ich Europe
had been buried was not absolutely and altogether that of stupor or
death. They occurred after the noon of that period we usually denominate
dark. But they were the realization of a dream which had often passed
through the monkish heart--the embodiment, of a wish which had often
brought tears into the eyes of genuine enthusiasts. There was, surely,
as much sublimity in the first conception as in the execution. What
indeed were the crusades, but the means of bringing to light, feelings,
desires, passions, a lofty disinterested heroism, which the very depth
of the former darkness had tended to foster and fire?

If the dark ages had thus their poetical tendencies, climbing toward a
full poetic expression, surely no age need or can be destitute of
theirs--need or can be called unpoetical. But the misfortune is, that
men will not look at the essential poetry which is lying around them,
and under their feet. They suppose their age to be unpoetical, merely
because they grapple not with its great excitements, nor will venture to
sail upon its "mighty stream of tendency." They overlook the volcano in
the next mountain--while admiring or deploring those which have been
extinct for centuries, or which are a thousand miles away. They are
afraid that if they catch the spirit of their age in verse, they will
give it a temporary stamp; and therefore they either abstain from
writing, and take to abusing the age on which they have unluckily
fallen, or else come to the same resolution after an unsuccessful
attempt to revive faded stimulants. Dante embodied, for instance, his
countrymen's rude conception of future punishment--and he did well. But
our modern religious poets have never ventured to meddle with those
moral aspects of the subject which have now so generally supplanted the
material. They talk instead, with Pollok, of the "rocks of dark
damnation," or outrage common sense by such barbarous mis-creations as
he has sculptured on the gate of hell, and think they have written an
"Inferno," or that, if they have failed, it is because their age is not
poetical.

Indeed, the least poetry is sometimes written in the most poetical ages.
Men, when acting poetry, have little time either to write or to read it.
There was less poetry written in the age of Charles I., than in that
which preceded it, and more poetry enacted. But the majority of men only
listen to the reverberations of emotion in song. They sympathize not
with poet