itself with imaging the outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth beneath the shadow of earth.  Continually the visible universe suggests the invisible.  We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare.  His imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.

Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the “Iliad,” we feel something of this.  Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change, he must look underneath the show for the reality.  Great captains and conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.  History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the world for a village.  This life could only become other than phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something that was higher and permanent.  Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power unseen—­that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy.  In the “Odyssey” we find pure allegory.

Now, under all these names—­praiser, seer, soothsayer—­we find the same idea lurking.  The poet is he who can best see and best say what is ideal—­what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty.  Whether he celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity.  He may be unconscious of his mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet, he rises to the level of it the more often.  He does not always directly rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what delight there is in the good and fair.  If he besiege evil, it is with such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that the besieged themselves are charmed with them.  Whoever reads the great poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking.  Whoever learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean and bad.  If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead of speaking the true universal language of imagination.  He who translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual, is the reverse of a poet.