The first thing that brought Dr. Bushnell out of the world of theology into the world of literature was his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1848. He had achieved a reputation as a preacher of remarkable insight for such as had ears to hear, and he was already in the thick of theological controversy; but his fine power of expression and breadth of thought had not been specially noticed. This oration introduced him into the world of letters. Mr. J. T. Fields--the most discerning critic of the day--said to the writer that the oration was heard with surprise and delight, and that it gave the speaker an assured place in the ranks of literature. That he should have been so readily welcomed by the literary guild is not strange, for the title of his oration--'Work and Play'--led the way into a discussion of the secret that underlies all works of genius. For once, the possessor of the divine gift heard its secret revealed and himself explained to himself; his work was set before him as the full play of his spirit. Beginning with nature, where our author always began, and finding there a free and sportive element, he carries it into human life; making the contention that its aim should be, and that its destiny will be, to free itself from the constraint of mere work and rise into that natural action of the faculties which may be called _play_--a moral and spiritual process. His conclusion is that-- "if the world were free,--free, I mean, of themselves; brought up, all, out of work into the pure inspiration of truth and charity,--new forms of personal and intellectual beauty would appear, and society itself reveal the Orphic movement. No more will it be imagined that poetry and rhythm are accidents or figments of the race, one side of all ingredient or ground of nature. But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state of man; the proper and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they long for, and the rhythmic flow of that universal play in which all life would live." The key to Dr. Bushnell is to be found in this passage, and it is safe to say of him that in hardly a page of a dozen volumes is he false to it. He is always a poet, singing out of "the pure inspiration of truth and charity," and keeping ever in mind that poetry and rhythm are not figments outside of nature, but the real and true state of man and the proper and last ideal of souls.