of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet
found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first
acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be
undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A
great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of
wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all
its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to
share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever
developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.

The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and
architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of
Italian invention.

But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out
the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon
their own and all succeeding times.

But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of
the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of
reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of this
distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces.
There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal and permanent;
the other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the
means of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense,
whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the
imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower
meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express
that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature,
the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser
delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of
mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of
personal advantage.

Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets,
and copy the sketches of their