mankind
were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
sunsets.

No; morning and the dewy prime are born into the earth again with every
child. It is our fault if drought and dust usurp the noon. Every age
says to her poets, like the mistress to her lover, "Tell me what I am
like"; and, in proportion as it brings forth anything worth seeing, has
need of seers and will have them. Our time is not an unpoetical one. We
are in our heroic age, still face to face with the shaggy forces of
unsubdued Nature, and we have our Theseuses and Perseuses, though they
may be named Israel Putnam and Daniel Boone. It is nothing against us
that we are a commercial people. Athens was a trading community; Dante
and Titian were the growth of great marts, and England was already
commercial when she produced Shakespeare.

This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
the noble, and the true, will never cease out of the world till the God
from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that they manifest themselves
in an eternal continuity of change to every generation of men, as new
duties and occasions arise; that the sacred duty and noble office of the
poet is to reveal and justify them to men; that so long as the soul
endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while
there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will
still send poets to find them and bear witness of them, and to hang
their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God with us is
forever the mystical name of