In short, look to the poetical character, however modified, and the leading feature is that of veneration. The ideal the visionary-the yearning-are all emanations from this principle-the vague internal impress of something great and high, "above the visible diurnal sphere." It is this that peoples space With life and mystical predominance. Divinities, being itself divine. The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The power, the beauty, and the majesty. It follows not, therefore, that the religious poet has most strongly within him the governing source of religion itself, the love-the worship-and the awewhich belong to the word REVERE. And Shakspearein whom veneration is unceasingly pre-eminent-indulges less of what in the daily sense is termed "religious" feeling than almost any English writer equally voluminous. But easy indeed is it to trace the sacred shadow that rested on that vast mind; and dull must be the sectarian who would trace more of the supernatural awereligion in its large sense-in Blair's poem of the Grave, or Addison's Hymn on Providence, than in the gloom of Hamlet or the dreary grandeur of Macbeth. In that poetry, however, more especially and commonly called religious,-poetry devoted to the praise and worship of the Deity, to the triumphs of revelation, the conditions of human life, the prospect of the grave, and the victory over death, England is peculiarly rich. It may, however, be observed, that many of our most beautiful writings of this class are but little known, and among the neglected fragments of our earliest poets lies the music of some of the purest, the tenderest, the most solemn out-breathings of a religious heart. The habits and manners indulged by the poets of our ancestry were indeed especially suited to that soft and solitary contemplation which is the nurse of the religious spirit. The quiet of the country life, the early rising, what time "the great sun begins his state"-the then thinly peopled greens and hollows, the frequent bell of the old church service, the Gothic spire, and dim aisle-so creative, in the soul, of the shadowy, the aspiring, and the indefinite-the very fashion of the houses, with the long fear-provoking gallery, and the gloomy room with its deep-sunk windows-the private chapel to the baronial house, the quaint dial on the smooth green, with its impressive motto-were all subservient to that grave and visioned mood in which the moral thought of this life, and fore-dream of the next, steal with a luxurious melancholy over the heart. These lesser and more subtle causes aided the main reasons, viz. the yet scarce-conquered influence of the monastic spirit, and the paucity of lighter literature, in tinging with a religious dye the writings of our more tender and contemplative authors, from the reign of Elizabeth to that of Charles the Second. Nor in verse alone is this noticeable; the religious spirit deeply impregnates the majestic prose of that period; an order of prose, be it said, immeasurably above that which has succeeded it; and it is with a sort of wonder that we remember how often we are gravely told that Addison and Steele were the improvers, instead of being, as they assuredly were, the arch corruptors of the pomp and buskined solemnity of the natural English tongue. There is something indeed in the lace and ruffles of that French style which the reign of Anne introduced, both in our verse and prose, eminently hostile to the religious spirit which, naturally venturous and unrestrained, moves with the air of an Abbé through the clipped little periods, all shorn and precise, which the writings of the Spectator brought into fashion. The dim and the vast are the necessary elements of the poetical religious feeling. It expands in proportion as it recedes into the Far Eld. The starred Chaldæa— the giant palaces of Babylon-as arch upon arch they grew of late on our great painter's dreams-the legendary Nile-the mysterious Egypt-the burning silence of the ancestral Ind;-or on the opposite pole, the still nights of the North, with its Runic cavern and rushing wave-the black forests of the old German race, pathless and scarce penetrated, all nurture and educe the thoughts which wrap poetry in august superstitions. Take antiquity from religion, and you make it prose. Its poetry is a temple through which you pass at once from the past into the future; it has no present! Wrapped in its sacred and awful dreams, the soul forgets itself, egotism vanishes in the sense of the universal-the eternal. We have no identity save with the great whole; or if for one moment we wake to our own cabined and minute existence, it is as Milton wakes in the openings of his mighty poem, with an overborne and hushed sense of loneliness, with a sentiment of corporeal pain, with a recollection of fleshly ills, with a rushing and solemn desire again to escape from earth, and "draw empyreal air." This is the true spirit of religious poetry. A. TOUR OF A GERMAN PRINCE.* THERE are few persons mixing generally with the world, who did not know something of the supposed author (Prince Pückler Muskau) of these volumes, during his stay in this country. We remember that it was a great dispute at the time, whether or not he was "clever;" that dispute this work will, we think, effectually set at rest; other questions respecting himself, the prince still leaves undetermined. We do not find the book, indeed, deserving of any high eulogium; and Göthe's opinion, prefixed by the very able translator to his version of the tour, must be received with some suspicion and reserve. For Göthe is warmly (too warmly were impossible,) panegyrized throughout the work, and that illustrious author is known to share the weakness of his no illustrious contemporary of Scotland, and to be a little unduly affected with respect for those external titles and appliances which the writer of the tour brings in addition to his literary claims to attention. Yet, without being very acute, or very profound, or very original, or even amusing, the author before us, possesses, nevertheless, a sufficient combination of all those qualities to make his work (accuracy apart) one of the best sketch books of travel that late years have produced. Certain it is, however, that no class of literature is more rarely found in any degree of *Tour in England, Ireland, and France, in the years 1828 and 1829; by a German prince. excellence, than travels. Few possesses the art, the greatest art perhaps, of letters, and the greatest proof of a truly deep and inquiring mind; which distinguishes by a brilliant and unerring instinct the light from the frivolous, and the heavy from the profound. And this is exactly the art which the tourist or the traveller ought the most eminently to possess. Generally in the familiar part of this class of writings, we are regaled with all that the traveller ate and drank, called in to admire or to condole with his eggs and his ham, his beef and his pudding, his want of sleep and his bad digestion; he tells us whether his head reposes upon one pillow or two, and is exceedingly diffuse upon the quantity of water the chambermaid leaves in his jug. In the graver portion, we have descriptions of foundries and machines; statistics that would be extremely delusive, if they were not wholly unreadable, and political discussions between the inquisitive traveller and some stray gentleman on the road, who thinks it kind and hospitable to inoculate the foreigner with as much of his own ignorance as he can conveniently dispense with. Our present traveller is not very free from the former error. He is sometimes garrulously revelant of the mysteries of his appetite; he condescends to inform us of the surprise he created in the black-haired damsel, by his pertinacity on mutton; and to make us partners of his grief, when instead of the anticipated varieties of fish, he is doomed to the monotony of "the eternal chop:" but these little frivolities we were willing to pardon in a man observant and reflective, and as to the other and graver fault of mistaking lead for the most valuable of metals, and dosing us with dulness for the pleasure of appearing sage; we yet more cheerfully and far more justly, acquit him. But our tourist is one whose observations we must warn our readers to take with distrust. criticisms on individuals are not very graphic, and often not very faithful; and upon the mass in general, though he is pretty accurate when he speaks of the higher classes, he is utterly out when he descends to the lower. For instance, speaking of the latter in page 4, vol. I. he tells us that His |