nd when they are no longer here, those who
would have been ashamed of them during their lives claim kindred with
them, and are proud to be called by their names. (Compare Thucyd.)

Who is the true poet?

Plato expels the poets from his Republic because they are allied to
sense; because they stimulate the emotions; because they are thrice
removed from the ideal truth. And in a similar spirit he declares in the
Gorgias that the stately muse of tragedy is a votary of pleasure and
not of truth. In modern times we almost ridicule the idea of poetry
admitting of a moral. The poet and the prophet, or preacher, in
primitive antiquity are one and the same; but in later ages they seem
to fall apart. The great art of novel writing, that peculiar creation
of our own and the last century, which, together with the sister art
of review writing, threatens to absorb all literature, has even less of
seriousness in her composition. Do we not often hear the novel writer
censured for attempting to convey a lesson to the minds of his readers?

Yet the true office of a poet or writer of fiction is not merely to give
amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind, good or
bad, or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. There have
been poets in modern times, such as Goethe or Wordsworth, who have not
forgotten their high vocation of teachers; and the two greatest of the
Greek dramatists owe their sublimity to their ethical character. The
noblest truths, sung of in the purest and sweetest language, are still
the proper material of poetry. The poet clothes them with beauty, and
has a power of making them enter into the hearts and memories of men. He
has not only to speak of themes above the level of ordinary life, but
to speak of them in a deeper and tenderer way than they are ordinarily
felt, so as to awaken the feeling of them in others. The old he makes
young again; the familiar principle he invests with a new dignity; he
finds a noble expression for the common-places of morality and politics.
He uses the things of sense so as to indicate what is beyond; he raises
us through earth to heaven. He expresses what the better part of us
would fain say, and the half-conscious feeling is strengthened by
the expression. He is his own critic, for the spirit of poetry and of
criticism are not divided in him. His mission is not to disguise men
from themselves, but to reveal to them their own nature, and make
them better acquainted