higher side of human nature and to strengthen it, to come to its rescue when it is overborne by worldliness and material interests, to support it by great truths set forth in their most attractive form-this is the only worthy aim, the adequate end, of all poetic endeavor. No doubt these sympathies, once awakened, yield a delight among the purest and noblest man can know; but to minister this pleasure is not the main end which the poet sets before himself, but only a subordinate object. The true end is to awaken men to the divine side of things; to bear witness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, the nobility that lies hid, often obscured, in human souls; to call forth sympathy for neglected truths, for noble but oppressed persons, for downtrodden causes, and to make men feel that through all outward beauty and all pure inward affection God himself is addressing them. In this endeavor poetry makes common cause with all high things, with right reason and true philosophy, with man's moral intuitions and his religious aspirations. It combines its influence with all those benign tendencies which are working in the world for the melioration of man and the manifestation of the kingdom of God. It is adding from age to age its own current to those great "tides that are flowing Right onward to the eternal shore." But if it has great allies it has also powerful adversaries. The worship of wealth and all it gives, a materialistic philosophy which disbelieves in all knowledge unverifiable by the senses, luxury, empty display, worldliness, and cynicism—with these true poetry cannot dwell. In periods and in circles where these are dominant the poet is discredited, his function as a witness to high truth is denied. If tolerated at all, he is degraded into a merely ornamental personage, a sayer of pretty things, a hanger-on of society or of the great. Such is the only function which degenerate ages allow to him, and this is a function which only poets of baser metal will accept. The truly great poets in every age have felt the nobility of their calling: that their true function is not to amuse or merely to give delight, but to be witnesses for the ideal and spiritual side of things; to come to the help of whatever is generous and noble and true against the mighty. And though some exceptions there have been, yet it is true that the great majority of poets in all times have, according to their gifts, recognized this to be their proper aim, and fulfilled it. Therefore we say once more, in the words of one of the foremost of the brotherhood: Blessings be on them, and eternal praise, VIII. If these general views are true, there follow from them some practical corollaries as to our poetic judgments, which hold true for all times, which are specially applicable to this time. I. The first of these is the need we have to cultivate an open and catholic judgment, ready to appreciate excellence in poetry and in literature, under whatever forms it comes. It might seem that there was little need to press this on cultivated and scholarly men, for is not one main end of all academic teaching to form in the mind right standards of judgment? Of course it is. But the process as often carried on is not free from hindrances. Scholars, too readily, by the very nature of their studies, become slaves to the past. Those who have spent their days in studying the master-minds of former ages naturally take from their works canons of criticism by which they try all new productions. Hence it is that when any fresh and original creation appears, which is unlike any thing the past has recognized, it is apt to fare ill before any learned tribunal. The learned and the literary are so trained to judge by precedents, that they often deal harder measure and narrower judg ment to young aspirants than those who have no rules of criticism, and judge merely by their own natural instincts. Literary circles think to bind by their formal codes young and vigorous genius, whose very nature it is to defy the conventional and to achieve the unexpected. Many a time has this been seen in the history of poetry, notably at the opening of the present century. Those who then seated themselves on the high places of criticism and affected to dispense judgment, brought their critical apparatus, derived from the age of Pope, to bear on the vigorous race of young poets who appeared in England after the French Revolution. Jeffrey and his band of critics tried by their narrow rules the new poetic brotherhood one by one, found them wanting, and consigned them to oblivion. Hardly more generous were the critics of the Quarterly Review. There was not one of the great original spirits of that time whom one or other of those schools of critics did not attempt to crush. The poets sang on, each in his own way, heedless of the anathemas. The world has long since recognized them and crowned them with honor. The critics and the canons by which they condemned the young poets-where is their authority now? Even more to be deprecated than critics, judging by the past, are coteries which test all things by some sudden sentiment or short-lived fashion of the hour. Those who have lived some time have seen school after school of this sort arise, air its little nostrums for a season, and disappear. But such coteries. while they last do their best, by narrowness and intolerance, to vitiate literature, and are unfair alike to past eminence and to rising genius. I can myself remember a time when the subjective school of poetry was so dominant in Oxford, that some of its ablest disciples voted Walter Scott to be no poet. Perhaps there may be some who think so still. To guard us against all such narrowness, it is well to remember that the world of poetry is wide-as wide as existence; that no experience of the past can lay down rules for future originality, or limit the materials which fresh minds may vivify, or predict the moulds in which they may cast their creations. Let those who would preserve catholicity of judgment purge their minds of all formulas and fashions, and look with open heart and ingenuous eye alike on the boundless range of past excellence or the hardly less boundless field of future possibility. It is well to have our rules of judgment few, simple, and elåstic, founded only on what is permanent in nature and in man. 2. Again, in universities and other learned societies, men's thoughts are turned-and rightly to the great world-poets of all time, to Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, Virgil -perhaps to Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. For the whole host of lesser, though still genuine, poets, much more for the sources whence all poetry comes, such academic persons are apt to have but scanty regard. It is well, perhaps, that for a short time, as students, we should so concentrate our gaze; for we thus get a standard of what is noblest in thought and most perfect in expression. But this exclusiveness should continue but a little while, and for a special purpose. If it be prolonged into life, if we continue only to admire and enjoy a few poets of the greatest name, we become, while fancying ourselves to be large-minded, narrow and artificial. If our eyes were always fixed on the highest mountain-peaks, what should we know of the broad earth around us? What should we think of the geographer who should acquaint himself with the rivers, only where they broaden seaward and bear navies on their bosom, and know nothing of the small affluents and brooks that run among the hills and feed the rivers, and of the mountain wells that feed the brooks, and of the clouds and vapors that supply the wells. You admire Homer, Eschylus, Shakespeare, perhaps Scott and Wordsworth and Shelley; but where did these get their inspiration, and the materials which they wrought into beauty? Not mainly by study of books, not by placing before themselves literary models, but by going straight to the truc sources of all poetry-by knowing and loving nature, by acquaintance with their own hearts, and by knowledge of their fellow-men. From the poetry of the people has been drawn most of what is truest, most human-hearted, in the greatest poems. Would the Iliad have been possible if there had not existed. before it a nameless crowd of rhapsodists, who wrought out a poetic language, and shaped the deeds of the heroes into rough, popular songs? Would Shakespeare have been possible if he had not wrought on a soil overstrewn with the wreck of mediæval mysteries, moralities, tales, ballads, with the chronicles and traditions of England, as well as the regular plays of his predecessors? When Shakespeare's "study of imagination" was filled with kings and heroes and statesmen such as he had never met with, how was it that he so painted them to the life? Was not his insight into their characters, his reading of their feelings, drawn from the power in him of imagination and memory, working on the scenes he had witnessed, the impressions he had gathered, first in the hamlets, and in the oak woods about his own Stratford, and then on what he afterwards saw of city life? His own experience, not of books, but of men, was idealized and projected into the strange and distant, till that became alive and near. No doubt a time comes with advancing civilization when the poets of the past must exercise more power over younger poets than in early times. But this at least remains true, that, if the poetry of any, even the most advanced age, is to retain that eternal freshness which is its finest grace, it must draw both its materials and its impulses more from sympathy with the people than from past pocts, more from the breast of man than from books. If poetry is to portray true emotion, this must come from having ourselves felt it and seen others feel it. Those who are familiar with the poor, know how much of that feeling language which is the essence of poetry may be heard at times under cottage roofs. At the fall of autumn I have visited and said farewell to two old Highland women, sisters, sitting in their smoky hut beside their scanty peat fire. With return of summer I have revisited that hut and found one sitting there alone, and have heard that sole survivor, as she sat on her stool, rocking her body to and fro, pour forth in Gaelic speech the story how her sister pined away, and left her, in the dead days of winter, all alone. And no threnody or lament poet ever penned could match the pathos of that simple narrative. In cases like this, not the feeling only is poetic-the words which utter it are so too. And the poet, instead of adopting the approved diction of poets, or coining tropes and images of his own, cannot do better than adopt the language of genuine emotion as it comes warm from the lips of suffering men and women. And not the language only, but the incidents of actual life, are worth more as a storehouse of fresh poetry than all the written poems of all the literatures. Here more than elsewhere that saying holds, that the literary language is a stagnant pool; the words men use under pressure of real emotion are the running stream, the living spring. 3. But it is not nature and human life only as they exist |