st star
faded as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed white
and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as I dipped down, was
gone.

A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY

There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us rather return unto the
soul. Nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man who
knows it. In what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thyself,
was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing when
the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the path of Arcturus with his
sons were young in human thought. These late conquests of the mind in
the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space,
its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this
new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of
achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid
spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human
welfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing from
unsuspected and illimitable resources,--all this has made us forgetful
of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances of
thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures.
Man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creature
but made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches
us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and
man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records.
Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our
mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being
we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past
without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and
some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowledge
is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of
horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin
guardians of the soul,--the poet and the priest. Conscience and
imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human
spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their
treasures, there is wisdom. I desire to renew the long discussion of the
nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry,
or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this
wisdom, which is the soul's know