barbarism, the one thing not supernatural and yet akin to the
supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid conditions,
tolerable to the race. For poetry is not merely the comfort of the
refined and the delight of the educated; it is the alleviator of poverty,
the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary
pilgrimage. We cannot conceive the abject animal condition of our race
were poetry abstracted; and we do not wonder that this should be so when
we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for
raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as
the body. The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the
office or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical
conditions in which the majority exist. There are races, which we may
call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly exemplified. It
would be difficult to find poverty more complete, physical wants less
gratified, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental
peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the
steppes of Siberia. But there are perhaps none among the more favored
races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and
romance. Watch the throng seated about an Arab or Indian or Persian
story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry,
almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid
condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense
absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement
as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they
are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment that
all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples. Measure, if
you can, what poetry is to them, what their lives would be without it. To
the millions and millions of men who are in this condition, the bard, the
story-teller, the creator of what we are considering as literature, comes
with the one thing that can lift them out of poverty, suffering--all the