conceptions of form in art, and especially of literary form, which would enable us to see our way clear among misconception

uld exterminate the species. We first tested this case by laying it alongside the historic facts in the case: confining our view to England, we found that science and poetry had been developing alongside of each other ever since early in the seventeenth century; inquiring into the general effect of this long contact, we could only find that it was to make our general poetry greatly richer in substance and finer in form; and upon testing this abstract conclusion by a concrete examinat

inexplicable contradictory shadow of the infinite which is projected upon the finite; it is this multitudinous flickering of all the other ego's upon the tissue of my ego: these are the lights and shades and vaguenesses of mystery in which the modern imaginative effort delights. And here I cannot help adding to what was said on this subject in the last lecture, by declaring to every young man who may entertain the hope of poethood, that at this stage of the world you need not dream of winning the attention of sober people with your poetry unless that poetry, and your soul behind it, are informed and saturated at least with the largest final conceptions of current science. I do not mean that you are to write "Loves of the Plants;" I

become a democratic poetry, as contrasted with the supposed weak and aristocratic poetry of the present-I called your attention to a notable circumstance which seems to throw a curious light along this inquiry: that circumstance being that the two English poets who have most exclusively laid claim to represent the people in poetry, to express nothing but the people's heart in the people's words, namely Wordsworth and Whitman, are precisely the two whose audience has been most exclusively confined to the other extreme of culture. Wordsworth, instead of appealing to Hodge, Nok

s poetry, in spite of his belief that it is democratic, is really aristocratic to the last degree; and instead of belonging, as he asserts t

pon all the bad adjectives, rolling the "errors" and the "audacities" and the "viciousness" under his tongue and faithfully believing that the strength which recommends his future poetry is to come out of viciousness and ruffianly elections and the like; let us inquire, to what representative facts in our history does this picture correspond; what great democrat who has helped to "block out" this present republic, sat for this portrait? Is it George Washington, that beautiful, broad tranquil spirit whom, I sometimes think, even we Americans have never yet held quite at his true value,-is it Washington who

elegance, civiliz

sweet, the sucki

ncing mortal ri

he decay of the rugged

erica because-"Here are the roughs, be

regards as the essential of democracy; nowhere more of that grace which he considers fatal to it, than among the very representative democrats who blocked out this republic. In truth, when Whitman cries "fear the mellow sweet," and "beware the mortal ripening of nature", we have an instructive instance of the extreme folly into which a man may be led by mistaking a metaphor for an argum

no counterpart in nature. It is perfectly true that we have ruffianly nominations; but we have them because the real democrats who govern our republic, who represent our democracy, stay away from nominating conventions and leave them to the ruffians. Surely no one can look with the most cursory eye upon our everyday American life without seeing that the real advance of our society goes on not only without, but largely in spite of that ostensible apparatus, legislative, executive, judicial which we call the Government, &c.; that really the most effective legislation in our country is that which is enacted in t

we punish them, they are not representative, they have no more rela

gh-life consisting of the measureless viciousness, the dishonesty, and the like. Cannot stomach it, no; who could? But how absurd to come down to this republic, to American society for these things! Alas, I know an Englishman, who, three h