As for poetry written for the working classes by the upper, such attempts at it as we yet have seen, may be considered nil.  The upper must learn to know more of the lower, and to make the lower know more of them—­a frankness of which we honestly believe they will never have to repent.  Moreover, they must read Burns a little more, and cavaliers and Jacobites a little less.  As it is, their efforts have been as yet exactly in that direction which would most safely secure the blessings of undisturbed obscurity.  Whether “secular” or “spiritual,” they have thought proper to adopt a certain Tommy-good-child tone, which, whether to Glasgow artisans or Dorsetshire labourers, or indeed for any human being who is “grinding among the iron facts of life,” is, to say the least, nauseous; and the only use of their poematicula has been to demonstrate practically the existence of a great and fearful gulf between those who have, and those who have not, in thought as well as in purse, which must be, in the former article at least, bridged over as soon as possible, if we are to remain one people much longer.  The attempts at verse for children are somewhat more successful—­a certain little “Moral Songs” especially, said to emanate from the Tractarian School, yet full of a health, spirit, and wild sweetness, which makes its authoress, in our eyes, “wiser than her teachers.”  But this is our way.  We are too apt to be afraid of the men, and take to the children as our pis-aller, covering our despair of dealing with the majority, the adult population, in a pompous display of machinery for influencing that very small fraction, the children.  “Oh, but the destinies of the empire depend on the rising generation!” Who has told us so?—­how do we know that they do not depend on the risen generation?  Who are likely to do more work during our lifetime, for good and evil,—­those who are now between fifteen and five-and-forty, or those who are between five and fifteen?  Yet for those former, the many, and the working, and the powerful, all we seem to be inclined to do is to parody Scripture, and say:  “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still.”

Not that we ask any one to sit down, and, out of mere benevolence, to write songs for the people.  Wooden out of a wooden birthplace, would such go forth, to feed fires, not spirits.  But if any man shall read these pages, to whom God has given a truly poetic temperament, a gallant heart, a melodious ear, a quick and sympathetic eye for all forms of human joy, and sorrow, and humour, and grandeur; an insight which can discern the outlines of the butterfly, when clothed in the roughest and most rugged chrysalis-hide; if the teachers of his heart and purposes, and not merely of his taste and sentiments, have been the great songs of his own and of every land and age; if he can see in the divine poetry of David and Solomon, of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and, above all, in the parables of Him