Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in private dialogue, for it is the reverse of injury to a man to offer him that hearing which he seems to have found nowhere else.  And for whatever purposes silence may be equal to gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication of specific ideas.  I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indifferent to the poets, and what was that new poetry which he had either written or, as to its principles, distinctly conceived.  But I presently found that he knew very little of any particular poet, and had a general notion of poetry as the use of artificial language to express unreal sentiments:  he instanced “The Giaour,” “Lalla Rookh,” “The Pleasures of Hope,” and “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King;” adding, “and plenty more.”  On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, he emphatically assented.  “Have you not,” said I, “written something of that order?” “No; but I often compose as I go along.  I see how things might be written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas.  The world has no notion what poetry will be.”

It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world’s resources.  Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.  But what this conversation persuaded me of was, that the birth with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he went along, and that the exercise was accompanied with a great sense of power.  This is a frequent experience in dreams, and much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.  Nay, for what I saw, the compositions might be fairly classed as Ossianic.  But I was satisfied that Lentulus could not disturb my grateful admiration for the poets of all ages by eclipsing them, or by putting them under a new electric light of criticism.

Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his protest and his consciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking of our race; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had been done in that way was wrong—­that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle who wrote in the ‘Regulator,’ were all equally mistaken—­gave my superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety.  After what had passed about the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue of unravelment?  We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by erudition.  Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if it turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker, ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned coincidence not due to forgotten reading.  It was therefore with renewed curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject—­the