order, and that no one can read his poems without discovering this. We say that ideality is the highest quality of a poet’s mind. So far forth, therefore, Lowell is entitled to rank among the foremost of our poets. But this is not all. A poet may have the intellect of a god, and yet want the heart to make him truly great; for all true greatness is based on nobility of mind, without which mere intellect is but a tinkling cymbal. All the great old poets eminently possessed this quality. Their hearts kept time, in a majestic march, to noble sentiments. They loved their race, and in their writings showed they were in earnest. This love for his fellows is one of the finest characteristics of Lowell, and contrasts strikingly with the frippery of Pope, and the sneering misanthropy of Byron. We adore this feeling. It is the good old Saxon spirit, the sentiment of universal brotherhood. We are all the children of one father, fitted for sympathy, companionship, affection. We are not born to scorn our fellows. We have not been created to seclude ourselves from society, to dwell in caves, and cells, and lonely hermitages. We are made for nobler purposes. Our mission, like that of him of Nazareth, is to go about doing good. Nor let any man hate his fellows, thinking them regardless of his sorrows. The most unfortunate of us are not without friends, often loving us unknown and in spite of our faults. We have seen the criminal at the bar, when all others shrunk from him, cheered by the affection of the very wife or mother he had wronged; and even the houseless old beggar by the way-side finds a friend in every honest heart that sees his grey hairs tossing in the wind. All over this wide world, in hut, or cottage, or lordly hall, millions of hearts are beating with love towards each other, so that the whole human race is, as it were, interwoven together by innumerable fine threads of sympathy and affection. A word, a deed, or a kind look may make us a friend of whom we little think: and it may be that even now, some one whom we have never seen, is yearning towards us, because something that we may have written has found an echo in his bosom. God be thanked for this, the brightest gift in a poet’s mission! How many hearts have sympathised with the blind old Milton, and how many more will sympathise with him to the end of all time. And thus it is with the good of every age. They live again in the memory of posterity. The dying words of Algernon Sidney will thrill the freeman’s heart through untold centuries. The apostolic charity of Fenelon, Latimer, Bunyan, Augustine, and of all holy men, will endear them to noble hearts as long as time endures. The only immortality worth having is an immortality like this; and it matters not whether our names are known to those who bless us or not. Men have written noble sentiments and died and been forgotten, yet posterity has still yearned towards the poet when it read his lines.