writers innumerable? How when the luscious melancholy of their morbid self-consciousness began to pall on the appetite, they fled for refuge as suddenly to mere poetry of description and action, to Southey, Scott, the ballad-literature of all ages? How when the craving returned (perhaps unconsciously to themselves) to understand the wondrous heart of man, they tried to satisfy it with deep draughts of Wordsworth's celestial and pure simplicity? How again, they tired of that too gentle and unworldly strain, and sought in Shakespeare something more exciting, more genial, more rich in the facts and passions of daily life? How even his all-embracing genius failed to satisfy them, because he did not palpably connect for them their fancy and their passions with their religious faith--and so they wandered out again over the sea of literature, heaven only knows whither, in search of a school of authors yet, alas! unborn. For the true literature of the nineteenth century, the literature which shall set forth in worthy strains the relation of the two greatest facts, namely, of the universe and of Christ, which shall transfigure all our enlarged knowledge of science and of society, of nature, of art, and man, with the eternal truths of the gospel, that poetry of the future is not yet here: but it is coming, ay even at the doors, when this great era shall become conscious of its high vocation, and the author too shall claim his priestly calling, and the poets of the world, like the kingdoms of the world, shall become the poets of God and of His Christ.