Dryden did not see, or did not say, that a certain lack of sympathy, of sentiment, in a way sets Milton below Chaucer or Shakespeare.

So much of art depends upon portrayal in painting, sculpture, music, words, that too much emphasis can hardly be put upon this truth. It is the business of intellectual leadership, especially in every form of art, to unfold or to interpret what men have missed or but half understood, in life or in its background of the natural world. "Art," averred Coleridge, "cannot exist without, or apart from, nature; and what has man of his own to give to his fellow-men but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations, so far as they are modified by his own thoughts or feelings?" So Ruskin : "The grandest aim of imaginative art [is] to give men noble grounds for noble emotion." We move in a circle, or rather we receive and give; sympathy and sentiment perceive, art interprets, and the receiver of the artist's gift transmits that gift to others. If there is

"A motion and a spirit which impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things,"

that spirit is assuredly something more than hard intellectuality. Intellect, after all, is human and mortal; soul is divine and eternal. Never in my life did this sense of the verities of the universe and the triumph of life over death come nearer to my mind than when once I stood on that hillock in Concord's Sleepy Hollow cemetery where rest, almost side by side, Hawthorne and Emerson, with

the Alcotts and Thoreau not far away. From their graves the spirits of our first writer and of our chief philosopher of optimism rise to tell us that we too have our Westminster Abbeys and St. Pauls, though overhanging branches replace upspringing arches of stone, and the dome of the blue vault is substituted for that which Christopher Wren upreared. When such dust was laid in mother earth men said not,

"Death . . . adds

Him to his land, a lump of mold the more -'

but, instead, "Now our soil is consecrated, and made part of the universe of mind as well as of matter."

"The restless sea resounds along the shore,

The light land-breeze flows outward with a sigh,
And each to each seems chanting evermore
A mournful memory of days gone by.

"Here, where they lived, all holy thoughts revive,
Of patient striving and of faith held fast;
Here, where they died, their buried records live,
Silent they speak from out the shadowy past."

Shelley, I suppose, represented more than any poet of his time a sort of ethereal mentality in the nature of his imaginative genius. Yet it was he who said, in his "Defense of Poetry": "The great instrument of moral good is imagination. . . . What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship-what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit, what were our consolations on this side of the grave, and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty

of calculation dare not ever soar?" Andrew Lang had the same thought in mind when he declared that "Coleridge is, or may be reckoned, a great poet, because every now and again he captures in verse that indefinable emotion which is less articulately expressed in music, and in some unutterable way he transports us into the world of dream and desire. This is a very vague fashion of saying what hardly permits itself to be said. We might put it that Coleridge has, on occasion, the power to move us, as we are moved by the most rarely beautiful cosmic effects of magic lights and shadows; by the silver on lakes for a chosen moment in the dawn or twilight; by the fragrant deeps of dewy forests; by sudden infrequent passions of heart and memory, and by unexpected potencies of imagination." Pitifully did Shelley and Coleridge-not less than Milton himself-fall short of Milton's declaration that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem." Literary men are as human as other folks, and a little more so. But sometimes the stream appears to rise higher than its source, because we do not really know what the artist's highest level is. “An artist's creations are the best . . . test of his nature. When we do not know all the facts of a man's life-and how seldom we know even half of them-it is dangerous to make what facts we do know overbear the evidence of his works." An author's book or a painter's picture, we may say, represents both the is and the would-be; and can there be an ideal without aspiration? Benvenuto Cellini was, as he has lately been characterized, a

❝scoundrel,” but his Perseus did not come from the scoundrelly part of him. Many of the great artists of the world have been moral weaklings, while some of its noblest souls have lacked not only the creative power, but any apparent sense of appreciation of beautiful things made. But art consecrated by ethics is that which produces a Divina Commedia out of the experiences and ideas of what otherwise would be a mere Comédie Humaine.

The poet, or other artist, is he who scans life and nature, and presents them to us in significant and enduring forms. He stands for what all mankind half hopes to be, and he is directly successful in proportion to his representative power. Ill-regulated superficiality is fatal to the artist, and therefore to the leader; and we ought all to be leaders of something, if only of ourselves. The ruler, the director, must correlate many things. His is the "breadth of life." If he finds that honesty is the best policy, he also perceives that "he is not an honest man who is honest for this reason." To him, at his best, belongs what Theodore Watts-Dunton calls Tennyson's-that is to say any great poet's "instinct for confronting the universe as a whole." And in the presence of the universe, he solemnly says with the possessor of one of the greatest of American "fortunes "-how foolish to speak of money and fortune as synonymous!-that "the poorest man I know is the man who has nothing but money."

The poet beholds and interprets. In the great book of nature and life he reads, and from a thousand texts unfolds to humanity the perennial beauty and

PLACE OF POETRY IN LIFE. xxiii

the divine lessons of the universe.

He learns by in

sight what others miss in the slow processes of external investigation. For him nature is the mirror of God and the mentor of man. As naturally as a mountain brook, he sings because he must. He studies the whole created universe, and finds God in the bush as well as in the libraries.

American literature furnishes in the case of Longfellow, whom it is now the fashion to decry, a pleasant illustration of the way in which the poet may combine many things for the benefit of his time. He was a college teacher, but no pedant; a text-book maker, but also a singer; an adapter, but not, as Poe called him, a plagiarist; an early follower of Heine, but at last the creator of two of our most characteristically American books, in story and in form; the scholarly student and translator of Dante, but likewise the simple singer of "Excelsior" and "A Psalm of Life." In a sentimental time he knew how to use and to better the fashions of his day; and in the crude and crass period of American isms and ologies he helped us because he was both sympathetic and wise.

The time-spirit, as far as it affects the intellectual life of a people, is simply the intelligence of man, dominated by a high purpose. The countrymen of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Webster do not need to be reminded that the brain is the servant of the soul, not less in politics than in art. The history of the United States is the history of the evolution of ideas. Evolution is in one sense inexorable; in another and far truer sense it is the sum-total of our own use of the powers and means