and resolute tone. The struggle between his feelings and his obstinate intellectual habit of minutely inspecting defects is obvious on his page. He likes good people, yet cannot help indulging in a sly, mischievous cut at their faults, and then seems vexed that he yields to the temptation. His humility is often that of a person who tells his neighbor that he is a fool and then adds, "but so are we all, more or less"; the particular fool pointed out having a dim intuition that the rapid generalization at the end is intended rather to indicate the wisdom of the generalizer than his participation in the universal folly. A covert insult thus lurks under his ostentatious display of charity. And then in his jets of geniality there is something suspicious. He condescends; he slaps on the back; he patronizes in praising; he is benevolent from pity; and, with a light fleer or vanishing touch of sarcasm, he hints that it is a superior intelligence that is thus disporting in the levities of goodfellowship. One thing remains to be said regarding the collective impression left on the mind by Thackeray's works. That impression, sharply scrutinized, we will venture to say is this, that life as he represents it is life not worth the living. It is doubtless very entertaining to read about, and it is not without instruction; but who would wish to go through the labor and vexation of leading it? Who would desire to be any one of the characters, good or bad, depicted in it? Who would consider its pleasures and rewards as any compensation for its struggles, disappointments, and disillusions? Who, if called upon to accept existence under its conditions, would not, on the whole, consider existence a bore or a burden, rather than a blessing? This can, we think, be said of no other delineator of human life and human character of equal eminence; and it points to that pervading scepticism, in Thackeray's mind, which is felt to be infused into the inmost substance of his works. Deficient in those qualities and beliefs which convey inspiration as well as information, which impart heat to the will as well as light to the intellect, - lacking the insight of principles and the experience of great passions and uplifting sentiments, his representation even of the actual world excludes the grand forces which really animate and move it, and thus ignores those deeper elements which give to life earnestness, purpose, and glow. THE FACULTY DIVINE [From "The Nature and Elements of Poetry," 1892. Copyright, 1892, by Edmund Clarence Stedman.] Unde aether sidera pascit ? - Lucr. OETIC expression is that of light from a star, our straightest message from the inaccessible human soul. Critics may apply their spectral analysis to the beam, but without such a process our sympathetic instinct tells us how fine, how rude, how rare or common, are the primal constituents from which its vibrations are derived. The heat-rays, the light, the actinic, these may be combined in ever various proportions, but to make a vivid expression they must in some proportion come together. Behind the action at their starting-place glows and pulsates a spirit of mysterious and immortal force, the "vital spark," to comprehend which were to lay hold upon divinity itself. As to the poet's share of this, Wordsworth, that inspired schoolmaster with the gift to create a soul under the ribs of pedantry, conceived his impressive title, — "the faculty divine." Before approaching more closely to this radiant source, we have to touch upon one remaining element which seems most of all to excite its activity, and to which, in truth, a whole discourse might be devoted as equitably as to truth, or beauty, or imagination. Passion. I have laid stress, heretofore, upon the passion which so vivifies all true poetry that certain thinkers believe the art has no other office than to give emotion vent. And I have just said that, while poetry which is not imaginative cannot be great, the utterance which lacks passion is seldom imaginative. It may tranquillize, but it |