awed by the presence of those tall and silent knights, with their hands folded and their legs crossed, as we see them reposing in full armor on the tombs of our cathedrals. And yet, however different in all other respects, these men, if they once lift their steel beaver and unbuckle their rich armor, are wonderfully like ourselves. Let us read the poetry which they either wrote themselves, or to which they liked to listen in their castles on the Rhine or under their tents in Palestine, and we find it is poetry which a Tennyson or a Moore, a Goethe or Heine, might have written. Neither Julius Cæsar nor Themistocles would know what was meant by such poetry. It is modern poetry,—poetry unknown to the ancient world,—and who invented it nobody can tell. It is sometimes called Romantic, but this is a strange misnomer. Neither the Romans, nor the lineal descendants of the Romans, the Italians, the Provençals, the Spaniards, can claim that poetry as their own. It is Teutonic poetry,—purely Teutonic in its heart and soul, though its utterance, its rhyme and metre, its grace and imagery, show the marks of a warmer clime. It is called sentimental poetry, the poetry of the heart rather than of the head, the picture of the inward rather than of the outward world. It is subjective, as distinguished from objective poetry, as the German critics, in their scholastic language, are fond of expressing it. It is Gothic, as contrasted with classical poetry. The one, it is said, sublimizes nature, the other bodies forth spirit; the one deifies the human, the other humanizes the divine; the one is ethnic, the other Christian. But all these are but names, and their true meaning must be discovered in the works of art themselves, and in the history of the times which produced the artists, the poets, and their ideals. We shall perceive the difference between these two hemispheres of the Beautiful better if we think of Homer’s “Helena” and Dante’s “Beatrice,” if we look at the “Venus of Milo” and a “Madonna” of Francia, than in reading the profoundest systems of æsthetics.