egins questioning. For modern culture has
come to him, as it comes to all, with its criticism, its science, its
wide conversation through books, its intellectual unrest; it has
looked him in the eye, and said, "_Are you sure?_ The dear old
traditions,--they are indeed _traditions_. The sweet customs which have
housed our spiritual and social life,--these are _customs_. Of what are
you SURE?" Matthew Arnold has recently said well (we cannot
quote the words) that the opening of the modern epoch consists in the
discovery that institutions and habitudes of the earlier centuries, in
which we have grown, are not absolute, and do not adjust themselves
perfectly to our mental wants. Thus are we thrown back upon our own
souls. We have to ask the first questions, and get such answer as we
may. The meaning of the modern world is this,--an epoch which, in the
midst of established institutions, of old consecrated habitudes of
thought and feeling, of populous nations which cannot cast loose from
ancient anchorage without peril of horrible wreck and disaster, has got
to take up man's life again from the beginning. Of modern life this is
the immediate key.

Our poet's is one of those deep and clinging natures which hold hard by
the heart of bygone times; but also he is of a nature so deep and
sensitive that the spiritual endeavor of the period must needs utter
itself in him. "ART THOU SURE?"--the voice went sounding
keenly, terribly, through the profound of his soul. And to this his
spirit, not without struggle and agony, but at length clearly, made
the faithful Hebrew response, "I TRUST." Bravely said, O
deep-hearted poet! Rest there! Rest there and thus on your own believing
filial heart, and on the Eternal, who in it accomplishes the miracle of
that confiding!

Not eminently endowed with discursive intellect,--not gifted with that
power, Homeric in kind and more than Homeric in degree, which might meet
the old mythic imaginations on, or rather above, their own level, and
out of them, together with the material which modern time supplies,
build in the skies new architectures, wherein not only the feeling, but
the _imagination_ also, of future ages might house,--our poet comes with
Semitic directness to the heart of the matter: he takes the divine
_Yea_, though it be but a simple _Yea_, and no syllable more, in his own
soul, and holds childlike by that. And he who has asked the questions of
the time and reached this conclusion,--he