thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures.
Man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creature
but made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches
us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and
man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records.
Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our
mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being
we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past
without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and
some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowledge
is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of
horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin
guardians of the soul,--the poet and the priest. Conscience and
imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human
spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their
treasures, there is wisdom. I desire to renew the long discussion of the
nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry,
or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this
wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, is stored up for the
race in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary
tradition and association, a proud task. May I not take counsel of
Spenser and be bold at the first door? Sidney and Shelley pleaded this
cause. Because they spoke, must we be dumb? or shall not a noble example
be put to its best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips?
The old hunt is up in the Muses' bower; and I would fain speak for that
learning which has to me been light. I use this preface not unwillingly
in open loyalty to studies on which my youth was nourished, and the
masters I then loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made eloquent;
my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they before drank from old
fountains; but chiefly I name them as a reminder that the main argument