with the world around them. True poetry is the
remembrance of youth, of love, the embodiment in words of the happiest
and holiest moments of life, of the noblest thoughts of man, of the
greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future may return to his
greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what
may not be effected for the human race by a better use of the poetical
and imaginative faculty. The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion,
with truth, may still be possible. Neither is the element of pleasure
to be excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for a lower we
raise men in the scale of existence. Might not the novelist, too, make
an ideal, or rather many ideals of social life, better than a thousand
sermons? Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of poetic and
artistic influences. But he is not without a true sense of the noble
purposes to which art may be applied (Republic).

Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato's language, a
flattery, a sophistry, or sham, in which, without any serious purpose,
the poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits his gifts of language and
metre. Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers; he has the
'savoir faire,' or trick of writing, but he has not the higher spirit
of poetry. He has no conception that true art should bring order out of
disorder; that it should make provision for the soul's highest interest;
that it should be pursued only with a view to 'the improvement of the
citizens.' He ministers to the weaker side of human nature (Republic);
he idealizes the sensual; he sings the strain of love in the latest
fashion; instead of raising men above themselves he brings them back to
the 'tyranny of the many masters,' from which all his life long a good
man has been praying to be delivered. And often, forgetful of measure
and order, he will express not that which is truest, but that which is
strongest. Instead of a great and nobly-executed subject, perfect
in every part, some fancy of a heated brain is worked out with the
strangest incongruity. He is not the master of his words, but his
words--perhaps borrowed from another--the faded reflection of some
French or German or Italian writer, have the better of him. Though
we are not going to banish the poets, how can we suppose that such
utterances have any healing or life-giving influence on the minds of
men?

'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:' A