It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that
the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources.
Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to
devise for them. But what this conversation persuaded me of was, that
the birth with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be
poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he went along, and
that the exercise was accompanied with a great sense of power. This is a
frequent experience in dreams, and much of our waking experience is but
a dream in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the compositions might be
fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied that Lentulus could not
disturb my grateful admiration for the poets of all ages by eclipsing
them, or by putting them under a new electric light of criticism.

Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his protest and his
consciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking of
our race; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had been
done in that way was wrong--that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle who
wrote in the 'Regulator,' were all equally mistaken--gave my
superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed about
the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by
heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may
somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue of
unravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by
erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if it
turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker,
ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned
coincidence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with renewed
curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject--the universal
erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that