sense of power, and grandeur, and magnificence, which leads him to the ocean's brink, to pour his soul forth in its native elementthe true sublime.

The last character under which we shall attempt to describe the poetical nature of grief, is that of pity-a sentiment so admirably adapted to the relief of the wants and sufferings of humanity, that we regard it as one of our greatest blessings; because we owe to pity half the kind offices of life, never feeling the pain it awakens in ourselves, without feeling also some laudable impulse, and seldom witnessing the signs of it in others, without hailing them as omens of good. Indeed so powerful is the influence of pity, that it is the first refuge of innocence the last of guilt; and when artifice would win from feeling what it wants merit to obtain from discretion, it never fails to appeal to pity with an exaggerated history of suffering and distress.

But for the gentle visitations of pity, the couch of suffering would be desolate indeed. Pain, and want, and weakness would be left to water the earth with tears, and reap in solitude the harvest of despair. The prisoner in his silent cell, would listen in vain for the step of his last

earthly friend; and the reprobate beneath the world's dread stigma, involving in wretchedness and ruin, would find no faithful hand to lift the pall of public disgrace, and reclaim the lost one from a living death. But more than all, without pity, we should want the bright opening in the heavens through which the radiance of returning peace shines forth upon the tears of penitence-we should want the ark of shelter when the waters of the deluge were gathering around us-we should want the cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night to guide our wanderings through the wilder

ness..

of

The grief arising from pity is the only disinterested grief we are capable of; and therefore it carries a balm along with it, which imparts something of enjoyment to the excitement it creates; but for its acuteness sensation, we have the warrant of the deep workings of more violent passions, which pity has not unfrequently the power to overcome. History affords no stronger proof of this, than when Coriolanus yielded to the tears of his mother, and the matrons of Rome, what he had refused to the entreaties of his friends, and the claims of his country.

But if pity connected with the power of alleviating misery is mingled with enjoyment, pity without this power is one of the most agonizing of our griefs. To live amongst the oppressed without being able to break their bonds-amongst the poor without the means of giving-to walk by the side of the feeble without a hand to help-to hear the cries of the innocent without a voice to speak of peace, are trials to the heart, and to the will, unparalleled in the register of grief. And it is this acuteness of sensation, connected with the unbounded influence of pity, and the circumstance of its being woven in with the chain of kindness, and love, and charity, by which human suffering is connected with human virtue, that constitutes the poetry of grief in its character of pity-a character so sacred, that we trace it not only through the links of human fellowship, binding together the dependent children of earth; but also through God's government, up to the source of all our mercies, where separate from its mortal mixture of pain, pity performs its holy offices of mercy and forgiveness.

71

THE POETRY OF WOMAN.

AFTER what has already been said of love and grief, we feel that to treat at large upon the poetry of woman, must be in some measure to recapitulate what forms the substance of the two preceding chapters; because, from the peculiar nature and tendency of woman's character, love and grief may be said to constitute the chief elements of her existence. That she is preserved from the overwhelming influence of grief, so frequently recurring, by the reaction of her own buoyant and vivacious spirit, by the fertility of her imagination in multiplying means of happiness, and by her facility in adapting herself to place and time, and laying hold of every support which surrounding circumstances afford, she has solely to thank the Author of her life, who has so regulated the

balance of human joys and sorrows, that none are necessarily entirely and irremediably wretched. On glancing superficially at the general aspect of society, all women, and all men who see and speak impartially, would pronounce the weaker sex to be doomed to more than an equal share of suffering; but happily for woman, her internal resources are such as to raise her at least to a level with man in the scale of happiness. Bodily weakness and liability to illness, is one of the most obvious reasons why woman is looked upon as an object of compassion. Scarcely a day passes in which she has not some ache or pain that would drive a man melancholy, and yet how quietly she rests her throbbing temples; how cheerfully she converses with every one around her, thus beguiling her thoughts from her own sufferings; how patiently she resigns herself to the old accustomed chair, as if chained to the very hearth-stone; while the birds are warbling forth their welcome to returning spring, and she knows that the opening flowers are scenting the fresh gales that play around the garden where she may not tread, and that the sunny skies are lighting up the landscape with a beauty which she may not look upon-it is