inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as little
activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But in
this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all,
we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliterates
another. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant
things. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an
outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and
great possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet to
induce such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all
living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking,
of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we
coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify
his readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and
eager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a
superior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims
of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily
disown after two hours' serious reflection on the subject is, I am
afraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted
Ground of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah
of considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in
the middle of God's beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy heads
have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell
asleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a
single active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir up
such fellows to a sense of their own and other people's principles in
life.

And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent
means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern
wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a
particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that
it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed;
like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our
sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare
to express the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The
speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the
mind, produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume