noble lyrics. So that the most rapt and imaginative of men, if
artists, utilize the whole realm of knowledge, and diffuse it, and
perpetuate it in artistic forms. But real poets are rare, even if
there are many who glory in the jingle of language and the
structure of rhyme. Poetry, to live, must have a soul, and it must
combine rare things,--art, music, genius, original thought, wisdom
made still richer by learning, and, above all, a power of appealing
to inner sentiments, which all feel, yet are reluctant to express.
So choice are the gifts, so grand are the qualities, so varied the
attainments of truly great poets, that very few are born in a whole
generation and in nations that number twenty or forty millions of
people. They are the rarest of gifted men. Every nation can boast
of its illustrious lawyers, statesmen, physicians, and orators; but
they can point only to a few of their poets with pride. We can
count on the fingers of one of our hands all those worthy of poetic
fame who now live in this great country of intellectual and
civilized men, one for every ten millions. How great the pre-
eminence even of ordinary poets! How very great the pre-eminence
of those few whom all ages and nations admire!

The critics assign to Dante a pre-eminence over most of those we
call immortal. Only two or three other poets in the whole realm of
literature, ancient or modern, dispute his throne. We compare him
with Homer and Shakspeare, and perhaps Goethe, alone. Civilization
glories in Virgil, Milton, Tasso, Racine, Pope, and Byron,--all
immortal artists; but it points to only four men concerning whose
transcendent creative power there is unanimity of judgment,--
prodigies of genius, to whose influence and fame we can assign no
limits; stars of such surpassing brilliancy that we can only gaze
and wonder,--growing brighter and brighter, too, with the progress