r of all men living cannot
bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill
enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this
faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women
from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour
Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the
Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners
wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do
but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible
imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the
southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fiber of the
heart in you that will break too.

181. But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for
imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?
Yes, the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain
when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever
imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without
forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training
which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could
receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training
consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention
high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every
sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank
attributed to these powers--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
attained, increased, or in anywise modified by teaching, only in various
ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this thoroughly;
know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of
creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our methods of
teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks of bringing
men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of general recipe or
method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in a youth that which we
hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we
instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing
else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor? Should we force him
to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set
before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of vers