absurdity and madness in a camp-meeting, would have walked through the five thousand followers of St Francis with the feeling only of intolerable disgust. Yet so it is, that merely from the lapse of time, or the obscurity it throws over certain parts of the picture, there are many who find something very affecting and sublime in the fanaticism of the thirteenth century, who treat the same fanaticism with pity or disdain when exhibited in the nineteenth. "Miltons and Shakspeares," says an editor of one of the volumes before us, "have not yet sprung from the only half-tilled soil of the mighty continent; giants have not yet burst from its forests, with a grandeur equal to their own; but," &c. &c. Doubtless the giant will make his appearance in due course of time. But what if he should never manifest himself in the epic of twelve, or twenty-four books, or in any long poem whatever? A number of small poems, beautiful and perfect of their kind, will constitute as assuredly a great work, and found as great a reputation. We are far from thinking that the materials for poetry are exhausted or diminished in these latter days. As a general rule, in proportion as men _think_, do they _feel_,--more variously, if not more deeply, themselves--and more habitually through sympathy with others. Love and devotion, and all the more refined sentiments, are heightened in the cultivated mind; and speculative thought itself becomes a great and general source of emotion. As almost every man has felt, at one period of his life, the passion of love, so almost every cultivated mind has felt, at one period of his career, what Wordsworth describes as-- "The burden and the mystery Of all this unintelligible world." We are persuaded that both the materials and the readers of poetry will increase and multiply with the spread of education. But there is apparently a revolution of taste in favour of the lyric, and at the expense of the epic poet. A long narrative, in verse of any kind, is felt to be irksome and monotonous: it could be told so much better in prose. We do not speak of such narrations as _The Paradise Lost_, where religious feeling presides over every part, and where, in fact, the narrative is absorbed in the sentiment. If Milton were living at this day, there is no reason why he should not choose the same theme for his poem. But Tasso and Ariosto would think long before they would now select for their flowing stanzas the _Jerusalem Delivered_, or the _Orlando Furioso_. Such themes, they would probably conclude, might be far more effectively dealt with in prose.