be acquired at the expense of delicacy,
loyalty, or honor. Many assert that the nobler feelings exist only
in the works of art. When some unfortunate occurrence seems to give a
deplorable foundation to the words of such mockers, with what avidity
they name the most exquisite conceptions of the poet, "vain phantoms!"
How they plume themselves upon their own wisdom in having advocated the
politic doctrine of an astute, yet honeyed hypocrisy; how they delight
to speak of the perpetual contradiction between words and deeds!... With
what cruel joy they detail such occurrences, and cite such examples in
the presence of those unsteady restless souls, who are incited by their
youthful aspirations and by the depression and utter loss of happy
confidence which such a conviction would entail upon them, to struggle
against a distrust so blighting! When such wavering spirits are engaged
in the bitter combat with the harsh alternatives of life, or tempted at
every turn by its insinuating seductions, what a profound discouragement
seizes upon them when they are induced to believe that the hearts
devoted to the most sublime thoughts, the most deeply initiated in
the most delicate susceptibilities, the most charmed by the beauty of
innocence, have denied, by their acts, the sincerity of their worship
for the noble themes which they have sung as poets! With what agonizing
doubts are they not filled by such flagrant contradictions! How much
is their anguish increased by the jeering mockery of those who repeat:
"Poetry is only that which might have been"--and who delight in
blaspheming it by their guilty negations! Whatever may be the human
short-comings of the gifted, believe the truths they sing! Poetry is
more than the gigantic shadow of our own imagination, immeasurably
increased, and projected upon the flying plane of the Impossible. POETRY
and REALITY are not two incompatible elements, destined to move on
together without commingling. Goethe himself confesses this. In speaking
of a contemporary writer he says: "that having lived to create poems,
he had also made his life a Poem." (Er lebte dichtend, und dichtete
lebend.) Goethe was himself too true a poet not to know that Poetry
only is, because its eternal Reality throbs in the noble impulses of the
human heart.

We have once before remarked that "genius imposes its own obligations."
[Footnote: Upon Paganini, after his death.] If the examples of cold
austerity and of rigid disinter