THE

HE use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning; install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English, and American houses and modes of living.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument, and all the wisdom, is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode, or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable

The use

of Literature

Poetry is
Experi-

ence

Depth

once more of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.

THE

Circles.

HE advancing man discovers how deep a property he hath in all literature—in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, yet dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Æsop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own head and hands. History.

THE of any writically measurable

'HE effect of any writing on the public

by its depth of thought. How much water does it draw? If it awaken you to think; if it lift you from your feet with the great

voice of eloquence; then the effect is to be
wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of
men; if the pages instruct you not, they

will die like flies in the hour. The way to
speak and write what shall not go out of
fashion, is to speak and write sincerely. All
the gilt edges and vellum and morocco, all
the presentation-copies to all the libraries,
will not preserve a book in circulation
beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with
all Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors to
its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok,
may endure for a night, but Moses and
Homer stand forever. There are
not in
the world at any one time more than a
dozen persons who read and understand
Plato-never enough to pay for an edition
of his works; yet to every generation these
come duly down, for the sake of those few
persons, as if God brought them in his
Spiritual Laws.

hand.

THE test the past, with its news, its day,

HE test of the poet is the power to take

cares, its fears, as he shares them and hold

The

Great

Books

Endure

The Poet's Test

History

Only

Repre

sents

the Individual

Life

it up to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to be related to astronomy and history and the eternal order of the world. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is coalesced and elevated. Poetry and Imagination.

THE

HE world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society, or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a most wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit at home with might and main, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the Court, and if England or Egypt have anything to