My friend, I am sure you have often shared in the pain and grief I feel, that in so few cases should home be the blessed, peaceful spot that poetry pictures to us.  There is no real poetry that is not truth in its purest form—­truth as it appears to eyes from which the mists of sense are cleared away.  Surely our earthly homes ought to realize the representations of poetry; they would then become each day a nearer, though ever a faint type of, that eternal home for which our earthly one ought daily to prepare us.

Poetry and religion always teach the same duties, instil the same feelings.  Never believe that any thing can be truly noble or great, that any thing can be really poetical, which is not also religious.  The poet is now partly a priest, as he was in the old heathen world; and though, alas! he may, like Balaam, utter inspirations which his heart follows not, which his life denies, yet, like Balaam also, his words are full of lessons for us, though they may only make his own guilt the deeper.

I have been led to these concluding considerations respecting poetry by my anxiety that you should turn your refined tastes and your acute perceptions of the beautiful to a universally moral purpose.  There is no teaching more impressive than that which comes to us through our passions.  In the moment of excited feeling stronger impressions may be made than by any of the warnings of duty and principle.  If these latter, however, be not motives co-existent, and also in strength and exercise, the impressions of feeling are temporary, and even dangerous.  It is only to the faithful followers of duty that the excitements of romance and poetry are useful and improving.  To such they have often given strength and energy to tread more cheerfully and hopefully over many a rugged path, to live more closely to their beau-ideal, a vivid vision of which has, by poetry, been awakened and refreshed in their hearts.

To others, on the contrary, the danger exceeds the profit.  By the excitement of admiration they may be deceived into the belief that there must be in their own bosoms an answering spirit to the greatness, the self-sacrifice, the pure and lofty affections they see represented in the mirror of poetry.  They are deceived, because they forget that we have each within us two natures struggling for the mastery.  As long as we practically allow the habitual supremacy of the lower over the higher, there can be no real excellence in the character, however a mere sense of the beautiful may temporarily exalt the feelings, and thus increase our responsibility, and consequent condemnation.

I am sure you have experimentally understood the subject on which I have been writing.  I am sure you have often risen from the teaching of the poet with enthusiasm in your heart, ready to trample upon all those temptations and difficulties which had, perhaps an hour before, made the path of self-denial and self-control apparently impracticable.