tural, for amid all the divisions or
distractions of your history, your literature has ever been patriotic
and national. Literature, in truth, has been to you a good and faithful
emigrant, reproductive not only of all intellectual growth, but of the
sympathies--the largest sympathies--which bind together man to man. It
has settled among you every classic writer of British origin, and from
the Continent it has brought to you Goethe, Schiller, and Heinrich
Heine. It is also noticeable that by the side of these great
colonizations of thought you have not refused to receive and to pass to
your furthest Territories the humblest addition, the single volume of
verse, the chance felicitous expression of combined thought and feeling,
even some accidental refrain of song that had pleasantly caught the ear
and gone to the heart of man.

And this brings me to say to you one professional word respecting that
art and the nature of poetry that you have been kind enough to connect
with my name. The greater part of the verses I have written were that
product of the lyrical period of youth which is by no means uncommon in
modern civilization. It exhibits itself sometimes in the strangest
manner, without connection with other culture, or even the most common
intellectual opportunities. Of this I happen to have given to the world
a signal instance in the volume I published of the poems of David Gray,
a Scotch weaver-boy, who, without one advantage beyond the common
education of his class, described all the nature within his ken in the
highest poetic perfection, and passed away, leaving a most pathetic
record of a short life of imaginative sensibility. You can contrast this
simple and wayside flower of a faculty with such rich and complete
cultivation as it can assume in the efflorescence of Tennyson or
Swinburne; but in whatever form you find it, do not the less value the
faculty itself. Permit me to say that in no condition of society can it
be encouraged and fertilized more usefully than among yourselves. For
not only will it bring with it calm and comfort amid all the
superabundant activities, ambitions, and confusions of daily life, but
it has also the regulative powers teaching men to divide the sphere of
the imagination from that of practical life, and thus obviating the
dangers that so often arise from the want of this distinction.

There is no better preservative than the exercise of the poetic faculty
from religious hallucination