Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/81

Rh is one of the poets who will never die. He sees men and things, in his own light way, truly; and he describes them simply, honestly, with little careless touches of pathos and humour, while he floods his whole scene with that gorgeous Sicilian air, like one of Titian 's pictures; with still sunshine, whispering pines, the lizard sleeping on the wall, and the sun-burnt cicala shrieking on the spray, the pears and apples dropping from the orchard bough, the goats clambering from crag to crag after the cistus and the thyme, the brown youths and wanton lasses singing under the dark chesnut boughs, or by the leafy arch of someand here and there, between the braes and meads, blue glimpses of the far-off summer sea; and all this told in a language and a metre which shapes itself almost unconsciously, wave after wave, into the most luscious song. Doubt not that many a soul then was the simpler, and purer, and better, for reading the sweet singer of Syracuse. He has his immoralities; but they are the immoralities of his age: his naturalness, his sunny calm and cheerfulness, are all his own." Surely a charming glimpse ofas Mrs. Browning pictures the poet whom Mr. Bruce, allowing him to be the simplest and the most natural of all rural poets, yet mistrusts as an aristocratic and courtly minstrel, wholly ignorant of the country life he painted so attractively, wallowing the while in wealth and luxury, and robed in purple and fine linen, in the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus.

Mr. Kingsley gives a highly interesting sketch of the character of Neo-Platonism in his third lecture; dealing thoughtfully and frankly with a difficult subject, and throwing out many a pregnant hint, and suggesting many a weighty matter of speculation, as might be expected from one of his hardihood and outspoken earnestness. He makes this section of his subject the most valuable of any, as it was of itself the most attractive, and the most delicate to handle before a mixed multitude. Firmly stating and standing to his own convictions as a Christian priest, he disserts with the manliest freedom on the inter-agencies and co-relations of philosophy and religion in the schools of Alexandria. He passes in review the tenets of Philo, the father of Neo-Platonism, who seemed "to himself to find in the sacred books of his nation that which agreed with the deepest discoveries of Greek philosophy, which explained and corroborated them," and who saw partially and yet clearly that great metaphysic idea of the Logos, which, after Coleridge, Mr. Kingsley believes to be "at once the justifier and the harmoniser of all philosophic truth which man has ever discovered, or will discover;"—of Plotinus, "slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an infallible oracle, with a 'He says,' as if there were but one he in the universe," but who at least tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he