popular vote in
determining an issue, it has a certain place in the discovery of truth.
One would not entirely despise the benefit derived from a general survey
of philosophers' convictions, for instance. Into the conclusions of each
philosopher, even of the greatest, there are bound to enter certain
personal whimsicalities of thought, which it is profitable to eliminate,
by finding the common elements in the thought of several men. If the
quest of a universal least common denominator forces one to give up
everything that is of significance in the views of philosophers, there
is profit, at least, in learning that the title of philosopher does not
carry with it a guarantee of truth-telling. On the other hand if we find
universal recognition of some fundamental truth, a common _cogito ergo
sum_, or the like, acknowledged by all philosophers, we have made a
discovery as satisfactory in its way as is acceptance of the complex
system of philosophy offered by Plato or Descartes. There seems to be no
real reason why it should not be quite as worth while to take a similar
census of the views of poets.

After hearkening to the general suffrage of poets on the question of the
poet's character, we must bring a serious charge against them if a
deafening clamor of contradiction reverberates in our ears. In such a
case their claim that they are seers, or masters of harmony, can be
worth little. The unbiased listener is likely to assure us that
clamorous contradiction is precisely what the aggregate of poets'
speaking amounts to, but we shall be slow to acknowledge as much. Have
we been merely the dupe of pretty phrasing when we felt ourselves
insured against discord by the testimony of Keats? Hear him:

How many bards gild the lapses of time!
* * * * *
... Often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude,
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.

However incompatible the characteristics of the poets celebrated by
Wordsworth and by Swinburne, by Christina Rossetti and by Walt Whitman
may have seemed in immediate juxtaposition, we have trusted that we need
only retire to a position where "distance of recognizance bereaves"
their individual voices, in order to detect in their mingled notes
"pleasing music, and not wild uproar."

The critic who condemns as wholly discordant the variant notes of our
multitudinous verse-writ