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heap fuel on the living fire, which glows through the expansive soul.

It is, still to speak figuratively, by the light of this fire, that they see what is imperceptible to other eyes. They can discover types and emblems in all created things; and having received in their own minds deep and indelible impressions of beauty and harmony, majesty and awe, can recur to those impressions through the channels which external things afford, and draw from thence a never-failing supply of the purest poetical enjoyment.

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THE POETRY OF ANIMALS.

WHILE flowers, and trees, and plants in general, afford an immense fund of interest to the contemplative beholder, the animal kingdom, yet scarcely touched upon in these pages, is perhaps equally fertile in poetical associations. From the reflections of the melancholy Jacques upon the wounded deer, down to the pretty nursery fable of "The Babes in the Wood," the same natural desire to associate with our own the habits and feelings of the more sensitive and amiable of the inferior animals is observable, as well in the productions of the sublimest, as the simplest poet.

Burns' "Address to a Mouse," proves to us with how much genuine pathos a familiar and ordinary subject may be invested. No mind

which had never bathed in the fountain of poetry itself-whose remotest attributes had not been imbued with this ethereal principle as with a living fire, could have ventured upon such a theme. In common hands, a moral drawn from a mouse, and clothed in the language of verse, would have been little better than a burlesque, or a baby's song at best; but in these beautiful and touching lines, so perfect is the adaptation of the language to the subject-so evident, without ostentation, the deep feeling of the bard himself, that the moral flows in with a natural simplicity which cannot fail to charm the most fastidious reader.

The lines in which Cowper describes himself as a "stricken deer," are also affecting in the extreme; but as my object is not to quote instances, but to examine why certain things are pre-eminently poetical, we will proceed to the consideration of a few individual subjects; first premising, that animals obtain the character of being so in a greater degree in proportion as we imagine them to possess such qualities as are most elevated or refined in ourselves, and in a less degree as we become familiarized with their bodily functions: be

cause the majority of our ideas in connection with them must then be of a gross and material character, just as we may speak in poetry, of the "wild boar of the wilderness," while the tame hog of the sty is a thing wholly forbidden.

The elephant is allowed to be the most sagacious of the brute creation; but his sagacity is celebrated chiefly in anecdotes of trick and cunning, which qualities being the very reverse of what is elevated or noble in human nature, he possesses, in spite of his curious formation and majestic power, little claim to poetical interest.

The dog very properly stands next in the scale of intellect; and so far as faithful attachment is a rare and beautiful trait in the character both of man and brute, the dog may be said to be poetical; but we are too familiar with this animal to regard him with the reverence which his good qualities might seem to demand. We feed him on crusts and garbage; or we see him hungered until he becomes greedy, neglected until he becomes servile, and spurned until he threatens a vengeance which he dares not execute.

The claims of the horse to the general ad

miration of mankind are too well understood to need our notice here, especially as they have already been examined in a former chapter. To the horse belong no associations with ideas of what is gross or mean. His most striking attribute is power; and the ardour with which he enters into the excitement of the chase, or the battle, give him a character so nearly approaching to what is most admired in the human species, that the ancients delighted to represent this noble animal, not as he is, but with distended nostrils, indicating a courage almost more than animal, with eyes animated with mental as well as physical energy, and with the broad intellectual forehead of a man.

The ass is certainly less poetical than picturesque; but still it is poetical in its patient endurance of suffering, in its association with the wandering outcasts from society, whose tents are in the wilderness, and whose "lodging is on the cold ground," in its humble appetites, and in its unrepining submission to the most abject degradation. Let us hope that the patience of the ass arises from its own insensibility, and that its sufferings, though frequent, are attended with little acuteness of sensation; but they are sufferings still, borne with a meek

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