our memories or hearts.  We crown them, when alive, with laurels and praises; and when they die, we erect monuments to their honor.  They are dear to us, since their writings give perpetual pleasure, and appeal to our loftiest sentiments.  They appeal not merely to consecrated ideas and feelings, but they strive to conform to the principles of immortal art.  Every great poet is as much an artist as the sculptor or the painter:  and art survives learning itself.  Varro, the most learned of the Romans, is forgotten, when Virgil is familiar to every school-boy.  Cicero himself would not have been immortal, if his essays and orations had not conformed to the principles of art.  Even an historian who would live must be an artist, like Voltaire or Macaulay.  A cumbrous, or heavy, or pedantic historian will never be read, even if his learning be praised by all the critics of Germany.

Poets are the great artists of language.  They even create languages, like Homer and Shakspeare.  They are the ornaments of literature.  But they are more than ornaments.  They are the sages whose sayings are treasured up and valued and quoted from age to age, because of the inspiration which is given to them,—­an insight into the mysteries of the soul and the secrets of life.  A good song is never lost; a good poem is never buried, like a system of philosophy, but has an inherent vitality, like the melodies of the son of Jesse.  Real poetry is something, too, beyond elaborate versification, which is one of the literary fashions, and passes away like other fashions unless, redeemed by something that arouses the soul, and elevates it, and appeals to the consciousness of universal humanity.  It is the poets who make revelations, like prophets and sages of old; it is they who invest history with interest; like Shakspeare and Racine, and preserve what is most vital and valuable in it.  They even adorn philosophy, like Lucretius, when he speculated on the systems of the Ionian philosophers.  They certainly impress powerfully on the mind the truths of theology, as Watts and Cowper and Wesley did in their noble lyrics.  So that the most rapt and imaginative of men, if artists, utilize the whole realm of knowledge, and diffuse it, and perpetuate it in artistic forms.  But real poets are rare, even if there are many who glory in the jingle of language and the structure of rhyme.  Poetry, to live, must have a soul, and it must combine rare things,—­art, music, genius, original thought, wisdom made still richer by learning, and, above all, a power of appealing to inner sentiments, which all feel, yet are reluctant to express.  So choice are the gifts, so grand are the qualities, so varied the attainments of truly great poets, that very few are born in a whole generation and in nations that number twenty or forty millions of people.  They are the rarest of gifted men.  Every nation can boast of its illustrious lawyers, statesmen, physicians, and orators; but they can point only to a few of their poets with pride.  We can count on the fingers of one of our hands all those worthy of poetic fame who now live in this great country of intellectual and civilized men, one for every ten millions.  How great the pre-eminence even of ordinary poets!  How very great the pre-eminence of those few whom all ages and nations admire!