theme, and wrote "The
Raven." Tragedy will always have a deeper hold upon the public than
comedy; it appeals to deeper principles, stirs more powerful emotions,
imparts an assured sense of strength, is more intimate with our nature, or
certainly it would not be tolerated. There is no delight in the exhibition
of misery as such, it is only painful and repulsive; we discard all vulgar
horrors utterly, and keep no place for them in the mind. Let, however, a
poet touch the string, and there is another response when he brings before
us pictures of regal grief, and gives grandeur to humiliation and penalty.
Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and
circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us. His humbler
minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of "Lycidas" to
the elegiac verse of Tennyson. George Herbert still speaks to this
generation as two centuries ago he spoke to his own. His quaint verses
gather new beauties from time as they come to us redolent with the prayers
and aspirations of many successions of the wives, mothers and daughters of
England and America; bedewed with the tears of orphans and parents; an
incitement to youth, a solace to age, a consolation for humanity to all
time.

These have been costly gifts to our benefactors. "I honor," says Vaughan,
"that temper which can lay by the garland when he might keep it on; which
can pass by a rosebud and bid it grow when he is invited to crop it." This
is the spirit of self-devotion in every worthy action, and especially of
the pains and penalties by which poets have enriched our daily life. We
are indebted to the poets, too, for something more than the alleviation of
sorrow. Perhaps it is, upon the whole, a rarer gift to improve
prosperity. Joy, commonly, is less of a positive feeling than grief, and
is more apt to slip by us unconsciously. Few people, says the proverb,
know when they are well off. It is the poet's vocation to teach the world
this--

--"to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet."

The poet lifts our eyes to the beauties of external nature, educates us to
a keener participation in the sweet joys of affection, to the loveliness
and grace of woman, to the honor and strength of manhood. His ideal world
thus becomes an actual one, as the creations of imagination first borrowed