requires some special circumstance or excitement to develop it. Thus it was, we think, with Burke, Burns, and Carlyle himself. All these had poetry in them, and have expressed it; but any of them might have _avoided_, in a great measure, its expression, and might have solely shone in other spheres. For example, Burke has written several works full, indeed, of talent, but without a single gleam of that real imagination which other of his writings display. What a contrast between his "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," or his "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful," (an essay containing not one sublime, and not two beautiful sentences in it all,) and the "rare and regal" rhetorical and poetic glories of his "Essay on the French Revolution," or his "Letters on a Regicide Peace!" Burns might have been a philosopher of the Dugald Stewart school, as acute and artificially eloquent as any of them, had he gone to Edinburgh College instead of going to Irvine School. Carlyle might have been a prime-minister of a somewhat original and salvage sort, had it been so ordered. None of the three were so essentially poetical, that all their thoughts were "twin-born with poetry," and rushed into the reflection of metaphor, as the morning beams into the embrace and reflection of the lake. All were _stung_ into poetry: Burke by political zeal and personal disappointment, Burns by love, and Carlyle by that white central heat of dissatisfaction with the world and the things of the world, which his temperament has compelled him to express, but which his Scottish common sense has taught him the wisdom of expressing in earnest masquerade and systematic metaphor. But, 4thly, there is a class of poets who have possessed more than the full complement of human faculties, who have added to these extensive accomplishments and acquirements, and yet who have been so constituted, that imaginative utterance has been as essential to their thoughts as language itself. Such were Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, &c., and such are Wilson, Bailey, Aird, and Yendys. These are "nothing, if not poetical." All their powers and acquisitions turn instinctively toward poetic expression, whether in verse or prose. And near them, although on a somewhat lower plane, stood Delta.