Not to read poetry is to miss the greatest ideas in the world, to disregard the noblest and most exalted work that the human mind has achieved. To poetry all other arts and sciences are in some way inferior. Not music, nor painting, nor the laws of government, nor the discoveries of mechanics, nor anything else that man has done has the right of poetry to be called divine, except only that of which poetry is the vehicle, which is in a sense one with it, religious prophecy and worship. Whether religion and poetry are one, as some philosophers hold, it is a fact of history that the great religious prophets have had the gifts of poets, and the poets are all singers of hymns and incantations which stir in our hearts the religious sense. We need not go further into this question than to this simple truth, that the man who has no poetry in him is likely to be an irreligious man, not necessarily lacking in goodness and righteousness, but lacking the upward aspiration of the truly religious mind. Come, poet, come! A thousand laborers ply their task, And what it tends to scarcely ask, And trembling thinkers on the brink Shiver and know not how to think. To tell the purport of their pain, And what our silly joys contain; In lasting lineaments portray The substance of the shadowy day; Our real and inner deeds rehearse, And make our meaning clear in verse: Come, Poet, come! or but in vain We do the work or feel the pain, And gather up the seeming gain, Unless before the end thou come To take, ere they are lost, their sum. Come, Poet, come! To give an utterance to the dumb, And make vain babblers silent, come; A thousand dupes point here and there, Bewildered by the show and glare; And wise men half have learned to doubt Whether we are not best without. Come, Poet; both but wait to see Their error proved to them in thee. Come, Poet, come! In vain I seem to call. And yet Think not the living times forget. Ages of heroes fought and fell That Homer in the end might tell; O’er groveling generations past Upstood the Doric fane at last; And countless hearts on countless years Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears, Rude laughter and unmeaning tears, Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome The pure perfection of her dome. Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see; Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown, The dead forgotten and unknown. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. CHAPTER VI THE READING OF POETRY--(_Continued_)