The practical is a very good thing in its way—­if it only be not another name for the worldly.  To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from Parthia—­which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they were some great matter till he died.

One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins.  The dozy old world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany, talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till bedtime.  The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs.  But divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of Annihilation.  It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity, “trailing” such “clouds of glory” as would beggar a Platonic year of sunsets.

No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every child.  It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon.  Every age says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, “Tell me what I am like”; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has need of seers and will have them.  Our time is not an unpoetical one.  We are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone.  It is nothing against us that we are a commercial people.  Athens was a trading community; Dante and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already commercial when she produced Shakespeare.

This lesson I learn from the past:  that grace and goodness, the fair, the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory.  God with us is forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing.  The lives of the great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt most deeply the meaning of the present.