his best critics remarks, "by the measured grace of his verse, reflecting here and there the emotions and sympathies of a later age. And yet the "Idyls" of Tennyson are as nearly as possible reproductions of the letter and spirit of the Arthurian legends." According to the practice of the original composers of Romance, the poet has allowed himself the utmost liberty in regard to the incidents he employs, only preserving truth of character, according to the old traditions.

As refined of its grossness and elaborated by modern culture, the old Romance still lives and finds its place in literature. It lives because it meets some of the deeper wants of the human soul, its longings for freedom, its gladsome play of imagination, unhampered by the hard bonds of fact, which beset its finite capabilities. And though this indulgence must be coupled with temperance, and excess leads to a dangerous intoxication, yet on occasion the most earnest souls find pleasure in these excursions into fairy-land, away from common life, into the region of the strange, the mysterious, and the impossible, where fancy is at liberty to create and dissolve at will, and to disguise every object in shapes and colors of her own; - all this in play and relaxation, and yet not wholly in vain, because of some thought which, however feebly and faintly, still shines through all, giving it the right to be and to engage the interest we be

stow.

In the hazy atmosphere, or dim twilight rather, of the Middle Ages, were found, as at no other period in the history of literature, the conditions of Romance; the grand outlines of truths rather than actual truths, and these, too, often running into each other, with just details enough to connect them with human interests and sympathy, and give a spring to the imagination to fill them up as it could. The necessity of such conditions was recognized by Scott in his poetical Romance, and later when he left the historical novel for prose Romance. He employs historical incident in the development of his plot, quite in the style of the old Romance, while he goes back to a period sufficiently remote, and to a state of society sufficiently unlike his own, to be free from the commonplace details that would. otherwise have embarrassed his invention, and prevented that

"Ed. Review," July, 1859.

suspense of the mind on the part of his readers, necessary to give full effect to the marvellous and mysterious incident he introduces. He needs just distance enough for atmosphere, the dim hazy atmosphere of the old Romance, over which to cast a visionary radiance from his imagination, — and so, as in "Ivanhoe," he goes back to a period earlier than in his historical novels; to a time in some sense mythical to us, and when we willingly allow him free play to his imagination.

The close relation of Romance to poetry was well illustrated in the literary history of Sir Walter Scott, in his early transition from the "Lady of the Lake" and "Marmion," to the historical novel and Romance. Indeed Jeffrey does not hesitate to call "Ivanhoe" a poem. So Shakspeare took from the old stories much of his material, incidents, manners, characters, and entire plots. He also goes back to the earlier periods in those plays, as "Macbeth" and "King Lear," that bear most of those characteristics from which the name Romance drama is derived.

We have now noticed two of the forms in which the spirit of Romance has been preserved in modern times; the first in the "Faery Queen" of Spenser and the "Idyls" of Tennyson; and the second in the historical novels and romances of Scott. A third form is peculiar to our age, and is represented by Fouqué, Hawthorne, and Holmes. The two forms already noticed have preserved more faithfully the idea of Romance. Spenser and Tennyson retained for substance the old material, but threw over it, the one a gorgeous, the other a delicate, drapery of poetic thought. Scott toned down rather the quality of his material, and reproduced and revived a former age, freed of much of its grossness, and with its better qualities idealized. The later Romance abandons the old material altogether, adopts our modern society with all its habits, associations, and tastes, and then imports from the old the element of mystery, in some weird fancy, that might more properly belong to a former age, and yet is not so far removed from the ordinary range of our experience, as to prevent us from yielding to the necessary illusion. It thus approaches the novel, in fact differs from it only by this element of mystery, which allows of course a greater ideality of incident and a freer exercise of the

imagination, and so the introduction of the strange and the marvellous that would not be allowed in the novel, as, for instance, the land-slide that buried up Rattlesnake Ledge upon the death of Elsie Venner. Thus the field of modern Romance lies in the supposed subtle and mysterious sympathies between the powers of nature and the human soul, — in a kind of intermediate twilight between the known and the unknown, in which there is just enough of inexplicable facts to excite our curiosity and wonder, and make us willing to suspend our judgment at the will of any bold Romancer, and not enough for science or solid beliefs. In our modern Romance as compared with the old, there has been a change in the relative agencies of the fancy and the imagination, to correspond with the advancing intellectual discipline and culture of the age. The fancy now has a different part; instead of its free, bold play with the material of the Romance, it rather furnishes the essentially romantic element in the story, and this is worked out, developed in its various manifestations, under a much stricter supervision of the imagination.

The novel has remained substantially unchanged. It is still a picture of common life idealized. It corresponds therefore to the narrative poem, just as the higher forms of Romance do to the epic. Its incidents must always be truthful to common life, -only more truthful as presenting it stripped of its commonplaces, and thus holding up its essential features more distinctly to our contemplation. The interest of the Romance, so far as it is genuine, turns upon the marvellous and the mysterious. Notwithstanding the changes it has undergone, the essential grounds of interest have been preserved. In the old Romance the imagination furnished the idea of the characters and prescribed the general limits of their representation, but left the details almost wholly to fancy within those limits. So in Undine, Donatello, and Elsie Venner, the imagination first places us in a sort of fairy-land, makes us accept of certain impossible conditions, gratifies our love of the marvellous, our desire for freedom from the ordinary limitations of human life, and then leaves the fancy to develop the characters introduced under its supervision. This last form, as seen in Hawthorne and Holmes, is therefore rather a combination of the Romance

with the novel, than genuine Romance. It requires greater delicacy of treatment, it allows more of the niceties of art, but lacks in breadth and scope, in grandeur of character and incident, giving proof of skilful analysis, subtle speculation, but having little of the primitive freshness and large-hearted simplicity of the old Romance.

If we were to inquire into the moral character of the literature of the imagination generally, and so of Romance, we should recognize the same principles we have been illustrating. The imagination works according to fundamental laws of the human. mind. Its creatures are true, present in fact ideal truth. There is an old French story, that when Innocence left the world, she met Poetry on the confines. The sisters met, embraced, passed on their several ways, Innocence back to heaven, and Poetry down to earth, to present to men henceforth in ideals what could no longer be real. This gives in a word the office of poetry, of art, of all imaginative literature. Hence the work of the imagination, whether the epic, the drama, or the novel, is "a fit representation," to use the words of Chevalier Bunsen, "of events consistent with the highest laws of moral government, whether it delineate the general history of a people, or narrate the fortunes of a chosen hero." And those only have lived that have satisfied this requirement. Their excellence lies in this truthful apprehension and exhibition of the course of human life as determined by moral laws that have been made permanent in the moral constitution of the world. Every genuine work of the imagination is fitted to exert a moral influence, and failing to do so is to be condemned. not less on literary than on moral grounds. Vinet, in a criticism upon the "Henriade" of Voltaire, says of epic poems, that they 66 are true human bibles: the commemoration of a great event in them serves to consecrate a great truth."

The Romance, as the work of the fancy, and so far as it is true to its character as Romance, is out of the pale of morals. Its influence is purely negative. It obtains a moral character, if at all, from the presence of the imagination to some extent, and from the character that may attach to the material it employs. Hence in the absence of the moral pur

"French Lit. 18th Century," p. 268.

pose that presides over all works of the imagination, the general tone of Romance has often been on the side of immorality; and we are not surprised that the old Romance soon degenerated to such a degree as to merit the severe censure and condemnation of the early Reformers, and erelong to die out. The novel has also been employed for the same unworthy ends; but the human mind sooner or later casts off such abuses, and reserves for an abiding place in its literature only such works as really minister to the substantial needs of humanity.

ARTICLE V.

UZZEN-SHERAH; AND ISRAEL'S RIGHT TO CANAAN.

And his daughter was Sherah, who built Beth-horon the nether, and the upper, and Uzzen-sherah. - 1 Chron. vii. 24.

WHAT portion of the Scriptures is so often passed over as uninstructive, in reading, as the genealogies in the beginning of the First Book of Chronicles? And what name, in the whole dry catalogue, is less suggestive of instruction than Uzzen-Sherah, mentioned only that once in the whole Bible? And yet, in what we may know of its history and relations, is evidence that the Israelites, under Joshua, had a right, even according to human law, to enter Canaan as they did, and recover, by force of arms, their ancient heritage.

Many, perhaps most, have justified that act on the ground of God's command to do it, virtually admitting that it had no other ground of justification. But probably few thinkers ever felt perfectly satisfied with that defence. The question will recur to considerate minds, whether God would or could make a wrong act right by simply commanding it. The assumption that he did, or could, seems to imply that he knows nothing of, or cares nothing for, any "eternal and immutable morality;" that his will is perfectly lawless, conforming to no idea of right in his own mind; and that Abraham, when he argued that "the Judge of all the earth" must "do right," was talking