Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother’s breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon; Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep. The first thing we notice, besides the pleasing rhythm, is the musical quality of the words. There can be no melody, as melody is known in music, but in the repetition of sounds and their enchanting variations we find something that very strongly suggests musical melody. Then we are attracted by the beauty of the images. The words come tripping like fairy forms, and we feel a picture growing out of the _camera obscura_ of our minds. The appeal is almost wholly to our feelings; for if we stop to analyse the words and interpret their strict sense, we seem to see nothing but nonsense. The poem exists for the soothing, enchanting, dreamy beauty that seems rather to breathe in the words than to be expressed by them as words express thoughts in prose. If there is any truth or any nobility in this poem of Tennyson’s, it would be hard to say just what they are. There is nothing ignoble; there is nothing untrue. But it seems as if we had a perfect type of beauty pure and simple. Now let us read this little thing from Shelley: LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY. The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one another’s being mingle;-- Why not I with thine? See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven, If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me? Once more we observe the rhythm and the music, though not so perfect or real as in Tennyson’s song; and we see the beauty of images, almost as beautiful as the images in Sweet and Low; but we observe that there is a new element: a thought is expressed. Beauty has come to the aid of truth; and while we are uncertain whether we care most for the beauty or for the truth, we cannot but perceive how they aid each other. But we have not yet found the moral or ethical element. Neither Tennyson nor Shelley inspires in us nobler sentiments, or gives us courage to do and dare loftier deeds. For the purely ethical type we might turn to the psalms of David, or that noble poem Job. But we find the same element in a simple and modern form in a poem of Longfellow’s. A PSALM OF LIFE. WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.