from which they sprung or shall spring ...  Did you guess any of them lived only its moment?  The world does not so exist ... no parts palpable or impalpable so exist ... no result exists now without being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so backward without the farthest mentionable spot coming a bit nearer the beginning than any other spot....  Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.  The prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has no particular sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present, matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement ... knows that the young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while the man who has not perilled his life and retains to old age in riches and ease has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning ... and that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to prefer real longlived things, and favors body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect assuredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and waiting to meet him again—­and who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries or avoids death.

The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day.  If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides ... and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his Semitic muscle into its merits and demerits ... and if he be not himself the age transfigured ... and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave—­let him merge in the general run and wait his development....  Still the final test of poems or any character or work remains.  The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead and judges performer or performance after the changes of time.  Does it live through them?  Does it still hold on untired?  Will the same style and the direction of genius to similar points be satisfactory now?  Has no new discovery in science or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and behavior fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon?  Have the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake?  Is he beloved long and long after he is buried?  Does the young man think often of him? and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle aged and the old think of him?