To answer objections of this latitude demands the assertion of certain characteristic facts which, tho’ not here demonstrated, may be authenticated by reference to history.  Of these, the facts of Alfred’s disguised visit to the Danish camp, and Aulaff’s visit to the Saxon, are sufficient to show in what respect the poets of that period were held; when a man without any safe conduct whatever could enter the enemy’s camp on the very eve of battle, as was here the case; could enter unopposed, unquestioned, and return unmolested!—­What could have conferred upon the poet of that day so singular a privilege?  What upon the poet of an earlier time that sanctity in behoof whereof

  “The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
  The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
  Went to the ground:  and the repeated air
  Of sad Electra’s poet had the power
  To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.”

What but an universal recognition of the poet as an universal benefactor of mankind?  And did mankind recognize him as such, from some unaccountable infatuation, or because his labours obtained for him an indefeasible right to that estimate?  How came it, when a Greek sculptor had completed some operose performance, that his countrymen bore him in triumph thro’ their city, and rejoiced in his prosperity as identical with their own?  How but because his art had embodied some principle of beauty whose mysterious influence it was their pride to appreciate—­or he had enduringly moulded the limbs of some well-trained Athlete, such as it was their interest to develop, or he had recorded the overthrow of some barbaric invader whom their fathers had fallen to repel.

In the middle ages when a knight listened, in the morning, to some song of brave doing, ere evening he himself might be the hero of such song.—­What wonder then that he held sacred the function of the poet!  Now-a-days our heroes (and we have them) are left unchapleted and neglected—­and therefore the poet lives and dies neglected.

Thus it would appear from these facts (which have been collaterally evolved in course of enquiring into the propriety of choosing the subject from past or present time, and in course of the consequent analysis) that Art, to become a more powerful engine of civilization, assuming a practically humanizing tendency (the admitted function of Art), should be made more directly conversant with the things, incidents, and influences which surround and constitute the living world of those whom Art proposes to improve, and, whether it should appear in event that Art can or can not assume this attitude without jeopardizing her specific existence, that such a consummation were desirable must be equally obvious in either case.