and the meaning of mysticism, stand above
it, on a clear and sun-lighted peak, and incline _rather_ to the
classical and masculine, than to the abstract and transcendental. His
genius should be less epic and didactic, than lyrical and popular. He
should be not so much the Homer as the Tyrtaeus of this strange time. He
should have sung over to himself the deep controversies of his age, and
sought to reduce them into an unique and intelligible harmony. Into
scales of doubt, equally balanced, he should be ready to throw his lyre,
as a makeweight. Not a partisan either of the old or the new, he should
seek to set in song the numerous points in which they agree, and strive
to produce a glorious synthesis between them. He should stand (as on a
broad platform) on the identity and eternity of all that is good and
true--on the fact that "faiths never die, but are only translated"--on
the fact that beauty physical and beauty moral are in heart the same;
and that Christianity, as rightly understood, is at once the root and
the flower of all truth--and, standing on this, should sing his fearless
strains to the world. He should have a high idea of his art--counting it
a lower inspiration, a sacred trust, a minor grace--a plant from a seed
originally dropped out of the paradise of God! He should find in it a
work, and not a recreation--an affair of life, not of moments of
leisure. And while appealing, by his earnestness, his faith, his
holiness, his genius, to the imagination, the heart, and the conscience
of man, he should possess, or attain to, the mechanical ingenuity that
can satisfy man's constructive understanding, the elegance that can
please his sensuous taste, the fluency that can blend ease with
instruction, and the music that can touch through the ear the inner
springs of his being. Heart and genius, art and nature, sympathy with
man and God, love of the beautiful apparition of the universe, and of
that divine halo of Christianity which surrounds its head, must be
united in our poet. He should conjoin Byron's energy--better controlled;
Shelley's earnestness--better instructed; Keats's sensibility--guarded
and armed; Wordsworth's Christianized love of Nature; and Coleridge's
Christianized view of philosophy--to his own fancy, language, melody,
and purpose; a lofty ideal of man the spirit, to a deep sympathy with
man the worm, toiling, eating, drinking, struggling, falling, rising,
and progressing, amidst his actual environme