nature, and make them better acquainted with the world around them. True
poetry is the remembrance of youth, of love, the embodiment in words of the
happiest and holiest moments of life, of the noblest thoughts of man, of
the greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future may return to his
greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what may
not be effected for the human race by a better use of the poetical and
imaginative faculty. The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion, with
truth, may still be possible. Neither is the element of pleasure to be
excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for a lower we raise
men in the scale of existence. Might not the novelist, too, make an ideal,
or rather many ideals of social life, better than a thousand sermons?
Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of poetic and artistic
influences. But he is not without a true sense of the noble purposes to
which art may be applied (Republic).

Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato's language, a
flattery, a sophistry, or sham, in which, without any serious purpose, the
poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits his gifts of language and metre.
Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers; he has the 'savoir
faire,' or trick of writing, but he has not the higher spirit of poetry.
He has no conception that true art should bring order out of disorder; that
it should make provision for the soul's highest interest; that it should be
pursued only with a view to 'the improvement of the citizens.' He
ministers to the weaker side of human nature (Republic); he idealizes the
sensual; he sings the strain of love in the latest fashion; instead of
raising men above themselves he brings them back to the 'tyranny of the
many masters,' from which all his life long a good man has been praying to
be delivered. And often, forgetful of measure and order, he will express
not that which is truest, but that which is strongest. Instead of a great
and nobly-executed subject, perfect in every part, some fancy of a heated