“Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair—­”

he utters a moral idea.  When Shakespeare says, that

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,"[370]

he utters a moral idea.

Voltaire was right in thinking that the energetic and profound treatment of moral ideas, in this large sense, is what distinguishes the English poetry.  He sincerely meant praise, no dispraise or hint of limitation; and they err who suppose that poetic limitation is a necessary consequence of the fact, the fact being granted as Voltaire states it.  If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the term ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral.

It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this:  that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life;[371] that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,—­to the question:  How to live.  Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion; they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day; they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers; they grow tiresome to some of us.  We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayyam’s words:  “Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque.”  Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them; in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite.  We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning.  A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life.

Epictetus had a happy figure for things like the play of the senses, or literary form and finish, or argumentative ingenuity, in comparison with “the best and master thing” for us, as he called it, the concern, how to live.  Some people were afraid of them, he said, or they disliked and undervalued them.  Such people were wrong; they were unthankful or cowardly.  But the things might also be over-prized, and treated as final when they are not.  They bear to life the relation which inns bear to home.  “As if a man, journeying home, and finding a nice inn on the road, and liking it, were to stay forever at the inn!  Man, thou hast forgotten thine object; thy journey was not to this, but through this.  ‘But this inn is taking.’  And how many other inns, too, are taking, and how many fields and meadows! but as places of passage merely, you have an object, which is this:  to