"I walked on, musing with myself On life and art, and whether, after all, A larger metaphysics might not help Our physics--a completer poetry Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants More fully than the special outside plans, Phalansteries, material institutes, The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries, Preferred by modern thinkers." MRS. BROWNING. The highest poetry is the purest truth. To learn whether any thing is as it ought to be, we have only to learn whether it is truly poetical. It is a popular fallacy to suppose that poetical things are necessarily fanciful, or imaginative, or sentimental in other words, that poetry resides in that which is both baseless and valueless. In the popular thought, poetry is shut out of the realm of truth and reality. The reason, I suppose, is, that poetry demands more of truth and harmony and beauty than is commonly found in the actualities of human life. Let us suppose that in a country journey we arrive at the summit of a hill, at whose foot lies a charming village imbosomed in trees from the midst of which, rises the white spire of the village church. If we are in a poetical mood, we say: "How beautiful is this retirement! This quiet retreat, away from the world's distractions and great temptations, must be the abode of domestic and social virtue--the home of contentment, of peace, and of an unquestioning Christian faith. Fortunate are they whose lot it is to be born and to pass their days here, and to be buried at last in the little graveyard behind the church." As we see the children playing upon the grass, and the tidy matrons sitting in their doorways, and the farmers at work in the fields, and the quiet inn, with its brooding piazzas like wings waiting for the shelter of its guests, the scene fills us with a rare poetic delight. In the midst of our little rapture, however, a communicative villager comes along, and we question him. We are shocked to learn that the inn is a very bad place, with a drunken landlord, that there is a quarrel in the church which is about to drive the old pastor away, that there is not a man in the village who would not leave it if he could sell his property, that the women give a free rein to their propensity for scandal, and that half of the children of the place are down with the measles.