vil, if it be evil, is not there for nothing--it serves; at
the base of it is Love. Every poet of the highest quality is,
in the masterly coinage of the author of Leaves of Grass, a
kosmos. His work, like himself, is a second world, full of
contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral indeed, but
only as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good, Rabelais
is all good, Montaigne is all good, not because all the
thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at
the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention--a love
which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd,
often terrible and repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and
never to degrade. It is the spirit in which authorship is
pursued, as Augustus Schlegel has said, that makes it either
an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit of the great authors, no
matter what their letter, is one with that which pervades the
Creation. In mighty love, with implements of pain and
pleasure, of good and evil, Nature develops man; genius also,
in mighty love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good
and evil, develops man; no matter what the means, that is the
end.

"Tell me not, then, of the indecent passages of the great
poets. The world, which is the poem of God, is full of
indecent passages! 'Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord
hath not done it?' shouts Amos. 'I form the light, and create
darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all
these things,' thunders Isaiah. 'This,' says Coleridge, 'is
the deep abyss of the mystery of God.' Ay, and the profound of
the mystery of genius also! Evil is part of the economy of
genius, as it is part of the economy of Deity. Gentle
reviewers endeavor to find excuses for the freedoms of
geniuses. 'It is to prove that they were above
conventionalities.' 'It is referable to the age.' Oh, Ossa on
Pelion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly! What has
genius, spirit of the absolute and the eternal, to do with
the definitions of position, or conventionalities, or the age?
Genius puts indecencies into its works, because God puts them
into His world. Whatever the special reason in each case, this
is the general reason in all cases. They are here, because
they are there. That is the eternal why. No; Alphonso of
Castile thought that, if he had been consulted at the
Creation, he