lace
of the minstrel was at the lower end of the hall. If we are pushed to say
why this is, why this happens to the poet and not to the producers of
anything else that excites the admiration of mankind, we are forced to
admit that there is something in the poet to sustain the popular judgment
of his in utility. In all the occupations and professions of life there
is a sign put up, invisible--but none the less real, and expressing an
almost universal feeling--"No poet need apply." And this is not because
there are so many poor poets; for there are poor lawyers, poor soldiers,
poor statesmen, incompetent business men; but none of the personal
disparagement attaches to them that is affixed to the poet. This popular
estimate of the poet extends also, possibly in less degree, to all the
producers of the literature that does not concern itself with knowledge.
It is not our care to inquire further why this is so, but to repeat that
it is strange that it should be so when poetry is, and has been at all
times, the universal solace of all peoples who have emerged out of
barbarism, the one thing not supernatural and yet akin to the
supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid conditions,
tolerable to the race. For poetry is not merely the comfort of the
refined and the delight of the educated; it is the alleviator of poverty,
the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary
pilgrimage. We cannot conceive the abject animal condition of our race
were poetry abstracted; and we do not wonder that this should be so when
we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for
raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as
the body. The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the
office or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical
conditions in which the majority exist. There are races, which we may
call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly exemplified. It
would be difficult to find poverty more complete, physical wants less
gratified, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental
peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the
steppes of Siberia. But there are perhaps none among the more favored
races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and
romance. Watch the throng seated about an Arab or Indian or Persian
story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of