itself. "It is in works of art that some nations have deposited the
profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts." Job and Isaiah,
Æschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, were first of all poets.
Mankind is indebted to them in the first place for revealing beauty; but
it also owes to them much insight into the facts and principles of the
moral world. It would be an unutterable loss to the ethical thinker and
the philosopher, if this region were closed against them, so that they
could no longer seek in the poets the inspiration and light that lead to
goodness and truth. In our own day, almost above all others, we need the
poets for these ethical and religious purposes. For the utterances of
the dogmatic teacher of religion have been divested of much of their
ancient authority; and the moral philosopher is often regarded either as
a vendor of commonplaces or as the votary of a discredited science,
whose primary principles are matter of doubt and debate. There are not a
few educated Englishmen who find in the poets, and in the poets alone,
the expression of their deepest convictions concerning the profoundest
interests of life. They read the poets for fresh inspiration, partly, no
doubt, because the passion and rapture of poetry lull criticism and
soothe the questioning spirit into acquiescence.


But there are further reasons; for the poets of England are greater than
its moral philosophers; and it is of the nature of the poetic art that,
while eschewing system, it presents the strife between right and wrong
in concrete character, and therefore with a fulness and truth impossible
to the abstract thought of science.

"A poet never dreams:
We prose folk do: we miss the proper duct
For thoughts on things unseen."[A]