I.

THE POET AS A TEACHER.

GREATEST of the forms of art, poetry retains its influence over the mind and heart of man through all changes of philosophy and religion. He is ever ready to confess its magic charm and to own its subtle power. Whether savage, sage, or saint, it commands his aspirations and bears sway over his feelings. Its rhyme and rhythm, its music and flow of words, draw him to its beauties as an art; but its sentiment and ideal thought lay hold of him with the keenest joy and the deepest satisfaction.

In every man is something of "the vision and the faculty divine." All men see beneath the surface of things, are transformed by feeling, have the sense of beauty, and are awakened to a higher life by visions of what has not yet been made actual in conduct. Few have the gift of expres

sion, or the touch and renewing power of the artist; but all have their moments of ideal desire and poetic impulse. To a few are given the faculty of poetic utterance, and the power of making words beautiful with passion and imagination. These say what others only feel; and they become the interpreters of the world's inward impulses and ideals.

The poet is loved of mankind because he reveals the thoughts of many hearts, because he says in words of living force and beauty what all experience. He is the world's sayer and singer, finding forms of adequate utterance for the passion that burns within the heart of man, and singing the heart's emotions in words of melody and power. While feeling is awakened in man by the experiences of life and death, the passionate ardors of love and the dark destinies of hate, poetry will continue to attract men and to answer to a need of their natures. While men love they will delight in the poet's art. As the world advances it may bring us a Homer never again, with his naïve and primitive look at the fortunes and destinies of men; but feeling itself has known no decay or corruption since Homer sang, and it burns within men with the same mighty passion

as in the time of Helen. It has grown purer, sweeter, and nobler with the lapse of ages, less sanguine and volcanic, more humane and gentle; but not less ardent and imperative. While love remains, while death awaits, while pain and sorrow beset, while aspiration soars, feeling will be to the poet an inspiration and a perennial cause of song. It will fill and satisfy his heart; it will cause imagination to bring forth ever fresh creations from the boundless treasure of its spirit; it will smite him with a passion for moral insight and greatness, and it will unite him in the bonds of deathless love to the men his brothers for whom he sings.

The poet does not speak what he will, but what he must; he is the voice of immeasurable powers which lie behind him calling for utterance. He becomes the medium of their expression, the spokesman who comes forth to deliver their thought. There is more in what he says than he knows; deep things he has not divined, rules of life he has not comprehended, echoes of an immeasurable life he has not realized in its fulness. If he understands all which he says, in all its meanings and relations, as reason may take note of them, then he is no poet. There is more

in man than reason defines, more in his experience than the understanding can describe; and therefore it is the poet finds a place for his song and a demand for his singing. The larger any truth which comes near to man's life, the less clearly can it be defined, the less is it possible for any words to tell us what it really means and is. Affections, and the soul's vision, bear meaning to us in relation to our own experience and capacity. The same words give much to one, little to another. It is not so in geometry; it is not so in physiology. In these regions of scientific fact there is but one voice to be uttered, and every person gets from the facts the same meaning. The smaller the value, the greater the accuracy. The dead rock can be perfectly described; but the mother's love is not to be brought within the limits of the finest poem or the most exquisite picture. There is always that which is beyond the limits of description, beyond the methods of reason. Into this region of the largest of all thoughts, the noblest of all experiences, the region of life and its soul-realities, comes the poet. What he has lived he pours forth in his song, telling men what he has seen and what he is. Nothing beyond that can he ever sing with power to touch other

men. If he has loved, then love will be in his song. If he has seen God as one of the pure in heart may see him, then earth and heaven cannot keep that out of his poem. The moment he stands before us in his singing, with the true light of song kindling his face, that moment we shall know what manner of man he is; that hour is his heart confessed. So it is the poet helps us to know what we cannot define, to touch the experiences of others with a sense of reality. He does not define the love surpassing the love of women, but his words become so transfused with that love as to kindle the like of it in ourselves.

That which is expressed in poetic form is not any the less true, but all the more true, because too large for any logical statement. Astronomy is the only purely exact science, conformable to the mathematical test; and it deals with matter only in relations of quantity and position. Next to this is Physics, into which more complex forces and relations enter; but in which exactness is less often to be obtained. Chemistry presents a field of still more subtle and intangible forces; precision and certainty are so much the farther removed. The higher the science and its materials, the greater its importance, the more complex