sly together, she is to be
revered and cherished. The poet has a fresher memory of Eden, and of
the path leading back thereto, than other men; so that we might almost
deem him to have been conceived, at least, if not borne and nursed,
beneath the ambrosial shadow of those dimly remembered bowers, and to
have had his infant ears filled with the divine converse of angels,
who then talked face to face with his sires, as with beloved younger
brethren, and of whose golden words only the music remained to him,
vibrating forever in his soul, and making him yearn to have all sounds
of earth harmonize therewith. In the poet's lofty heart Truth hangs
her aerie, and there Love flowers, scattering thence her winged seeds
over all the earth with every wind of heaven. In all ages the poet's
fiery words have goaded men to remember and regain their ancient
freedom, and, when they had regained it, have tempered it with a love
of beauty, so as that it should accord with the freedom of nature, and
be as unmovably eternal as that. The dreams of poets are morning
dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and daybreaking of great
truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as
children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with
quarreling about the meaning of creeds, which have no meaning at all,
listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying
incredulity; for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and
infallible saints in the next.

We love to go back to the writings of our old poets, for we find in
them the tender germs of many a thought which now stands like a huge
oak in the inward world, an ornament and a shelter. We can not help
reading with awful interest what has been written or rudely scrawled
upon the walls of this our earthly prison house, by former dwellers
therein. From that which centuries have established, too, we may draw
true principles of judgment for the poetry of our own day. A right
knowledge and apprehension of the past teaches humbleness and
self-sustainment to the present. Showing us what has been, it also
reveals what can be done. Progress is Janus-faced, looking to the
bygone as well as to the coming; and radicalism should not so much
busy itself with lopping off the dead or seeming dead limbs, as with
clearing away that poisonous rottenness around the roots, from which
the tree has drawn the principle of death into its sap. A love of the
beautiful and harmonious, which mu