In fact, you never go out into Life: living only in the past world,
you go on repeating in new combinations the same elements for the
same effect. You have taught an enlightened Public, that the province
of Poetry is to reproduce the Ancients; not as Keats did, with the
living heart of our own Life; but so as to cause the impression that
you are not aware that they had wives and families like yourselves,
and laboured and rested like us all.
The greatest, perhaps, of modern poets seeming to take refuge from
this, has looked into the heart of man, and shown you its pulsations,
fears, self-doubts, hates, goodness, devotedness, and noble
world-love; this is not done under pretty flowers of metaphor in the
lispings of a pet parson, or in the strong but uncertain fashion of
the American school; still less in the dry operose quackery of
professed doctors of psychology, mere chaff not studied from nature,
and therefore worthless, never felt, and therefore useless; but with
the firm knowing hand of the anatomist, demonstrating and making
clear to others, that the knowledge may be applied to purpose. All
this difficult task is achieved so that you may read till your own
soul is before you, and you know it; but the enervated public
complains that the work is obscure forsooth: so we are always looking
for green grass--verdant meads, tall pines, vineyards, etc.
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