His faith in something nobler
than gold and iron and cotton comes back to him, not as an upbraiding
ghost that wrings its pale hands and is gone, but beautiful and
inspiring as a first love that recognizes nothing in him that is not
high and noble. The poets are nature's perpetual pleaders, and protest
with us against what is worldly. Out of their own undying youth they
speak to ours. "Wretched is the man," says Goethe, "who has learned to
despise the dreams of his youth!" It is from this misery that the
imagination and the poets, who are its spokesmen, rescue us. The world
goes to church, kneels to the eternal Purity, and then contrives to
sneer at innocence and ignorance of evil by calling it green. Let every
man thank God for what little there may be left in him of his vernal
sweetness. Let him thank God if he have still the capacity for feeling
an unmarketable enthusiasm, for that will make him worthy of the society
of the noble dead, of the companionship of the poets. And let him love
the poets for keeping youth young, woman womanly, and beauty beautiful.
There is as much poetry as ever in the world if we only knew how to find
it out; and as much imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more
prosaic direction. Every man who meets with misfortune, who is stripped
of material prosperity, finds that he has a little outlying
mountain-farm of imagination, which did not appear in the schedule of
his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep itself alive, though he
never thought of it while he was fortunate.
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