pupils.

Then too moral demonstrativeness is never the habit either of the best
poets or of the best men. True virtue indeed is a very modest and
retiring quality; and we naturally feel that they who have most of it
have "none to speak of." Or, to take the same thing on another side,
virtue is a law of action, and not a distinct object of pursuit: those
about us may know what object we are pursuing, but the mind with which
we pursue it is a secret to them; they are not obliged to know it; and
when we undertake to force that knowledge upon them, then it is that
they just will not receive it. They will sometimes learn it from our
life, never from our lips. Thus a man's moral rectitude has its proper
seat inside of him, and is then most conspicuous when it stays out of
sight, and when, whatever he does and wherever he goes, he carries it
with him as a thing of course, and without saying or even thinking any
thing about it. It may be that our moral instincts are made to work in
this way, because any ambition of conscience, any pride or ostentation
of virtue, any air of moral vanity or conceit, any wearing of
rectitude on the outside, as if put on for effect, or "to be seen of
men," if it be not essentially fictitious and false, is certainly in
the most direct course of becoming so. And how much need there still
is of those eloquently silent lessons in virtue which are fitted to
inspire the thing without any boasting of the name,--all this may well
be judged when we consider how apt men are to build their hopes on
that which, as Burke says, "takes the man from his house, and sets him
on a stage,--which makes him up an artificial creature, with painted,
theatric sentiments, fit to be seen by the glare of candlelight."

These positions indicate, I believe, pretty clearly the right course
for poetry to pursue in order to keep the just law of moral proportion
in Art. Ethical didacticism is quite out of place in workmanship of
this kind. To go about moralizing as of set purpose, or to be
specially dealing in formal precepts of duty, is not the poet's
business. I repeat, that moral demonstrativeness and poetry do not go
well together. A poet's conscience of virtue is better kept to
himself, save as the sense and spirit thereof silently insinuate
themselves into the shapings of his hand, and so live as an
undercurrent in the natural course of truth and beauty. If he has the
genius and the heart to see and to represent things just