hty is turned into a palace, and
a bit of lath acquires all the potency of Excalibur.

But nowadays it is the understanding itself that has turned poet. In her
railroads she has given us the shoes of swiftness. Fine-Ear herself
could not hear so far as she, who in her magnetic telegraph can listen
in Boston and hear what is going on in New Orleans. And what need of
Aladdin's lamp when a man can build a palace with a patent pill? The
office of the poet seems to be reversed, and he must give back these
miracles of the understanding to poetry again, and find out what there
is imaginative in steam and iron and telegraph-wires. After all, there
is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed
that fed on men. If you cut an apple across you may trace in it the
lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May, and so the soul
of poetry survives in things prosaic. Borrowing money on a bond does not
seem the most promising subject in the world, but Shakespeare found the
"Merchant of Venice" in it. Themes of song are waiting everywhere for
the right man to sing them, like those enchanted swords which no one can
pull out of the rock till the hero comes, and he finds no more trouble
than in plucking a violet.

John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford, many years ago,
reckoned the number of whale-ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed
out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as
a type of American success. But, alas! it is with quite other oil that
those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever must
be filled. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity,
but only by moral greatness, by ideas, by works of imagination, that a
race can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from the once mighty
Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests amid her crumbling palaces.
Of Carthage, whose merchant-fleets once furled their sails in every port
of the known world, nothing is left but the deeds of Hannibal. She lies
dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert
only flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. A fog can blot
Holland or Switzerland out of existence. But how large is the space
occupied in the maps of the soul by little Athens and powerless Italy!
They were great by the soul, and their vital force is as indestructible
as the soul.

Till America has learned to love art, not as an amusement, not