But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline alike in vision and in sweep of wing.  It is not unworthy to stand with Sidney’s and with Shelley’s “Defence of Poesy,” and it is fitted to warm and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less than of that to which it was first addressed.  As a close to the lecture Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem “To the Muse.”

Charles Eliot Norton

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Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions that will keep for a good many centuries yet.  Confining myself to what little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in certain outward respects, but essentially the same.

And however far we go back, we shall find this also—­that the poet and the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men.  This was his highest function, and hence his name of “seer.”  He was the discoverer and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous.  His were the epea pteroenta, the true “winged words” that could fly down the unexplored future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise and good.  It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame.  This is Homer’s character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the “Odyssey,” “whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill”—­the gift of conferring good or evil immortality.  The first histories were in verse; and sung as they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust, because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the future.  We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries ago:  “When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high.”  Nor have poets lost their power over the future in modern times.  Dante lifts up by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind.  The historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave them.