ry, but with poets. And, therefore, when a cluster of poets
die, or are buried before they be dead, they chant dirges over the death
of poetry--as if it ever did or ever could die! as if its roots, which
are just the roots of the human soul, were perishable--as if, especially
when a strong current of excitement was flowing, it were not plain, that
there was a poetry which should, in due time, develop its own masters to
record and prolong it forever. Surely, as long as the grass is green and
the sky is blue, as long as man's heart is warm and woman's face is
fair, poetry, like seed-time and harvest, like summer and winter shall
not cease.

There was little poetry, some people think, about England's civil war,
because the leader of one party was a red-nosed fanatic. They, for their
part, cannot extract poetry from a red nose; but they are in raptures
with Milton. Fools! but for that civil war, its high and solemn
excitement, the deeds and daring of that red-nosed fanatic, would the
"Paradise Lost" ever have been written, or written as it has been? That
stupendous edifice of genius seems cemented by the blood of Naseby and
of Marston Moor.

Such persons, too, see little that is poetical in the American
struggle--no mighty romance in tumbling a few chests of tea into the
Atlantic. Washington they think insipid; and because America has
produced hitherto no great poet, its whole history they regard as a
gigantic commonplace--thus ignoring the innumerable deeds of derring-do
which distinguished that immortal contest--blinding their eyes to the
"lines of empire" in the "infant face of that cradled Hercules," and the
tremendous sprawlings of his nascent strength--and seeking to degrade
those forests into whose depths a path for the sunbeams must be hewn,
and where, lightning appears to enter trembling, and to withdraw in
haste; forests which must one day drop down a poet, whose genius shall
be worthy of their age, their vastitude, the beauty which they inclose,
and the load of grandeur below which they bend.

Nor, to the vulgar eye, does there seem much poetry in the French
Revolution, though it was the mightiest tide of human passion which ever
boiled and raved: a great deal, doubtless, in Burke's "Reflections"--but
none in the cry of a liberated people, which was heard in heaven--none
in the fall of the Bastile--none in Danton's giant figure, nor in
Charlotte Corday's homicide--nor in Madame Roland's scaffold speeches,
immo