If we suppose a race of men suddenly extemporized, would it be possible for them to have any poetry? In order to have that, we must allow time for the invention of music, then for the application of its laws to language, and, that done, of what subjects would the poets avail themselves? There would be love and war, or, if no deeds worth celebrating offered themselves (unhappily Horace's saying is sometimes reversed, and heroic men as often fail to the bard as the bard to them), there would only be love. I merely put the case as a comment on the assertion we sometimes hear that if we have no poetry it is the fault of the poets, since the material always abundantly exists in human nature. Undoubtedly it does,- the passions and desires, the loves, hopes and despairs of men are the raw material,- but there are periods in which that material is more abundant or of finer staple, when the passions have freer play and on a more heroic stage, when human nature, as it were, puts on the Cothurnus and assumes a loftier port.

At the same time it may be questioned whether contemporaries do not always stand more or less in the relation of valets-de-chambre to the age in which they live, and whether there be not something in nearness which is fatal to the heroic. If Prometheus had a Boswell, would not the vulture have been Niebuhrized into the liver-complaint, and he himself, the thief of fire from heaven, into a palaeozoic Dr. Franklin who amused himself with electrical experiments? The truth is that so long as the nature of man is dual, so long as he is an animal as well as a spiritual being, the element of humor evolved by the contrast puts the heroic out of countenance. That old story fathered upon Cromwell, of his being found on his knees by a Puritan preacher whom he told he was 'seeking the Lord,' when in fact he was seeking the corkscrew which had dropped under the table, is a good illustration of what I mean. In life, as in a meanly-appointed theatre, the parts are doubled and the same actor who stalked as the majesty of buried Denmark, may appear as a clown after a change of scenes. The lover, the poet, the mourner, the mystic, after their fine frenzies feel that there is something ludicrous in dining, and to confess a fondness for lobster or a sorrow that oysters are out of season seems a satire on their hardly cold ideal longings and regrets.

II.Poetry in Homely Lines.I have known people who had to go to Europe to see a sunset, who could never find out how beautiful snow was till they saw it on the Alps. The familiar miracles of nature at home were too cheap, and there could be nothing wonderful in what they had only to look out of their back-windows to see. It seems incredible to them that God should come down in all his pomp and glory upon the hills that clasp the homely landscape of their native village,- that he should work his wonders with the paltry material of their every-day life, that he should hang as fair diamonds of dew on Cambridge grass-blades as on their famous cousins of Mount Hermon. These autumn trees of ours that seem to have caught and kept the sunset in their branches till it looks as if a western evening-cloud had stretched itself in Fresh Pond meadows, are too ordinary for marvel.

Thus it is that the beautiful fades gradually out of nature and life becomes dull and prosaic to dull and prosaic men.

III.The Practical and the Ideal.But ours is a utilitarian age, and what is the use of studying the belles lettres? I would find its use in the very existence of that utilitarian tendency. The mind may become as unbalanced through over-practicalism as through over-idealism, and boast as we may of the triumphs of science in its application to commerce and the arts of life, it is still only the achievements of the imagination that stir the deeper enthusiasm of mankind. Watt and Stephenson are entitled to our highest respect, but Plato holds his own, and we feel that something greater and rarer went to the making of Hamlet than to the invention of the steamengine, or the turning of it into a draught horse. Men have always been willing to pay the highest prices for things that were of no practical use whatever, and though a Frenchman has said that cookery was the test of civilization, we are more commonly apt to gauge it by the value set upon works whose only apology for being is their beauty. If we compare the spirit which led to the Great Exhibition of 1851, with that which underlay the first crusade we can hardly hesitate as to which was the nobler and most inspiring. And it was curious to see at the time the Atlantic cable was laid how much more the political and moral significance of the achievement was dwelt on than the commercial.

IV.Style.The primary question with books and shoes alike is-How do they wear? And, as literature is an art, the first question we should ask is-not what a man's natural gift may have been-but, What use has he made of it? Even in imaginative literature. imagination is not enough by itself; that it may become in any sense art, it must be united with style, which is the instinct of form,