The relation of the poet to his age. A discourse delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, on Thursday, August 24, 1843

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The Relation of the Poet to
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THE RELATION

OF

THE POET TO HIS AGE.

A DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE

PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY

OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 1813.

BY GEORGE S. IIILLARD.

SECOND EDITION.

BOSTON

CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN.

1813.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1843,

By Charles C. Little and James Bbown,

iu the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

BOSTON :

PRINTED BY FREEMAN AND BOLLES,

WASHINGTON STREET.

DISCOUHSE.

Most persons have probably amused themselves
with unprofitable speculations upon the relative
rank to be assigned to eminence in the several de-
partments of intellectual action, a question, upon
which we can never arrive at any definite conclu-
sion, from the want of a common measure of com-
parison. Sir Wilham Temple esteemed a great
poet, the " bright, consummate flower " of hu-
manity, and observes that " of all the members of
mankind that live within the compass of a thousand
years, for one man that is born capable of making
a great poet, there may be a thousand born, capa-
ble of making as great generals and ministers of
state as any in story." On the other hand. Sir
AValtcr Scott thought the highest success in litera-
ture cheap, in comparison with the deeds of a man
like the Duke of Wellington. But, whatever dif-

899673

ference of opinion there may be on these points,
all Avill admit that, among writers and thinkers, the
largest field of influence is enjoyed by those who
address the moral nature through the medium of
the imaginative faculties. Mankind here meet
upon a common ground ; and in the pages of the
poet and the novelist find refreshment and relaxa-
tion, whatever may be their habitual pursuits or
the daily business of their minds. The influence
of writers of this class begins with the first pulse
of intellectual life and ends only with its last throb.
They twine themselves around every fibre of the
growing mind. They mould and color every
man's life. They supply motive and impulse ;
give stability to unfixed purposes and direction to
irregular aims. They make virtue more lovely or
vice more seductive. They weaken or enforce
the lessons of moral truth and the sanctions of re-
ligion. Whatever elevates or debases man, what-
ever lifts him to heaven or nails him to earth, what-
ever embellishes or deforms life, whatever makes
it stately, heroic and glorious, or mean, loathsome
and brutish, the passions that rage like blasts from
hell, the affections that breathe like airs from
heaven — all find in them, appropriate food, and
draw from them their elements of growth.

To writers of this class we may give the general
name of poets, if to poetry be allowed a definition
somewhat arbitrary, excluding the form of verse
and sufficiently comprehensive to include such
works as the Arabian Nights, Ivanhoe and the
Sketch-Book. In view of the important influence
exerted by these writers upon the public mind, I
ask your attention to some observations upon the
relation of the poet to his age, the various ele-
ments that modify that relation, and the changes
wrought in poetry by the progress of society. 1
need offer no apology for selecting a subject re-
mote from those material and political interests
which make up so much of our hfe. We meet here
as scholars. We have left our various posts of duty
and occupation to breathe again the untroubled
air of contemplation, and to seek the peace that
comes from " backward-looking thoughts."

The office of poetry is to idealize human life ;
to connect the objects of thought with those asso-
ciations which embellish, dignify and exalt, and to
keep out of sight, those which debase and deform ;
to extract from the common world, which lies at
our feet, the elements of the romantic, the im-
passioned and the imaginative ; to arrest and con-

dense the delicate spirit of beauty which hovers
over the earth, hkc an atmosphere, and to give
shape, color and movement to its airy essence.
Life presents itself to our view in a twofold as-
pect. It has its poetical and prosaic side ; its
face and its reverse ; and different minds, by a
natural affinity, are attracted to one or the other
of these aspects ; and indeed the same mind often
passes from one to the other, as it is swayed by
different moods. Hence we have tragedy and
farce ; the historical picture and the caricature ;
the poem and the parody ; hence the gods of
Homer and the gods of Lucian, the romance of
chivalry and Don Quixote. A thousand poetical
associations invest the ocean, the sailor and the
ship ; all of which vanish, like a ghost at cock-crow,
at the thought of tar, sea-sickness and libels for
wages. There are many charming pictures of
woodland life in English poetry, as in the early
ballads, and best of all, in "As You Like It ;" and
in reading these, we grant the poet his own terms.
We are willing to observe from his point of view,
and to overlook the plain facts of the case. We
forget the miserable discomforts inseparable from
such a life, which must have made it intolerable
to natures so delicately organized as those who are

represented as leading it, and think only of the
sunshine and the foliage, the fresh turf and the
bounding deer. Pastoral life too, has always been
a favorite theme with poets, and yet in point of
fact, few employments are less poetical than the
tending of sheep, and if the uniform testimony of
observers is to be relied upon, there are few per-
sons, whose manners and speech are further re-
moved from an ideal standard, than shepherds.
Here also we take, without questioning, the poet's
statement. We waive all inquiry as impertinent.
We accept the imaginative aspect as the true one,
and surrender ourselves to the mellow tones of the
pastoral reed, whether breathed from the lips of
Theocritus, Virgil, or Allan Ramsay.

But though the office of poetry be at all times
and everywhere, essentially the same, it will vary
in its expression or manifestation, according to the
instruments and materials with which the poet
works, the scenes in which he is placed, and the
social hfe of which he forms a part. He is em-^ I
_phaticdly the child of his age. However original
his genius may be ; however sternly he may refuse
to bend his knee to the idols of his time, his mind
will unconsciously be moulded and colored by the
influences that surround him, even by those which

8

he resists. His whole intellectual structure would
be changed, had the accident of his birth happened
thirty years sooner, or thirty years later. A thou-
sand inevitable elements enter into the composition
of that verse which seems to flow as spontaneously
as the bird sings, or water runs. It is modified
by the point of social progress attained by the
state in which he lives, by the greater or less
amount of personal liberty enjoyed by its citizens,
by the troubled or peaceful times in which his lot
is cast, by the greater or less consideration in
which women are held in the society in which
he is reared, by the presence or absence of an
hereditary nobility, an established church and the
law of primogeniture, by the religious tendencies
of his country or age, and even by purely physi-
cal elements, by soil, by climate, by a maritime or
mland position, by the wild grandeur of mountain
scenery or the gentler beauties of cultivated plains.
The quality of two minds is no more alike than
the glory of two stars, and yet, as the stars have
been grouped into clusters and constellations, so
do poets fall into classes and orders, according
to the point of view from which they are con-
templated, and the principle by which they are ar-
ranged. The poets of the same nation have

certain distinctive features of resemblance ; so
have those of the same period, and those of the
same continent. The poets of the age of Queen
Ehzabeth have a family likeness ; so have those of
Queen Anne , and those of Queen Victoria. The
poetry of Europe is infinitely diversified, yet there
are elements common to it all, which distinguish it
from oriental poetry. The poet of the north is
not like the poet of the south ; each reproduces
the scenes which have fed the growth of his own
mind. Through the ruofcred lines of the former,
a sound seems to gather and swell, mingled from
the roar of mountain torrents, the groaning of pine
trees in the storm, and the howl of the wintry blast
over the snow-covered plain ; while the song of
the latter breathes softly upon the ear, and comes
laden with gales of balm, the voice of the night-
ingale, and the cool dash of moonlight fountains.
Poetry is the oldest birth of the human mind.
The first unravellings of that veil of light which
God has woven into the frame of man, are in the
form of verse. A poet of our own times has sup-
posed that the first poet sung when the rainbow
first shone upon the "green, undelugcd earth," as a
covenant between God and man, but surely sixteen
hundred years had not rolled by, without some

10

musical utterance, however rude and uncouth, of
those sensations and emotions, which are felt in
the blood and in the soul of man. Suns had set,
and moons had risen, and the sweet influences of
the stars had dropped from the midnight sky, the
spinning earth had known its alternations of day
and night, seed-time and harvest, lovers had wooed
and maidens had been won, the child had been
born and the old man had been carried to his grave,
joy and sorrow, hope and fear, smiles and tears,
had brightened and darkened man's life, and it
cannot be that the minstrel had not sung — that
the harp of Jubal had not trembled to the poet's
touch.

As children resemble each other more than men,
so are nations more alike in their infancy than in
their mature age. All early poetry is marked,
more or less strongly, by the same general charac-
teristics. It has the unstudied movement, and the
unconscious charm of childhood. It fills the mind
with a sense of the golden light and dewy fresh-
ness of morning. It flows from an age which
acknowledges a vivid satisfaction in the mere pos-
session of life. That pleasure in the simple exer-
cise of the faculties, without reference to the end
or object of pursuit, which is common to the young

11

of all animals, and in which the benevolent obser-
vation of Paley saw the most striking proof of the
goodness of God, is then the heritage of the race.
It is a privilege to be alive : to enjoy the pleasura-
ble sensations which accompany a healthful organ-
ization ; to hear the bird sing, to drink the red
wine, to gaze on the cheek of beauty. The natu-
ral pleasures which lie upon the lap of the common
earth content the child-like man. The feelino; of
satiety, of weariness and unrest, of longing after
some ideal and unattainable good, is as yet un-
known. The morning star of hope is in the
ascendant, and not the evening star of memory.
The poles of nature are not yet reversed. The
appetites are not yet perverted from their legiti-
mate function of means, and made to become ends.
That unhappy system of anticipation, which brings
the meal before the hunger, the bed before the
weariness, has not begun. It is no disparagement
to a brave man to express that honest fear of death
which results naturally from an honest love of life.
If we imagine grown up men carrying into the
common business of the world, that heartiness, that
irrepressible vivacity, that fulness of animal life,
which children put into their play, we shall have a
notion of that unwithercd world which surrounds

12

the early poet, and which he reproduces in his
epic, his saga, or his ballad. The heroes of Homer
feel their life in every limb. They recoil from the
unfathomable gulf of death, as children from a
dark room. That same sense of the value of mere
existence beats, like a strong pulse, through the
early poetry of Spain, England, and Germany.
The sorrow which is breathed over the dead body of
Arcite, in the Knights' tale of Chaucer, flows chiefly
from the feeling of what he had lost in losing life.

Why woldest thou be ded ? this women crie,
And haddest gold ynough, and Emelie.

All early poetry is essentially picturesque. It
is written at a time when the eye is the chief
instrument of knowledge. Everything is seen
clearly and presented in the vertical light and
sharply-defined shadows of noon-day. Illustrations
are used simply to illustrate, without inquiring
whether they dignify and embellish. The crowd
of impressions comes in too thick and fast to admit
of discrimination and analysis. Epithets are not
chosen from any particular sense of adaptation.
The poet is too full of his matter to think of his
style. He cannot pause in his rush of feeling
to select his word with the care with which the

13

worker in mosaic does his color. Homely images
are saved from being vulgar, and minute details
from being tedious, by their vividness and truth.
Poetry is a record of sensations, not reflections.
The glance has not become introspective. The
harvest of a quiet eye, which broods and sleeps
upon its own heart, is not yet gathered. The
mind is too busy with the young, untried world
around it, to dwell at home and speculate on
its own essence and organization. The exulting
sweep of its own wings is too delightful to admit
of pause and inquiry into the law by which they
are moved. To employ terms which have become
naturalized into the language, everything has an
objective and not a subjective reality. The pro-
cess of Berkley and the idealists is reversed. The
mute forms of nature are clothed with life, and the
earth, the air, and the sea arc peopled with spirit-
ual beings. The interval which separates the hu-
man soul from all other of God's works is not
apprehended. So far from regarding his own
mind as the highest manifestation of creative pow-
er, the early poet bows in awe and adoration be-
fore the beauty and grandeur of the visible world,
as something mightier than himself The moun-
tain appals him with its frown. In its shady depths

'^•1

14

lurk the hoofed satyr and the bearded faun. The
rushing blast chills him with fear. Diana and her
nymphs are sweeping by in the storm of chase, or
in another age and clime, the wild huntsman is
pursuing his spectral game, " the hunter and the
deer a shade." A shaping spirit of imagination
hangs over the earth and fills it with life. Hence

The intelligible forms of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of okl religion,

The power, the beauty and the majesty

That had her haunts in dale, or piny mountain

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring

Or chasm or watery dejsths ;

Hence the fair forms of worship to which the
graceful genius of Greece gave birth ; the wood-
nymph in the forest and the naiad of the stream ;
the sun imaged as a golden-haired youth, and the
moon shining on the hunter's face, symbolized
into Diana bending over her sleeping Endymion.
Hence, too, those delicate beings, the creation of
modern romantic fiction.

Whose midnight revels by a forest-side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course,

who throw their peculiar charm over so much of

15

early English literature and of whose agency
Shakspeare has availed himself in his INIidsumnier
Night's Dream, with such creative power and
artistic skill, as to form one of the most strikins;
triumphs of even his miraculous genius.

As society advances from infancy to mature age,
this process is essentially reversed. If the early
poet may find his appropriate type in the child at
his morning play, glowing with animal life, and
seeing the sunshine of his own breast reflected
from the dewy world around him, the poet of a
later age and of modern times may be compared to
the ripened man, in his evening walk. A change
has come over the spirit of the scene. The tone
of coloring is more subdued ; the lights and sha-
dows less strongly defined, the movement less ani-
mated. Life is more compact of reflection than
of sensation. We do not merely observe, but we
analyze, dissect and combine. The mute forms of
the external world have lost their objective charac-
ter. They are linked to long trains of association
and represent states of mind and moods of feel-
ing. That sharp and painful spirit of observation
which Shakspeare has embodied in the character
of Jaqucs, which moralizes material forms into a
thousand similes drawn from artificial life and

16

manners, is called into being. The mind itself is
a point of departure ; a standard to which all other
things are referred. The poet of civihzation is
made acquainted with the thoughts of other men,
and with his own, before he becomes familiar with
Nature, and thus looks at it through a medium
which colors with its own hues, the objects ob-
served. Hence descriptive poetry is not so much
a description of what is seen, as a transcript of
the feelings in the poet's own mind awakened
by it. Thus Thomson's descriptions are glowing
but indistinct ; Cowper's, minute and accurate ;
Byron's, vivid and impassioned ; Wordsworth's,
profound ; Shelley's, ideal ; Tennyson's, fan-
tastic; Bryant's, natural and true. Indeed, de-
scriptive poetry is the growth of a comparatively
late age, in which men, weary of study or busi-
ness, throw themselves upon the lap of Nature for
refreshment and repose, and chronicle, with some-
thing of a lover's fondness, her changing expres-
sions. The early poet deals with the visible world
in a familiar and business-like way ; very much as
the sailor talks of the sea, or the farmer of his
farm. His descriptions serve the purposes of
scenery only, or come in as introductory to some-
thing else. He has no more idea of describing

17

Joots own sake, than an artist would have of frain-
ing^ apiece of bare canvass.

In an advanced period of society, a new element
of the poetical is evolved in the contrast between
the poet's ideal world and the real one around
him. The mind of the eai'ly bard seems to be
ahvays in unison with the scenes and the hfe into
which he is thrown. His world is fashioned of
kindly elements and every one in it has his share
of satisfaction. The face of Nature has not yet
worn a step-mother's frown. The blue sky of
God's providence bends lovingly over all. The
child is not met with the pitiless question " why
were you born ? " The contrasts of life are not
so violent and its extremes not so far apart. There
are no glittering inaccessible peaks of wealth and
splendor, with hopeless chasms of poverty and de-
gradation at their feet. In the highest station, the
element of a common humanity is always promi-
nent. The king is not a ceremony or an abstrac-
tion, but a man crowned and reigning. Power
belongs to him who can best vindicate his claim to
it by superior strength, courage or wisdom. Life
is full of dramatic changes and singular alterna-
tions of fortune. Palaces and castles are the re-
wards of enterprise and hardihood. A single battle

18

may cause the king and the wanderer, the noble
and the outlaw to change places. The things in
which men differ from each other — the accidents
of birth, rank and station — are less conspicuous
than those in which they are alike. Cloth of frieze
rubs against cloth of gold. Thus the substance of
poetry is ready made and requires only the form
of verse. The relation of the poet to this natural
and hearty world around him is all that he can ask.
To the rude spiritsof his time, he supplies their
highest intellectual excitement, and the boon is ac-
knowledged with a warmth and fulness proportion-
ate to their impressible organization. An easily
gathered harvest of smiles and tears rewards his
efforts. Wealth enriches, power protects, and rank
caresses him. Unconsciously to themselves, they
reverence the breath of God in the poet's soul,
and the infinite capacities of their own natures are
not revealed to themselves, until they hear the min-
strel singing to his harp.

On the other hand, in a highly civilized age,
the poet finds himself perplexed with contradic-
tions which he cannot reconcile, and anomalies
which he cannot comprehend. Coming out from
the soft ideal world in which he has dreamed
away his youth, he is constantly repelled by some

19

iron reality. The aspect of life to him seems
cold, hard and prosaic. It renews the legend of
(Edipus and the Sphinx. It propounds to him a
riddle, with a face of stone, which he must guess
or be devoured. It is an age of frio-htful extremes
of social condition ; of colossal wealth and heart-
crushing poverty ; of courts and custom-houses ;
of corn-laws and game-laws ; of man-traps and
spring-guns. The smoke from the almshouse and
the jail blots the pure sky. The race of life is
not to the swift, nor its battle to the strong. A
sensitive conscience, a delicate taste, the gift of
genius and the ornament of learning, are rather
obstacles, than helps, in the way of what is called
success. Men are turned into petrifactions by the
slow-dropping influences of artificial hfe. The
heroic virtues of the elder age have vanished with
its free speech and its simple manners. There
seems to be no pulse of hearty life in anything,
whether it be good or bad. Virtue is timid and
vice is cunning. Love is cold and calculating,
and hatred masks its dagger with a smile. In tliis
world of hollow forms and gilded seeming, the
claims of the poet are unheeded, and his voice
unlieard. The gifts which he prolfers are unvalued
by those who have forgotten the dreams of their

20

youthj and wandered away from the primal light
of their being. He looks around him, and the
mournful fact presses itself upon his conviction,
that there is no cover laid for him at Nature's
table. His very existence seems to him a mis-
take. And now begins that fiery struggle in
which the temper of his genius is to be tried, and
which moves the deepest springs of compassion
and sympathy in the human heart. Poetry has
invented nothing more pathetic, history has re-
corded nothing more sad, than those mournful ex-
periences which are so often the lot of the scholar
and the man of genius. The dethronement of
kings and the beggary of nobles are less affecting
than the wrongs, the sorrows, the long-protracted
trials, the forlorn conditions of great and gifted
-minds ; nobles, whose patents are of elder date
than the pyramids, and kings by the anointment of
God's own hand. What tragedies can be read, in
the history of literature, deeper than Macbeth,
more moving than Lear ! Milton, old, poor and
blind, selhng Paradise Lost for five pounds ; Dry-
den beaten by ruffians at the prompting of a worth-
less peer, who, in Plato's commonwealth, would
have been changing the poet's plate ; Tasso, a
creature as delicately moulded as if, like the Peris,

21

he had fed upon nothing grosser than the breath
of flowers, wearing out the best years of his hfe in
the gloom of a dungeon ; Racine hurried to his
grave by the rebuke of a heartless king ; Chatter-
ton, at midnight, homeless and hungry, bathing the
unpitying stones of London with the hot tears of
anguish and despair ; Johnson, at the age of thirty-
six, dining behind a screen at the house of Cave,
because he was too shabbily dressed to appear at
the table ; Burns taken from the plough, which he
had " followed in glory and in joy upon the moun-
tain side," to guage ale-firkins and watch for con-
traband tobacco.

The false position in which men of genius so
often find themselves placed in relation to their
age, and the painful and protracted efforts they
must make in order to gain a true one, have given
to modern literature some of its prominent charac-
teristics. Hence that half-unconscious sympathy
which poets feel with characters, like Robin Hood,
Rob Roy and Charles de Moor, who embody a
protest against their times ; who mean, like Jack
Cade, " to dress the commonwealth and turn it and
set a new nap u])on it ; " who presume, to borrow
a daring expression of Schiller's, to grind down the
gaps in the sword of Almighty justice, [fence

22

much of that dreary melancholy, which over-
shadowed the mind of the stout-hearted and pious
Johnson, whose sombre hue darkens the pages of
his Rambler and Rasselas, and is concentrated in
that celebrated couplet, in which the words seem
to fall like drops of blood from a lacerated heart :

But ah ! what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail.

To this source we may trace, in part, that personal
element which glows so intensely in the lyric po-
etry of Schiller, and even sickhes o'er his otherwise
admirable dramas. This, too, gave something of
their depth and sternness to the powerful pictures
of Crabbe. Hence that numerous tribe of poets
and poetasters who, of late years, have so filled
the groves of Parnassus with their melancholy
notes, as sad, if not as sweet as those of the night-
ingale, whose young affections are ever running
to waste, upon whose withered hearts the dew of
hope can never fall, and who are ever longing to
be a breeze, a cloud, a wave, or a sound — some-
thing that shall not have nerves to feel and a heart
to ache.

In the struggle of which I have spoken, the
poet has need of all his good angels. Without
faith, strength of purpose and stern self-respect.

23

the very delicacy of organization which makes
him a poet will only increase tlie odds against
him. The dangers which assail him are various
and menacing to different parts of his nature.
He is tempted to make his poetry a mere medium
forthe^ expression of his own discontent ; to fall
into a tone of gloomy egotism, of querulous lament-
ation or of bold arraio^ninff of that Providence,
whose purposes he cannot comprehend and will
not submit to. The habit of morbid introspection,
into which he is likely to fall, leads inevitably to a
self-exaggerating mood of mind, and this is a most
fruitful source of unhappiness. Irving, in his
Tales of a Traveller, has drawn a lively sketch of
a poor devil author, who went up to London as
a great genius, and starved miserably in that ca-
pacity, till it occurred to him that he was by no
means so gifted a person as he and his friends
had supposed, and he had since lived very comfort-
ably, as a penny-a-liner. All, however, do not
come to this self-knowledge. The history of liter-
ature, and especially of art, abounds with sad
records of men, whose lives have been wasted be-
cause they aimed at a mark beyond their powers,
mistaking aspiration for inspiration, sensibility for
genius, an impressible organization for a creative

24

mind. The remark of Coleridge is perfectly true,
that " where the subject is taken immediately from
the author's personal sensations and experiences,
the excellence of a particular poem is but an
equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge of
genuine poetical power." But the young espe-
cially are apt to mistake strength of feeling for
power of expression, to exhaust themselves in
unavailing efforts to give utterance to what are
merely emotions and not conceptions, and to de-
lude themselves with the notion that it is merely
some formal defect, which care and training may
supply, that keeps them from the highest suc-
cess. But with the man of true genius, the inward
voice and the outward utterance are simultaneous,
and where imagination does body forth the forms
of things unknown, the poet's pen will surely turn
them to shape.

But in this conflict, the poet is in especial dan-
ger of suffering moral shipwreck. He is in dan-
ger of becoming the tool and slave of his age ; of
bartering away conscience and peace of mind for
ease, delicate living, fine clothes and dainty food ;
of falling asleep on the lap of society and waking to
the consciousness that the invincible locks of his
genius have been shorn away by the hands of the

25

enclitiiitress. It is hard to be loyal to truth, when
its wages are want and obscurity ; to keep the erect
attitude of sturdy virtue when house and land may
be gained by bending before the idols of the time.
Burns has recorded that in his experience nothing
was so sad as a man seeking work ; more sad is the
sight when that man is a man of genius ; and sad-
dest of all is it when, enforced by fancied or real
want, he consents to do the work, which is degrada-
tion and infamy. In this extremity, let him hold fast
to the integrity of his soul. Let him learn that vir-
tue may ennoble poverty, dignify neglect, and exalt
a lowly station ; that peace of mind is better than
a competence, and a good conscience more to be
desired than a good estate. Is he called upon to
suffer want, to languish in obscurity, to be the vic-
tim of persecution, to die, perhaps, of heart-sick-
ness ? Let him drink in silence the cup that is
held to his lips. Such has been the lot of the wise
and gifted before him, and there was no covenant
at his birth, that he should be exempt from the
common chances of humanity. Let liim eat his
crust of bread in innocence and thankfuhiess. Let
hmi dwell contentedly in his mean abode, whose
threshold is not crossed by friendly forms, and
whose echoes are not stirred by friendly voices.

26

Angel forms shall there minister to him ; the se-
rene brow of faith, the cordial smile of hope, the
overshadowing wings of peace shall be around
him ; his own far-darting thoughts shall be his lov-
ing friends; the wealth of his own imagination
shall hang shapes of beauty upon the walls and
empurple its floor with celestial roses. The smile
of God shall beam upon it and the glory of its
gates shall be as the glory of heaven.

From what has been said of the relation of the
poet to his age, we might infer a fact which lite-
rary history confirms, that the poetry which has
the most vitality and durabihty, is that which has
flowed most naturally from the poet's age, and
been the strongest infusion of the circumstances
and scenes, among which it was written. The
universal popularity of the poetry of Homer is to
be ascribed as much to its truth as to its genius.
It has an historical, as well as an imaginative value.
From internal evidence, we have the strongest as-
surance that it is a true picture of the heroic age ;
as we pronounce of some portraits that they are
good likenesses, without ever having seen the
originals. We call the Ihad the perfection of the
epic, but the poet was unconscious that he was
writing what we call an epic poem. He wrote, as

27

his own genius and the spirit of his age prompted,
and we name the result the epic, and from it we
draw the definition of that form of poetry. He in-
troduces supernatural machinery, as a matter of
course, because it was the faith of his time. To
him who then walked upon the shores of the
^gean, Thetis and her nymphs were not cold
shadows, but warm realities. He invests his gods
and goddesses with a port, a majesty, a mixture of
the terrible and the graceful, which can come only
from that unquestioning faith, which trembles while
it delineates. To him may be apphed, w ith pecu-
har propriety, the hnes,

Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders which he sang.

I have spoken of the Iliad as the work of a single
mind, and that opinion is likely always to form a
part of the popular literary creed, whatever may
be the views of the initiated. The common mind
will never consent to exchange that " blind old
man of Scio's rocky isle," for a bodiless abstraction,
nor blot out that single and blazing star of poetry
from the dark morning sky, and put in its place a
nebulous galaxy composed of inimmerabic lesser
lights, without a nanic.

28

In all epic poetry since the Iliad we observe in
a greater or less degree, the faltering touch and
the diluted coloring which distinguish the copy
from the original. When the ^neid was written,
it was no longer an age of childlike faith in the
unseen, but of speculation and skepticism ; when,
as Cicero says, it was a wonder that two augurs
could look in each other's faces without laughing ;
and the effect is seen in the fainter lines and less
vivid hues in which its mythological personages
are drawn. There is a certain hesitation percep-
tible in the artist's hand. His gods and goddesses
have not the unforced dignity and natural air of
command of the deities of that elder hneage.
They shine with a cold, lunar light, compared with
that full meridian blaze. The truth of the ob-
servation which has been made may be more
clearly perceived by comparing the ^Eneid with the
Georgics. Here the poet's foot is upon his own
native heather. Every line has the racy flavor of
the soil. The hot sun and transparent sky of Italy
hang over the scene, and its blue waters enclose it
as in a frame. The song of the cicada, the rustle
of the vine-leaf, the hum of the bee, the voice of
the reaper, the cooing of the wood-pigeon ; the
very sounds which had charmed his own childhood

29

in his father's fields on the banks of the Mincius,
and revealed to him the secret of his inspiration,
breathe through its exquisite poetry and color it
with the warm hues of life.

The revelation of Christianity has of course been
unfavorable to that supernatural machinery, which
forms a part of the very definition of the epic, and
in all poems of that class which have been written
since, it has been rather an obstacle to be over-
come, in deference to estabhshed rules, than a help.
Nothing proves the boldness of Milton's genius
more than the choice of his subject ; nothing shows
its vast resources more than the manner in which
he has treated it. Its difficulties were almost su-
perhuman, but he has grappled them with a com-
mensurate power. Yet may we not ask, with that
reverence with which so majestic a name should
ever be approached, whether he has not attempted
an enterprise in which complete success was im-
possible, whether there is not something of ne-
cessity debasing in those material attril)utcs with
which he has clothed the beings who are only to
be spiritually discerned with the eye of faith,
whether we do not pass lightly over such pas-
sages, to linger and dwell upon lliose, whose
unequalled grandeur and beauty have no such

30

mixture of alloy, and whether it is not to be
wished that he had at least paused at the foot of
that throne, before whose glories angels bow and
veil their faces.

The remarks which have been made upon Ho-
mer, may be applied in their spirit to the great
work of Dante, which in originality and its subse-
quent influence upon literature, occupies a place
second only to that of the Iliad. Indeed no work
of the human mind is more entirely original than
this. It draws its vigorous growth from the deep
soil of its age. We see in it the religion, the phi-
losophy, the science and the learning of that period
set to the music of the noblest verse ; that blend-
ing of the Grecian and Gothic elements which
characterized the times ; the unquestioning faith in
all that the church prescribed, in the wild legends
which it invented or circulated, and in the gross
material images by which it symbolized the future
world, and that strange mixture of Christianity and
Pagan mythology which brings together Lucifer
and Charon without any sense of incongruity. Its
picturesqueness and intensity of feeling flow from
the sincere and earnest spirit in which it was writ-
ten. The poet relates the wonders he has seen,
with the good faith and the circumstantial detail of

31

a witness on the stand. No poetry has the intense
vitahty of Dante's. The words burn and glow hke
coals of fire. To borrow a phrase of Ben Jon-
son's, it is "rammed with life." It was the m-owth
of a mind which had been kindled by indignation
at what it had suffered, and grief at what it had
lost, to a heat like that of the central caverns of
Etna. The mournful experiences of the lover
whose world of hope and joy had been shattered
into fragments, of the baffled pohtician, of the
homeless exile whose daily food had long been the
salt bread of dependence, only serve to deepen the
earnestness with which he writes, and to add re-
hef, distinctness and precision to his wonderful
pictures.

Further illustrations of the same general truth
may be seen in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, that
bright mirror of romance which reflects so clearly
the picturesque features of an age of chivalry ; in
the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, which give us so
lively a picture of the society and manners of Eng-
land at the time when they were written, and in
the early ballad poetry of England and Spain, so
full of morning freshness and overflowing life.
Nor is our own age without approi)riate exam})les.
One of its most striking poems is the Kaust of

32

Goethe, and the most striking thing in it is the char-
acter of Mephistopheles. This conception was
formed in the poet's mind at an early period in his
hfe, before the breaking out of the French Revolu-
tion, and it may naturally enough have been sug-
gested to an observation so penetrating and compre-
hensive as his, by the character of the times. It
was then one of the dreariest periods in the history
of the world ; of heartless skepticism in religion,
of shallow materialism in philosophy, of tame mo-
notony in literature, and of hideous profligacy in
social life. Of such an age, Mephistopheles is the
type and exponent. He is an embodied sneer.
He believes in nothing, hopes in nothing, sympa-
thizes with nothing. He represents a civihzation
which has passed from ripeness to rottenness. If
we suppose a man, thoroughly petrified by a long
course of libertinism in corrupt cities and profli-
gate courts, who has lost all faith in the honor of
man, and the purity of woman, clothed with super-
natural powers of body and mind, we have an out-
line of that character which the plastic hand of the
poet has so skilfully filled up.

The gloomy discontent of Byron owed much of
the response which it met in the public mind, to
the time at which it was uttered. The period from

33

the breaking out of the French Revolution, to the
battle of Waterloo, was one of intense and unpar-
alleled excitement. The minds of men were kept
in a constant eflervescence by the magic of change
and the whirl of revolution. There was passing
before their eyes, the spectacle of a mighty drama,
with Europe for the stage and kings for actors,
managed by tliat extraordinary man, compared
with whose dazzling career all that history has re-
corded is tame, all that fiction has invented is
cold. Byron wrote at the close of tliis period,
when the natural reaction was beginning to be
felt ; when the torpor, which follows a long-con-
tinued tension of the faculties, was stealing over
men's minds, and their brains were throbbing with
the sickness consequent upon the deep draughts of
intellectual excitement, which they had drained.
The energetic verses, in which he bewailed the
wreck of his own lawless passions, fell upon the
general mind like sparks upon combustible mate-
rials, and the result was a conflagration of unhap-
piness and misanthropy, the ashes of which are
not yet cold.

The great success of tlie poetry of Burns and
its permanent influence upon the literature of his
country, is also in a great measure to be ascribed

34

to this vital element of truth and reality of which I
have spoken. In his dedication of his poems to
the noblemen and gentlemen of the Caledonian
Hunt, he says, "the poetic genius of my country
found me, as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha,
at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over
me. She bade me sing the loves, the joys, the
rural scenes and the rural pleasures of my native
soil, in my native tongue." Well was it for him
and for us that he obeyed this call ; that he drew
his inspiration from the world around him ; that he
found his themes lying at his feet, in the daisy up-
torn by his plough, in the field-mouse whose nest
his furrow had laid bare, in the devotional exer-
cises of his father's cottage, in the " banks and
braes" of his own "bonnie Doon." The result
is that the songs of the peasant bard have been
borne, like the seeds of wild flowers, over the earth,
and wherever they have fallen they have taken
root in the human heart. They are mingling with
the flow of the Thames, the Ganges, and St. Law-
rence. The genius and the misfortune of Burns
are forever associated with the glory and the shame
of Scotland. He has poured round her hills and
her valleys a hght unknown before. Her forests
have since waved more majestically ; her streams

S5

have flowed in more lucid beauty ; her men have
seemed nobler ; her maidens more lovely. Where
the foot of the poet has been planted — where his
glance has rested — where his dust reposes — there
is hallowed ground.

His spirit wraps the dusky mountain,
His memory sparkles o'er the fountain,
The meanest rill, the mightiest river
Rolls mingling with his name for ever.

There is much good sense in the advice that
Goethe was accustomed to give to the young poets
of his country, not as a matter of course to form
the plan of writing a great poem, which might be
neither suited to their own genius, nor adapted to
the wants of their age, and which would cause
them to lose many golden moments of inspiration,
that might otherwise have been genially and pro-
ductively employed, but to let their talent express
itself naturally, and be ready to seize every poetical
opportunity that might present itself. The epic
form may be considered as a thing gone by, not to
be recalled, like a belief in witchcraft, or the f;ish-
ion of wearing armor. They who have written
epics in our time, have only thrown away their
labor and ingenuity. Who has ever, except as a
task, toiled through the dreary pages of Cottle's

36

Alfred, the Charlemagne of Lucien Bonaparte, or,
with reverence be it spoken, Barlow's Columbiad ?
A song of Burns, or a sonnet of Wordsworth is
fairly worth an alcove of such epics.

So it is with the ballad. It is the rude expression
of the sentiments of a rude age, and as such has a
charm and value of its own. Clever men, in a culti-
vated age, amuse themselves with writing what they
call ballads, but they are not native to the soil. The
old trumpet tone cannot be brought back. The
hues of morning will not blend with the light of noon.
They remind us of the recent tournament at Eglin-
toun castle, a plaything imitation of what was once
a manly reality ; or of an artificial river in a plea-
sure-ground, which is very well in its way, but is
not like the mountain stream, that wanders to the
ocean at its own sweet will.

We frequently hear it said that ours is not a
poetical age, still less a poetical country. The
young poet thinks that he could have done some-
thing, if he had been born in another period, or
under another sky. But this is, in a great mea-
sure, the effect of those magic hues which invest
the distant both in time and space. Were the dis-
tant brought near, were tlie past made present, we
should find the same mingled elements of prose

37

and poetry, that are around us at this moment.
The soft cloud which hes on the distant mountain's
side so temptingly, that we long for wings to bathe
and revel in its voluptuous folds, is chilling to the
bone, with its drizzling mist, the traveller who is
enveloped by it. We mistake the costume of po-
etry for poetry itself, and the picturesque, which is
one of its elements, for its whole substance. The
age of chivalry was undoubtedly more picturesque
than ours ; whether it was more poetical, is another
question. Steel breast-plates and silken doublets
make a fairer show than broadcloth, but the same
human heart beats under both. " What is nature ? "
said Bonaparte to Bourrienne, " the thing is vague
and unmeaning. Men and passions are the sub-
jects to write about. Here is something to study."
It betrays rather a poverty of invention to have per-
petual recourse to foreign names, distant epochs,
and remote places, to awaken interest. There is
as good poetry in Middlesex, as in Italy or Cash-
mere, if we only knew where to look for it ; and he,
whose heart is cold on the banks of die Merrimac,
will not find it growing warm on those of the Tiber.
An opinion essentially similar to that which I
have ventured to (luestion, has been expressed
by a distinguished living poet, in his lines to the
Rainbow :

38

When science from creation's face,
Enchantment's veil withdraws,
"What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws.

Presumptuous as it may seem to differ from the
author of O'Connor's Child, upon the principles
of his own art, I make bold to take issue with him
both upon the general position and the particular
illustration. Surely, the rainbow is a more glori-
ous vision to him who comprehends the beautiful
law by which its rich scarf is flung upon the dark
skirts of the retiring storm. Akenside's is the
better doctrine :

Nor ever yet
The melting rainbow's vermeil-tinctured hues
To me have shone so pleasing, as when first
The hand of science pointed out the path,
In which the sunbeams, gleaming from the west.
Fall on the watery cloud.

The stars are the poetry of heaven, but do they
become its prose to the instructed eye, which sees
in them, not points of gold upon a ground of blue,
but worlds of beauty peopling the infinite depths
of space ? Indeed, it seems to me that, if an unde-
vout astronomer be mad, an unpoetical astronomer
is monstrous. So too of the kindred science of

39

geology. The imaginative charm of the landscape
does not disappear when we survey it from the
geologist's point of view ; when we know what
elemental forces, what mighty energies of wave
and fire, have reared the i)innacled rock, have
smoothed the level plain, have rounded the gentle
slopes of the hills and torn open the mountain
gates for the stream to pass through. The flower
is not disenchanted to the botanist's eye, who has
followed with his microscope the minute vessels
and capillary tubes, by which it draws from the
dark unsightly earth its beauty and its fragrance.
To a well-constituted mind, the highest charm is
ever that of truth ; compared to this, all the mer-
etricious graces which may be borrowed from error
and delusion are but as the varnish on the harlot's
cheek, to the natural bloom of health and sensi-
bility.

As poetry has its scientific exposition, so is
science not without its poetical aspect. We may
draw from the history of literature and science
confirmations of the position which has been kiid
down. The imagination of Bacon was Shakspc-
rian in its comprehensiveness and richness. Vns-
cal, in his moral and religious writings, soars into
the highest region of poetry. TIk; scienliiic re-

40

searches of Goethe are well known. Sir Humphrey
Davy, by common consent of all who knew him,
might have been one of the prominent poets of
his country, if he had not chosen to become the
first of its scientific discoverers and benefactors.
One of the most fruitful and musical of our own
poets is also a highly distinguished man of science
in more than one department. If I may presume
to draw an inference from a very limited know-
ledge upon this subject, it seems to me that sci-
ence has been a sufferer from the hard, cold and
dry manner in which it has been viewedtand treat-
ed, and that new value and interest may be given
to its researches and discoveries by that more
genial spirit in which we find it studied and inter-
preted by such men as Sir John Herschel and Pro-
fessor Whewell.

The poet in our age has no occasion to lament
his destiny or consider himself as one born out
of due season. It is true that he must give
up much of what was once a part of the com-
mon stock in trade of the craft, because there is
no longer any demand for it in the market. All
the commonplaces of classical mythology, Apollo
and the Muses, Pegasus, Parnassus and Helicon,
have lost their chai-m by long familiarity. The

41

present age deals with them as sternly as Cole-
ridge relates that his teacher, Dr. Bowyer, did, when
he met with them in the exercises of his boys ;
" Muse, boy, Muse — your nurse's daughter, you
mean ! Pierian spring r Oh, ay, the cloister
pump I suppose." The green coats of the fairies,
and the tinkling of their silver bells, have also
passed away, never to be recalled. They can no
longer endure the open daylight of reason. They
were buried with the wand of that mighty magi-
cian, who, like his own Prospero, could summon
shapes of beauty and power from the reahns of
earth, air and sea, to do his bidding. Nor can he
have recourse to that cheap process of personifi-
cation so common in the last century, by which
life is attempted to be breathed into cold abstrac-
tions through the help of initial capitals, and which
was carried so far at one period that an enthusiastic
poet is said to have begun an ode with the line,
" Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend." The
compositor can no longer turn prose into poetry.
The life from which the poet must now draw his
materials is certainly less picturesque, })crhaps less
stimulating, than at former periods ; but the great
fountains of poetry are left in the mind ol" man,
with its thoughts that wand(;r llnoiigli eternity ;

42

and in the heart of man, that populous world of
feeling and passion.

We call ours an extraordinary age. If by this
expression it is meant that other ages have been
ordinary in comparison with ours, it is a fallacy ;
if it mean that our own age has its peculiar
characteristics distinguishing it from previous pe-
riods, it is no more than a truism. Each age
has its distinctive features and expression, and
ours among the rest. Ours is a grave and earnest
period ; of restless activity in every department of
thought and inquiry ; of bold enterprise ; of fervid
agitation. It is an age that takes nothing for
granted. All institutions and all existing facts
must be ever ready to produce their passports and
their title deeds. The force of prescription is not
recognised as it once was. The world has grown
too old to be treated like the child, who is told to
open his mouth and shut his eyes, if he would have
something good. In legislation, politics and gov-
ernment, a fearless and irreverend spirit of inno-
vation is at work. In these departments, the aim
of the times is to produce symmetry, uniformity
and consistency ; to correct what is anomalous,
and cut off what is superfluous ; and the danger
rather is, that we shall carve too deeply, and sacri-

43

fice the law of natural growth to an ideal standard
of proportion.

Nor does the restless spirit of discontent stop
here. A band of reformers, considerable from
tlieir enthusiasm and their purity of character,
are questioning the fundamental principles on
which society is organized and property distri-
buted, and propose to unravel the whole web of
social life and weave it anew. In metaphysics,
tlie movement of oscillation is from materialism to-
wards mysticism. The deepest problems in man's
nature and destiny form the staple subject-matter
of spiritual philosophy, and are discussed always
boldly and sometimes successfully ; though it may
be objected that the inquirer not unfrequently loses
himself in a mist of words, and that the stream of
thought is sometimes made turbid, as if on pur-
pose to conceal its want of depth. The fate of
Ixion is too often renewed ; and the lover of truth
finds that he has embraced a cloud instead of a
goddess.

In the sciences, there is a constant effort to
simplify, to generalize, to discern unity in mul-
ti])licity, to extract the formula, to educe the law,
by which discordant elements are harmonized and
remote facts brought into alhnity. In literature,

44

we require depth, comprehensiveness, philosophi-
cal insight and the breath of spiritual life. The
writer of fiction must analyze motives, and lay
bare the secret springs of action with metaphysical
acuteness and discrimination. It is not enough to
see the movement of the hands upon the dial-
plate, we must also watch the play of the inner
machinery, by which that movement is created and
transmitted. The historian must have his theory
of history ; he must survey his facts from his own
point of view, and group them according to some
pre-established harmony in his own mind. Criti-
cism is more genial, more penetrating, more crea-
tive ; and the spirit of modern research is vivifying
the dead bones of antiquity and extracting a new
and deep meaning from the stories which charmed
the childhood of the world.

From none of these influences can the poet es-
cape, if he would ; and the less so, from the fact
that his relations with society are more intimate
than at former periods. He is no longer the mere
minstrel singing to men, when their work is over,
but is himself an actor and laborer. Poetry forms
less of the embroidery of life, and more of its web.
We have substituted the bookseller for the patron,
and a reading pubhc for a pension. Burns was

proud of his skill in all rural occupations. He
was once engaged with a brother husbandman in
binding up the corn into sheaves after the reapers,
called in the dialect of Scotland " stooking," an
employment in which he rarely found his match.
After a hard strife, in which the poet was equalled,
his rival said to him, " Robert, I 'm not so fiir behind
you this time, I 'm thinking." The poet replied,
while a glance of triumph shot from his dark eye,
" John, you are behind me in something yet, for I
made a song while I was stooking." I mention
this anecdote for the illustration which it ailbrds.
The poet of our times must work and sing too.
Hence every movement in social and moral re-
form, every institution, every party — temperance,
anti-slavery, democracy — all keep their poets.
In many of these, the dehcate essence of poetry is
quite sublimated and consumed by the hot flames
of zeal. The poet is so terribly in earnest, that he
is only one part poet to nine parts partisan.

Men in our times look to the poet to helj) them
in their struggles and their aspirations. His clear
insight, his picturesque fancy, his creative imagina-
tion are pressed into the service of toiling, sullcring,
sorrowing humanity. His themes are to be drawn
less from the accidents of rank, place and position

46

than from those elements which are the common
heritage of man. An admirer of Goethe once
remarked to him, " your great tendency is to give
the real a poetical form ; others endeavor to realize
the so-called poetical, the ideal, and the result is
absurdity." The justice of this observation, so far
as Goethe is concerned, will be acknowledged by
all who are familiar with his writings. The poetry
of our times must be, more than ever before, the
poetry of real life, or if an expression may be
allowed, somewhat savoring of conceit, the poetry
of prose. It must be grave, earnest, sincere, and
manly. It must rest upon the great heart of hu-
manity, wiiose pulsations must vibrate through it.
We exact more rigorously than at former periods,
dignity of sentiment and elevation of feeling.
Transparent beauty of diction and the most care-
ful choice of language are seldom now employed
to embalm cheap thoughts, commonplace imagery,
and trivial conceptions, reminding us of straws and
insects preserved in amber. The essence of poetry
was once supposed to reside rather in the process
or art, but now in the product or result. We
sacrifice form to substance, and are only too care-
less about the garb of poetry. In the most sport-
ive movements of the muse, there is an earnest

47

expression. There is a chord of rebellion in the
lyre of Moore, and the songs of Beranger have
sent him to prison.

In our own country we have the most complete
manifestation of those characteristics which are
peculiar to the age, and the absence of that con-
trast of light and shadow which arises from fixed
ditierences in social life. How much poetry here
loses by that clear daylight in which our history
begins, and the want of those legendary tradi-
tions, drawn from the storehouse of a dim anti-
quity, and made venerable by the " awful hoar of
innumerable ages " — how much it gains by those
heroic and exalted virtues, in which the founda-
tions of our state were laid, and by which so much
of its subsequent history has been illustrated, and
which shed so pure a light upon the Mayflower,
the Pilgrims' rock, the plains of Lexington, and
the shades of Mount Vernon — is a fruitful subject
of inquiry, at which we can only give a passing
glance.

Looking at the life, and the society that arc
around us to-day, if there be something discour-
aging in the plain level on which everything here
rests, and in the absence of those picturescpic ;iii(l
melo-dramatic elements, which are llu; birlh ul'

48

traditionary symbols and transmitted institutions,
there is, on the other hand, a compensation in the
more unchecked development, which is thereby
given to simple humanity. In our free air, all
human passions burn more brightly, and the hues
of many-colored life glow more vividly. Love
is more spontaneous, ambition is bolder, hope is
more aspiring. The blood is younger in the veins
of time. There is no occasion here for the poet
to fold his hands in silent despair. All the primal
elements of his art stand round him like ripened
corn in the fields of the world. Here is man, no-
where more energetic, more persevering, more
brave ; here is woman, nowhere more lovely, more
pure, more self-devoting ; here are the dazzling
hopes of youth ; the evening shadows of age point-
ing eastward to the dawn of a new life ; love that
emparadises earth ; the mother and her child ; the
ever new mystery of birth ; the marriage benedic-
tion ; the grave waiting for all. Above us are the
unwrinkled heavens ; the sleepless ocean murmurs
around ; and all the shows of earth are at our feet.
There is something fearful in the rapidity with
which the industrial development of the country
goes on ; in the magic speed with which prairie
grass is turned into pavements, and the primeval

49

forest is transformed into court-houses, black-
smiths' shops, and lawyers' offices. As we travel
westward, we go back into the vanished centuries,
and in the settler, with his axe before the giant
woods of Michigan, we find a contemporary of the
Greek, under the oaks of Dodona. All these
things — even railroads, canals, and steam-ships,
have, in their relation to human happiness and
improvement, their poetical aspect. The poet
w^ho finds no " thoughts, that voluntary move har-
monious numbers," suggested by the Thames Tun-
nel, or the Croton Aqueduct, is but a tyro in his
noble art.

If there be no lack of themes and inspiration,
there is surely none of impulse and motive. No-
where is the poet called upon more imperatively
to speak out whatever there is within him of
divine birth. We need the charm and grace
which he alone can tlirow over the rough places
of hfe. A nation skilled in the arts that mul-
tiply physical comforts and conveniences, but ni
which the imaginative faculty lies paralyzed and
lifeless, disturbs us with the sense of something
incomplete and imperfect. It reminds us of a
world without children. It is a SI inker conunu-
nity on a gigantic scale. In some })()ints we re-

50

cognise the superiority of Sparta to Athens ; but
what to us are the institutions of Lycurgus, com-
pared with the choruses of Sophocles and the frieze
of the Parthenon ? As the idea of a cathedral
includes not only the central nave, the long-drawn
aisle, the high embowed roof, the massive buttress,
but also, the roses blooming in stone, the quaint
corbels, the twining wreaths of foliage, and the
stained glass, blushing with the blood of martyrs
and the glories of sunset ; so in the idea of a state
are comprehended, not only armies and navies,
politics and government, the custom-house and the
post-office, the judge and the sheriff, but whatever
sweetens and decorates life, the arts that repro-
duce the beauty of stars and clouds and child-
hood's cheek — poetry, painting, sculpture and
music.

The motives to intellectual action press upon
us with peculiar force in our country, because
the connection is here so immediate between
character and happiness, and because there is no-
thing between us and ruin, but intelligence which
sees the right, and virtue which pursues it. There
are such elements of hope and fear mingled in
the great experiment which is here trying, the re-
sults are so momentous to humanity, that all the

51

voices of the past and the future seem to blend in
one sound of warning and entreaty, addressing
itself not only to the general, but to the indi-
vidual ear. By the wrecks of shattered states, by
the quenched hghts of promise that once shone
upon man, by the long-deferred hopes of hu-
manity, by all that has been done and suffered
in the cause of liberty, by the martyrs that died
before the sight, by the exiles, whose hearts have
been crushed in dumb despair, by the memory of
our fathers and their blood in our veins, — it calls
upon us, each and all, to be faithful to the trust
which God has committed to our hands.

That fine natures should here feel their energies
palsied by the cold touch of indifference, that they
should turn to Westminster Abbey, or the Alps
or the Vatican, to quicken their flagging pulses,
is of all mental anomalies the most inexplicable.
The danger would seem to be rather that the spring
of a sensitive mind may be broken by the weight
of obligation that rests upon it, and that the stimu-
lant, by its very excess, may become a narcotic.
The poet must not plead his delicacy of organiza-
tion as an excuse for dwelling apart in trim gardens
of leisure, and looking at the world only through
the loop-holes of his retreat. Let him iling him-

52

self with a gallant heart, upon the stirring life, that
heaves and foams around him. He must call
home his imagination from those spots on which
the light of other days has thrown its pensive charm,
and be content to dwell among his own people.
The future and the present must inspire him, and
not the past. He must transfer to his pictures the
glow of morning, and not the hues of sunset. He
must not go to any foreign Pharphar or Abana,
for the sweet influences which he may find in that
familiar stream, on whose banks he has played as
a child, and mused as a man. Let him dedicate
his powers to the best interests of his country.
Let him sow the seeds of beauty along that dusty
road, where humanity toils and sweats in the sun.
Let him spurn the baseness which ministers food
to the passions, that blot out in man's soul the
image of God. Let not his hands add one seduc-
tive charm to the unzoned form of pleasure, nor
twine the roses of his genius around the reveller's
wine-cup. Let him mingle with his verse those
gi'ave and high elements befitting him, around
whom the air of freedom blows, and upon whom
the lio;ht of heaven shines. Let him teach those
stern virtues of self-control and self-renunciation,
of faith and patience, of abstinence and fortitude —

53

which constitute the foundations ahke of individual
happiness, and of national prosperity. Let him
help to rear up this great people to the stature and
symmetry of a moral manhood. Let him look
abroad upon this young world in hope and not in
despondency. Let him not be repelled by the
coarse surface of material life. Let him survey it
with the piercing insight of genius, and in the
reconciling spirit of love. Let him find inspiration
wherever man is found ; in the sailor singing at
the windlass ; in the roaring flames of the furnace ;
in the dizzy spindles of the factory ; in the regular
beat of the thresher's flail ; in the smoke of the
steam-ship ; in the whistle of the locomotive. Let
the mountain wind blow courage into him. Let
him pluck from the stars of his own wintry sky,
thoughts, serene as their own light, lofty as their
own place. Let the purity of the majestic hea-
vens flow into his soul. Let his genius soar upon
the wings of faith, and charm with the beauty of
truth.

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