reason) any more than the coarse ideal of recreation of sensuous nature.
The aim is to free human nature from accidental hinderances, without
destroying the essential ideal of our humanity, or displacing its limits.
All beyond this is exaggeration, and a quicksand in which the poet too
easily suffers shipwreck if he mistakes the idea of nobleness. But,
unfortunately, he cannot rise to the true ideal of ennobled human nature
without going some steps beyond it. To rise so high he must abandon the
world of reality, for, like every ideal, it is only to be drawn from its
inner moral source. He does not find it in the turmoil of worldly life,
but only in his heart, and that only in calm meditation. But in this
separation from real life he is likely to lose sight of all the limits of
human nature, and seeking pure form he may easily lose himself in
arbitrary and baseless conceptions. Reason will abstract itself too much
from experience, and the practical man will not be able to carry out, in
the crush of real life, what the contemplative mind has discovered on the
peaceful path of thought. Thus, what makes a dreamy man is the very
thing that alone could have made him a sage; and the advantage for the
latter is not that he has never been a dreamer, but rather that he has
not remained one.

We must not, then, allow the workers to determine recreation according to
their wants, nor thinkers that of nobleness according to their
speculations, for fear of either a too low physical poetry, or a poetry
too given to hyperphysical exaggeration. And as these two ideas direct
most men's judgments on poetry, we must seek a class of mind at once
active, but not slavishly so, and idealizing, but not dreamy; uniting the
reality of life within as few limits as possible, obeying the current of
human affairs, but not enslaved by them. Such a class of men can alone
preserve the beautiful unity of human nature, that harmony which all work
for a moment disturbs, and a life of work destroys; such alone can, in
all that is purely human, give by its feelings universal rules of
judgment. Whether such a class exists, or whether the class now existing
in like conditions answers to this ideal conception, I am not concerned
to inquire. If it does not respond to the ideal it has only itself to
blame. In such a class--here regarded as a mere ideal--the simple and
sentimental would keep each other from extremes of extravagance and
relaxation. For the idea of