The same tendency to idealize realities, or to see and image forth the ideas that are in realities, appears in the speculations of the most sagacious and practical men. In Rhode Island, the mantle of Bishop Berkeley, who once lived at Newport, seems to have fallen upon a solid, broad-shouldered judge, and the Pan-Idea of the late Chief Justice Durfee is a metaphysical treatise that might have emanated from Berkeley's own pen. It is quite as remarkable a fact, that the most skilful and fascinating interpreter of Swedenborg's mystical theology is a Yankee lawyer, and Theophilus Parsons finds leisure from his professorship of law to elucidate the doctrines of spiritual correspondences, the celestial marriage, and the New Jerusalem. Nay, mathematics itself figures as an idealist, and Professor Peirce, probably the first mathematical genius now living, is quite Pythagorean in his philosophy, reasons of the numbers and periods in planets and stars much in the fashion of the great transcendental sage, and so makes algebra the note-book from which the spheres sing their music. In not a few minds the drudgery of the workshop and the farm catches the lyrical passion, and in Whittier's Songs of Labor, and in the heroes of the Blithedale Romance, work threatens to turn into play, and sometimes has not failed in the attempt. The most conspicuous of New England editors, or editors from New England, is full of this idea of elevating and harmonizing industry, and has had no small success in inspiriting and idealizing the popular notions of labor and production. Horace Greeley, in this point of view, with all his crotchets and isms, is a kind of orphic Franklin, who is setting the machines and workshops of the land into a grand harmonial dance, and perhaps our notable fellow-citizen will not quarrel with us for fancying him in his drab coat and ponderous boots calling out the figures for a huge industrial waltz, in which the steam-engine leads off the printing-press, and this couple is followed by the power-loom and reapingmachine, with the whole band of arts in their train, all keep-. ing step by the time-beat of that harp of many and marvellous strings, the electric telegraph. There is surely a lyrical element in New England industry. Grim Vulcan in his workshop likes to be cheered by Apollo's lyre, and some

time beats the chorus by the ring on his anvil. After work, too, he washes his hands and face, and has a chat with his old crony, Minerva. New England itself is a work of art under the hand of educated mechanism, a marvellously carved granite Memnon statue, whose harmony awakes with every sunrise and continues to play till sunset in all the cheery voices of enterprise and toil.

The same disposition to connect imagination with matters of fact, and to idealize common life, appears in the poetry of New England. It is eminently in earnest, and its strains are human life set to music, with little trifling in dainty indolence for the sake of making pretty verses. How intimately that prose-poetry, the romantic literature of New England, connects itself with common scenes, and finds its gems in our daily paths! It is a fact not by any means alone, but representative of a general principle, that an earnest parish minister like Sylvester Judd created a new school of romance before he knew it by his close sympathy with human life around him, and all unconsciously inspired American art with perhaps its most original theme; and under Darley's genial touch, we have here the great promise of the alliance between the poet's pen and the artist's pencil.

Our poetry breathes the same spirit; and even its most marked eccentricities move in accordance with some instinctive law. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish verse from prose in our sententious thinkers. Alcott's Orphic Sayings are poems in their way, and in spite of their obscurity they contain meaning and point enough to give lasting fame to the author, could they be dated backwards some centuries, and so have the prestige of time. The most peculiar, and perhaps the most imaginative, of all our poets, Emerson, is a very earnest man, and, fond as he is of a joke, he never loses sight of his transcendental theory of human nature, or his thoroughgoing independence in glorification of the First Person Singular, in which personality soars so high as to become impersonal, and the Egotist is lost in the All. He makes it our wisdom to live in our own individual hermitage, and to seek the universe in ourselves, and returned from Europe blandly declaring that he had seen it all before at home. He found a

consistent interpreter in his young disciple, Thoreau, the hermit of Walden Pond, who gave up the world for nature and himself, whose house cost him $28.121, and whose living for eight months cost him, with clothes and oil, but $33.871, — a mystic of the Poor Richard school, a Yankee union of philosophy and prudence indeed. So it is that extremes meet, and the mysticism of the Oriental Sufís is found on the borders of our old battle-field at Concord. Usually, however, the New England poet is more in the path of our daily life, and his imagination, alike in its pathos and its humor, aims to cheer and help us in our thought and work.

No man deserves better to be named as a type of New England imagination, than Bryant, not even Dana with his meditative depth, Longfellow with his peerless melody, Lowell with his sparkling point, Parsons with his sculptured strength, or Whittier with his lyrical fire. Bryant perhaps as no other poet reflects the independence, the manly faith, the devotion to nature, the reverence for woman, the love of country and of home, the unfaltering passion for liberty, so characteristic of the best New England minds. New England honors him for not forgetting the high inspirations of his Muse in the pressure of affairs, and will always have laurels for the harp that in its thrills of gentle feeling has never ceased to ring out its stirring tones for liberty and humanity in the hour of their danger. Honor to Bryant for keeping his New England heart so true to itself in his tempted position, and for being none the less a Massachusetts man from being a citizen of the world.

Even the humorous poetry of New England is eminently practical, — always fond of raising a laugh to the discomfiture of some absurd pretender, or of cheering some downhearted worthy who has had small beginnings and a hard road before him. Lowell and Holmes, in their comic poems, are the literary exponents of the passion for practical jokes, and the late wheelbarrow feat between Newburyport and Boston was a broad exemplification of the sturdy practical humor that has made the Yankees laugh from the days of the Cobbler of Agawam and the Boston Tea Party. In fact, Mr. Ben Perley Poore rendered himself unconsciously a kind of VOL. LXXXIV. — NO. 175.

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parody on the history of New England. The lot of Jonathan has almost always been, like this wheelbarrow hero, to work with inadequate means, and very often his indomitable pluck has led him to push on over hill and through valley to his aim, not ashamed to go on one wheel without any horse but shank's mare, until at last he comes in conqueror, and the military escort and the banquet make his pilgrimage famous.

Now for more than two hundred years New England has been doing her work for herself, for the nation, and, we trust, for mankind. Great as have been her achievements in the workshop and the field, the memorials of her imagination, her pathos, her humor, are not insignificant, and her orators, poets, historians, and novelists are known throughout the globe. The alcove that holds her imaginative literature would not disgrace the libraries of Oxford, Cambridge, or Edinburgh; and the great Britons who have flourished during the same time, Milton, Wordsworth, Burns, Scott, and their peers, might linger fascinated by its creations. Yet notwithstanding all these literary trophies, and the high promise of her artists, she has not yet spoken out her full thought in letters, and her literature is fragmentary, as the not fully articulated voice of a civilization not yet matured, but waiting the good time coming. Her literature is not, like Italy's, the tomb of a majestic past, but the promise of a hopeful future; and it denies itself the moment it claims to be perfect, and shuts out the spirit of improvement. New England, herself an imagination in process, not yet worked into material, and all her utilities the growing fruit of a brave purpose not yet embodied, waits to take her place in the true civilization that is to be, and should be happy that her leading thinkers have a name among the architects of the ages, and have given so many hints of an age better than humanity has yet seen. There is a deep hopefulness in all her poetry, which its habitual seriousness can never hide, and its pensive tone is the wholesome shading of brave energies, not the darkening and blighting of cheerful faith. Her art is full of hope, and will be more hopeful when more closely allied with her daily life, and taking its due place in popular education. Let the claims of art be placed on no ground less solid or sacred. Insist that

art is educator of the beautiful in itself, and in its manifold relations with the good and the true; and in the better time coming let New England art build the gate called Beautiful to the stately temple of humanity, whose walls have been rising for centuries in this land of promise. The new beauty will not shame, but crown, the old Puritan strength.

Throughout his whole story, and especially in the closing description of his Mons Christi, the author of Margaret shows his deep conviction of the practical worth and power of the beautiful arts. It is evidently a leading idea with him, that life itself is the great art, and that all other arts are honorable as they minister to this by their utilities and refinements. We do not think he has been so successful in his specific plans as in his guiding spirit, and we should probably quarrel with the architecture of the church and the villas of Mons Christi, if we did not think much of its landscapegardening and ornamentation fantastic. But his purpose is eminently practical, and the arts must languish in New England until it is carried out, till the characteristic zeal for popular education accepts the element of taste as an exalted and wholesome part of our nature, and we provide for its culture in our schools, homes, public grounds and buildings, in our social recreations, our civic festivals, and our religious services. The New England mind has been remarkably fertile in artistic genius; yet our artists have had little popular appreciation, and many towns that have noble schools and academies do not present to the eyes of their youth a single picture or sculpture that deserves the name. A better time, we trust, is coming, - a time which shall bring about in art what has already been widely brought about in our literature, — the reconciliation between the real and ideal as essential parts of human life and Divine Providence. We hope to see a realism such as appears in Stuart's flesh-and-blood portraits, combined with an ideality like that which ennobles Allston's poetical creations, to educate and cheer our sons and daughters in our homes and schools and public walks.

We have our share of artistic enthusiasm, however latent it may be. The solemn Puritan from the beginning has been unconsciously an idealist, and without knowing it he stamped