as also of the "Lady of the Lake," is tame to me, and
deficient in high poetic genius. Doubtless we are all influenced by the
standards of our own time, and the advances making in literature as well
as in science and art. Yet this change in the opinions of critics does
not apply to Byron's "Childe Harold," which is as much, if not as
widely, admired now as when it was first published. We think as highly
too of "The Deserted Village," the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and
the "Cotter's Saturday Night," as our fathers did. And men now think
much more highly of the merits of Shakspeare than they have at any
period since he lived; so that after all there is an element in true
poetry which does not lose by time. In another hundred years, the
verdicts of critics as to the greater part of the poems of Tennyson,
Wordsworth, Browning, and Longfellow, may be very different from what
they now are, while some of their lyrics may be, as they are now,
pronounced immortal.

Poetry is both an inspiration and an art. The greater part of that which
is now produced is made, not born. Those daintily musical and elaborate
measures which are now the fashion, because they claim novelty, or
reproduce the quaintness of an art so old as to be practically new,
perhaps will soon again be forgotten or derided. What is simple,
natural, appealing to the heart rather than to the head, may last when
more pretentious poetry shall have passed away. Neither criticism nor
contemporary popularity can decide such questions.

Scott himself seemed to take a true view. In a letter to Miss Seward, he
said:--

"The immortality of poetry is not so firm a point in my creed as the
immortality of the soul."

'I've lived too long,
And seen the death of much immortal song.'

"Nay, those that have really attained their literary immortality have
gained it under very hard conditions. To some it has not attached till
after death. To others it has been the means of lauding personal vices
and follies which had otherwise been unremembered in their epitaphs; and
all enjoy the same immortality under a condition similar to that of
Noureddin in an Eastern tale. Noureddin, you remember, was to enjoy the
gift of immortality, but with this qualification,--that he was subjected
to long naps of forty, fifty, or a hundred years at a time. Even so
Homer and Virgil slumbered through whole centuries. Shakspeare himself
enjoyed undisturbed sleep from the age