I.
THE POET.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often
persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired
pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for
whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they
are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are
like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish
and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you
should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce
fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge
of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars,
or some limited judgment of color or form, which is
exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of
the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies
in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have
lost the perception of the instant dependence of form
upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy.
We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to
be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment
between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter
the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms,
the intellectual men do not believe in any essential
dependence of the material world on thought and volition.
Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the
Spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a
contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid
ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are