It is obvious, in the meanwhile, that all which we have of the past is stamped with an impress of mental assimilation:  an impress it has received from the mind of the author who has garnered it up, and disposed it in that form and order which ensure it acceptance with posterity.  For let a writer of history be as matter of fact as he will, the very order and classification of events will save us the trouble of confusion, and render them graspable, and more capable of assimilation, than is the raw material of every-day experience.  In fact the work of mind is begun, the key of intelligence is given, and we have only to continue the process.  Where the vehicle for the transmission of things past is poetry, then we have them presented in that succession, and with that modification of force, a resilient plasticity, now advancing, now recoiling, insinuating and grappling, that ere this material and mental warfare is over, we find the facts thus transmitted are incorporated with our psychical existence.  And in tradition is it otherwise?—­Every man tells the tale in his own way; and the merits of the story itself, or the person who tells it, or his way of telling, procures it a lodgment in the mind of the hearer, whence it is ever ready to start up and claim kindred with some external excitement.

Thus it is the luck of all things of the past to come down to us with some poetry about them; while from those of diurnal experience we must extract this poetry ourselves:  and although all good men are, more or less, poets, they are passive or recipient poets; while the active or donative poet caters for them what they fail to collect.  For let a poet walk through London, and he shall see a succession of incidents, suggesting some moral beauty by a contrast of times with times, unfolding some principle of nature, developing some attribute of man, or pointing to some glory in The Maker:  while the man who walked behind him saw nothing but shops and pavement, and coats and faces; neither did he hear the aggregated turmoil of a city of nations, nor the noisy exponents of various desires, appetites and pursuits:  each pulsing tremour of the atmosphere was not struck into it by a subtile ineffable something willed forcibly out of a cranium:  neither did he see the driver of horses holding a rod of light in his eye and feeling his way, in a world he was rushing through, by the motion of the end of that rod:—­he only saw the wheels in motion, and heard the rattle on the stones; and yet this man stopped twice at a book shop to buy ‘a Tennyson,’ or a ‘Browning’s Sordello.’  Now this man might have seen all that the poet saw; he walked through the same streets:  yet the poet goes home and writes a poem; and he who failed to feel the poetry of the things themselves detects it readily in the poet’s version.  Then why, it is asked, does not this man, schooled by the poet’s example, look out for himself for the future, and so find attractions in things of to-day?  He does so to a trifling extent, but the reason why he does so rarely will be found in the former demonstration.