enerations between
Milton and Burns. In Italy there was almost no real poetry for the
thirteen hundred years between Virgil and Dante. In France nearly two
centuries before Victor Hugo may be treated as a blank. Yet the revival
came, and came with strength. We forget, or do not know, that the
complaint of the decay of poetry is a hackneyed tale, familiar to
Addison as to Macaulay. We do not, in fact, look the question frankly in
the face. When one assures us of the decline of poetry as a fact and as
inevitable, we have a right to ask him two questions. One is: "What
signs of weakening and degeneracy in poetic genius, or of failing
interest in its creations, do you actually discover in the course of
history?" the other: "From what arguments are we to conclude that the
future must of necessity prove barren of poetry?" Is there evidence in
fact? Is there in theory?

We can imagine some champion of the Muses pointing to the mass and
excellence of the poetry which has been created during the last hundred
years; to the work of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Scott, Beranger, Victor Hugo, De Musset,
Leopardi, Longfellow, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson, Morris; to the immense
and varied fertility, to the creative and emotional power, of makers
like these, displayed during the most "enlightened"--that is to say, we
presume, the most rationalistic and scientific--century the world has
yet passed through. We can imagine him asking whether, in all the past
history of the human race, so great a zeal for poetry, romantic,
lyrical-descriptive, speculative, has ever been manifested at once in
such force and width in England, Germany, France, America. And we can
fancy him completely satisfied with that single phenomenon. We can also
imagine him setting opinion against opinion, outweighing Macaulay with
the greater name of Wordsworth and Macaulay's disciples with the name of
Matthew Arnold. We can hear him answering the assertion that in "the
advance of civilization" poetry must necessarily decline, with the
declaration of the most single-hearted poet of our century, that "poetry
is the first and last of all knowledge--it is immortal as the heart of
man. If the labours of men of science should ever create any material
revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions
which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at
present; he will be ready to follow the steps