hing to sing, it is not of the slightest consequence how they sing
it.

While poets persist in thinking and writing thus, it is in vain for
them to talk loud about the poet's divine mission, as the prophet of
mankind, the swayer of the universe, and so forth. Not that we
believe the poet simply by virtue of being a singer to have any such
power. While young gentlemen are talking about governing heaven and
earth by verse, Wellingtons and Peels, Arkwrights and Stephensons,
Frys, and Chisholms, are doing it by plain practical prose; and even
of those who have moved and led the hearts of men by verse, every
one, as far as we know, has produced his magical effects by poetry of
the very opposite forum to that which is now in fashion. What poet
ever had more influence than Homer? What poet is more utterly
antipodal to our modern schools? There are certain Hebrew psalms,
too, which will be confessed, even by those who differ most from
them, to have exercised some slight influence on human thought and
action, and to be likely to exercise the same for some time to come.
Are they any more like our modern poetic forms than they are like our
modern poetic matter? Ay, even in our own time, what has been the
form, what the temper, of all poetry, from Korner and Heine, which
has made the German heart leap up, but simplicity, manhood,
clearness, finished melody, the very opposite, in a word, of our new
school? And to look at home, what is the modern poetry which lives
on the lips and in the hearts of Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen? It
is not only simple in form and language, but much of it fitted, by a
severe exercise of artistic patience, to tunes already existing. Who
does not remember how the "Marseillaise" was born, or how Burns's
"Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," or the story of Moore's taking the
old "Red Fox March," and giving it a new immortality as "Let Erin
remember the days of old," while poor Emmett sprang up and cried,
"Oh, that I had twenty thousand Irishmen marching to that tune!" So
it is, even to this day, and let those who hanker after poetic fame
take note of it; not a poem which is now really living but has gained
its immortality by virtue of simplicity and positive faith.

Let the poets of the new school consider carefully Wolfe's "Sir John
Moore," Campbell's "Hohenlinden," "Mariners of England," and "Rule
Britannia," Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and "Bridge of Sighs," and
then ask themselves, as men who