visible display to human sense, lays the sure foundation of faith in the invisible.

The poor artizan and operative--the shoemaker in his stall-the weaver on his loom-the factory-girl, who is a living crank or pin in the roaring mechanism of the mill, often utter in their deepest hearts the vague, inarticulate complaint, that they live and labour in narrow overcrowded spaces, and that no noble thoughts, arrayed in beauty and crowned with sublimity, come to lighten their toils, cheer their sorrows, and make melody in their hearts. They shiver in a bleak, wintry clime, and have no covering for the cold. But for them, also, there are wedding-house of many mansions, a few of which we have just surgarments, if they but knew how to open the great wardrobe, and put them on. They are like the prisoners in Doubting Castle, and have the means of enlargement in their own hand. Do they toil in sadness, in narrow places? Let them look out with us from the doors of their workshops, and we will show them room enough. They stand in the midst of infinitude, and where could they find ampler standing-room? Created being surges on all sides around them, and the uncreated Being himself enfolds them every moment in his fatherly embrace. They live in the midst of a creation, of all conceivable creations the most beautiful and magnificent. Beneath them are infinite depths, above them infinite heights, and there are illimit able extensions on their right hand and their left. But beneath and above, the east and the west, are only figures of speech, and frequently hide as much as they reveal. We look up to the sun by day, to the moon and stars by night; but we might look down upon them all. We stand upon the firm earth, but in mental contemplations we can dispense with our pedestal. By a wave of the magic wand of mind the earth vanishes, but we fall not, for spirit is not subjected to the physical laws. This is in the night. We now look down upon the sun, which shines in the depths beneath. We are in the centre of two great concaves. In the depths below and in the heights above, in the illimitable extensions on the right hand and on the left, suns are blazing and planets burning--moons and stars shed a chastened radiance through the empty spaces -comets whirl in erratic orbits-and suns, moons, planets, stars, and comets, in their mystic dance to their own spheral music, which fills the immensity, utter the words, The hand which made us is divine,' and in reason's ear, the voice, as of him who inhabits eternity, proclaims, 'This is the house of God.'

If the house is thus great and glorious, much more its inhabitant. If he who builds the house have more honour than the house, so also he for whom it is built, fashioned as he is in the image of the builder, being as he is the temple of his Spirit-the finite transcript of the infinite and unereated. And yet the privileged inhabitant of this veyed-this finite transcript and temple of the Infiniteis often heard complaining that his life is cold and comfortless, that he is chilled with vacuity, and he cries with bitter pathos, 'Oh, who will show us any good?' In mournful mood and accents he tells companions mournful as himself that his life is a bundle of disappointments, follies, regrets, faded hopes, decaying fires; that the past which lies behind him is dotted with some bright spots, but an inexorable destiny prevents him from returning to bask in their sunlight, while the future, to which that destiny urges him, spreads before him an illimitable wintry waste of desert. This is a correct reading of human life in its deep eclipse; but let us again try to work a few of those telegraphic wires of which we have spoken, and see if there are not sympathetic responses in that highest, unwritten apocalypse of God, a man, to the visitations which come from afar; let us watch this living phenomenon as the day-spring of truth and beauty falls upon it, and hear if it does not become musical as the fabled statue of Memnon under the earliest rays of the sun.

Another wave of the magic wand, and the earth is in its place again. But now it hides not the splendour of the vision, for that once seen is seen for ever. We can now look through the earth as it were a ball of glass, into the literally unfathomable abyss over which we are suspended, and see the wonders of creation by which it is replenished. But we need not wander far from home in search of the noble companionship of great thoughts; for every living soul is a centre in which converge the wires of a spiritual telegraph, by which messages and visitations are communicated from the near and the far-lying provinces of God's empire; and there are capacities and faculties in every soul, by which more or less of the inflowings of the universal bounty might at all times be received and enjoyed. On some of these wires physical truths, on others spiritual truths, are conveyed. We would make the former vibrate with the physical laws by which we are surrounded. Reading carefully, we learn the steadiness with which they operate, and the prompt obedience which is paid to them, by all the forms and varieties of

True as it is to fact, it is yet strange enough that we should suffer our present to be eclipsed by the brightness of our past. We may reasonably enough regret the dark things which seem to lie behind us, but which in reality are not behind us but present with us, and part of ourselves; but the bright things of the past should naturally be loved and cherished always. But in truth they are so. Our regrets are the reflex or eclipse upon our minds of the moral spots with which we have stained our nature-the smarting of self-inflicted wounds. Pursuing this train of thought, we shall find that the past is a figure of speech. There is no past in the life of any of us. We do not drag a lengthening chain,' we carry it all on our backs, and it is a burden which crushes us, or a rich intellectual capital which cheers and comforts us, opening for us sources of enjoyment in the various inns on our journey, just as we have made it the one or the other. The past and the distant are not only present with us, but as inseparable from us as our own shadow. We have not left our young heart by the burns and braes of our childhood; we shall return and search for it there in vain. We carry it with us over wide oceans to the uttermost ends of the earth; and when, upon the extreme verge of life, we look upon the red of the evening instead of the red of the morning, that young heart lies buried deep in the depths of our being, probably under much rubbish, but also, we should hope, under much wisdom. What was the young heart but a mood of being, which was succeeded or modified by other moods, all of which, taken together, make up the building of an individual life? What we call time is the evolution of our thoughts; and although we say that 'time flies,' we know that our thoughts remain with us, and mould our existence. Our yesterdays are still with us; and thus our life seems to assimilate to the life of Him who changes not.