It is not unworthy to stand with
Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."
_Charles Eliot Norton_
* * * * *
Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
certain outward respects, but essentially the same.
And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25