the days of Dante or Petrarch; and many types
of manly and womanly beauty might appear among us, rising above the
ordinary level of humanity, and many lives which were like poems (Laws),
be not only written, but lived by us. A few such strains have been
heard among men in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom Plato
quotes, not, as Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep and
serious approval,--in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in
passages of other English poets,--first and above all in the Hebrew
prophets and psalmists. Shakespeare has taught us how great men should
speak and act; he has drawn characters of a wonderful purity and depth;
he has ennobled the human mind, but, like Homer (Rep.), he 'has left
no way of life.' The next greatest poet of modern times, Goethe, is
concerned with 'a lower degree of truth'; he paints the world as a stage
on which 'all the men and women are merely players'; he cultivates life
as an art, but he furnishes no ideals of truth and action. The poet may
rebel against any attempt to set limits to his fancy; and he may
argue truly that moralizing in verse is not poetry. Possibly, like
Mephistopheles in Faust, he may retaliate on his adversaries. But the
philosopher will still be justified in asking, 'How may the heavenly
gift of poesy be devoted to the good of mankind?'

Returning to Plato, we may observe that a similar mixture of truth
and error appears in other parts of the argument. He is aware of the
absurdity of mankind framing their whole lives according to Homer; just
as in the Phaedrus he intimates the absurdity of interpreting mythology
upon rational principles; both these were the modern tendencies of his
own age, which he deservedly ridicules. On the other hand, his argument
that Homer, if he had been able to teach mankind anything worth knowing,
would not have been allowed by them to go about begging as a rhapsodist,
is both false and contrary to the spirit of Plato (Rep.). It may be
compared with those other paradoxes of the Gorgias, that 'No statesman
was ever unjustly put to death by the city of which he was the head';
and that 'No Sophist was ever defrauded by his pupils' (Gorg.)...

The argument for immortality seems to rest on the absolute dualism of
soul and body. Admitting the existence of the soul, we know of no force
which is able to put an end to her. Vice is her own proper evil; and if
she cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot be destroyed