st be the guide and forerunner to
every onward movement of humanity, is created and cherished more
surely by pointing out what beauty dwells in anything, even the most
deformed (for there is something in that also, else it could not even
be), than by searching out and railing at all the foulnesses in
nature.

Not till we have patiently studied beauty can we safely venture to
look at defects, for not till then can we do it in that spirit of
earnest love, which gives more than it takes away. Exultingly as we
hail all signs of progress, we venerate the past also. The tendrils of
the heart, like those of ivy, cling but the more closely to what they
have clung to long, and even when that which they entwine crumbles
beneath them, they still run greenly over the ruin, and beautify those
defects which they can not hide. The past as well as the present,
molds the future, and the features of some remote progenitor will
revive again freshly in the latest offspring of the womb of time. Our
earth hangs well-nigh silent now, amid the chorus of her sister orbs,
and not till past and present move harmoniously together will music
once more vibrate on this long silent chord in the symphony of the
universe.

II

THE FIRST OF THE MODERNS[36]

Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years;
in the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the
whole, so high as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy,
detraction, unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his
preeminence was conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the
purely literary man, in the modern sense; there is a singular
unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to greatness which would be
denied to men as famous and more read--to Pope or Swift, for example;
he is supposed, in some way or other, to have reformed English poetry.
It is now about half a century since the only uniform edition of his
works was edited by Scott. No library is complete without him, no name
is more familiar than his, and yet it may be suspected that few
writers are more thoroughly buried in that great cemetery of the
"British Poets."

[Footnote 36: From the first essay in the first series entitled "Among
My Books." Copyright, 1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by
Houghton, Mifflin Company.]

If contemporary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may be
generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the suffrages of th