Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world.
Driven by their fine nature to search into and reverently contemplate
the universal laws of the soul, they find some fragment of the broken
tables of God's law, and interpret it, half-conscious of its mighty
import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at
snapdragon with, the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent
deeps of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one
central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the
universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by
contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity. Not unwisely
ordered is that eternal destiny which renders the seer despised of
men, since thereby he is but the more surely taught to lay his head
meekly upon the mother-breast of Nature, and harken to the musical
soft beating of her bounteous heart.
[Footnote 35: From an essay contributed to _The Pioneer_ in 1843.
Lowell was the founder and editor of _The Pioneer_, Robert Carter
being his associate. The magazine lived only three months. Charles
Eliot Norton, the editor of Lowell's "Letters," says it "left its
projectors burdened with a considerable debt." "I am deeply in debt,"
wrote Lowell afterward, when hesitating to undertake a journey, "and
feel a twinge for every cent I spend."]
That Poesy, save as she can soar nearer to the blissful throne of the
Supreme Beauty, is of no more use than all other beautiful things are,
we are fain to grant. That she does not add to the outward wealth of
the body, and that she is only so much more excellent than any bodily
gift as spirit is more excellent than matter, we must also yield. But,
inasmuch as all beautiful things are direct messages and revelations
of himself, given us by our Father, and as Poesy is the searcher out
and interpreter of all these, tracing by her inborn sympathy the
invisible nerves which bind them harmoniously together, she is to be
revered and cherished. The poet has a fresher memory of Eden, and of
the path leading back thereto, than other men; so that we might almost
deem him to have been conceived, at least, if not borne and nursed,
beneath the ambrosial shadow of those dimly remembered bowers, and to
have had his infant ears filled with the divine converse of angels,
who then talked face to face with his sires, as with beloved younger
brethren, and of whose golden words only the music remained to him,
vibrating forever in his soul, and making him yearn to have all sounds
of earth harmonize therewith. In the poet's lofty heart Truth hangs
her aerie, and there Love flowers, scattering thence her winged seeds
over all the earth with every wind of heaven. In all ages the poet's
fiery words have goaded men to remember and regain their ancient
freedom, and, when they had regained it, have tempered it with a love
of beauty, so as that it should accord with the freedom of nature, and
be as unmovably eternal as that. The dreams of poets are morning
dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and daybreaking of great
truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as
children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with
quarreling about the meaning of creeds, which have no meaning at all,
listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying
incredulity; for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and
infallible saints in the next.
We love to go back to the writings of our old poets, for we find in
them the tender germs of many a thought which now stands like a huge
oak in the inward world, an ornament and a shelter. We can not help
reading with awful interest what has been written or rudely scrawled
upon the walls of this our earthly prison house, by former dwellers
therein. From that which centuries have established, too, we may draw
true principles of judgment for the poetry of our own day. A right
knowledge and apprehension of the past teaches humbleness and
self-sustainment to the present. Showing us what has been, it also
reveals what can be done. Progress is Janus-faced, looking to the
bygone as well as to the coming; and radicalism should not so much
busy itself with lopping off the dead or seeming dead limbs, as with
clearing away that poisonous rottenness around the roots, from which
the tree has drawn the principle of death into its sap. A love of the
beautiful and harmonious, which must be the guide and forerunner to
every onward movement of humanity, is created and cherished more
surely by pointing out what beauty dwells in anything, even the most
deformed (for there is something in that also, else it could not even
be), than by searching out and railing at all the foulnesses in
nature.
Not till we have patiently studied beauty can we safely venture to
look at defects, for not till then can we do it in that spirit of
earnest love, which gives more than it takes away. Exultingly as we
hail all signs of progress, we venerate the past also. The tendrils of
the heart, like those of ivy, cling but the more closely to what they
have clung to long, and even when that which they entwine crumbles
beneath them, they still run greenly over the ruin, and beautify those
defects which they can not hide. The past as well as the present,
molds the future, and the features of some remote progenitor will
revive again freshly in the latest offspring of the womb of time. Our
earth hangs well-nigh silent now, amid the chorus of her sister orbs,
and not till past and present move harmoniously together will music
once more vibrate on this long silent chord in the symphony of the
universe.