of the poet's thoughts are
everywhere"; then, with those who maintain that poetry in this sense
must inevitably wither before the blighting touch of science and
democracy, we may join issue with a light heart. Assuredly the men of
science would be the first to rise in remonstrance at the charge that
the beauty, wonder and moral effluence of nature must all be from the
earth "with sighing sent" because contempt for them has been bred by the
familiarity of scientific knowledge.

And, first, is there any basis whatever in _history_ for the notion that
poetry flourishes best where enlightenment is least; that it is some
sort of noxious weed which cannot bear the intellectual sunshine? Do we
find the most consummate poets in a semi-barbarian world? Do we find our
Anglo-Saxon fore-fathers in this respect superior to Chaucer, Chaucer
superior to Shakespeare? Is Goethe the inferior of Hans Sachs in any
poetic quality, or still more the inferior of the nameless author of the
_Nibelungen Lied_? Is the verse of Caedmon of imagination more compact
than _Paradise Lost_? Or is the _Roman de la Rose_ more poetical, in any
sense ever attributed to the term, than _La Legende des Siecles_? No
one, however bold, will say "yes" to questions put with this undisguised
directness.

The poetical pessimists will not dispassionately examine plain facts.
They take English literature and point to the now remote date of
Shakespeare; they take Italian literature and remind us that Dante has
been dead nearly six centuries; they take the literature of Greece and
triumphantly observe that its greatest poet, Homer, was its earliest.
They ignore the essential fact that transcendent genius is the
phenomenon of a thousand years; that we must not demand a recurrence
even of second-rate genius in every generation or even in every century.
Without the altogether extraordinary genius of Shakespeare, English
poetry culminates, not in the age of Elizabeth, but in the nineteenth
century. Without the unique marvel of the mind of Dante, the poetry of
Italy is at its highest in the sixteenth century of Tasso and Ariosto,
not in the fourteenth century of the subtle amorist Petrarch. Remove the
one name of Homer, and you bring the crowning glory of Grecian poetry at
least three or four centuries later, to the era of Pindar, AEschylus, and
Sophocles. We cannot judge the laws of general progress by unique
instances of individual genius. These are the comets and meteors