onative poet caters for them what they fail to collect.
For let a poet walk through London, and he shall see a succession of
incidents, suggesting some moral beauty by a contrast of times with
times, unfolding some principle of nature, developing some attribute
of man, or pointing to some glory in The Maker: while the man who
walked behind him saw nothing but shops and pavement, and coats and
faces; neither did he hear the aggregated turmoil of a city of
nations, nor the noisy exponents of various desires, appetites and
pursuits: each pulsing tremour of the atmosphere was not struck into
it by a subtile ineffable something willed forcibly out of a cranium:
neither did he see the driver of horses holding a rod of light in his
eye and feeling his way, in a world he was rushing through, by the
motion of the end of that rod:--he only saw the wheels in motion, and
heard the rattle on the stones; and yet this man stopped twice at a
book shop to buy 'a Tennyson,' or a 'Browning's Sordello.' Now this
man might have seen all that the poet saw; he walked through the same
streets: yet the poet goes home and writes a poem; and he who failed
to feel the poetry of the things themselves detects it readily in the
poet's version. Then why, it is asked, does not this man, schooled by
the poet's example, look out for himself for the future, and so find
attractions in things of to-day? He does so to a trifling extent, but
the reason why he does so rarely will be found in the former
demonstration.

It was shown how bygone objects and incidents come down to us
invested in peculiar attractions: this the poet knows and feels, and
the probabilities are that he transferred the incidents of to-day,
with all their poetical and moral suggestions, to the romantic
long-ago, partly from a feeling of prudence, and partly that he
himself was under this spell of antiquity, How many a Troubadour, who
recited tales of king Arthur, had his incidents furnished him by the
events of his own time! And thus it is the many are attracted to the
poetry of things past, yet impervious to the poetry of things
present. But this retrograde movement in the poet, painter, or
sculptor (except in certain cases as will subsequently appear), if
not the result of necessity, is an error in judgment or a culpable
dishonesty. For why should he not acknowledge the source of his
inspiration, that others may drink of the same spring with himself;
and perhaps drink deeper and a clea