the only reality. "True it is," says my historian of the world, "that among many other benefits for which it hath been honoured, in this one it triumpheth over all human knowledge, that it hath given us life in our understanding, since the world itself had life and beginning even to this day; yea, it hath triumphed over times which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over." You poets and philosophers are often like alchemists: you seek for the absolute, and believe that you can get a poem, or a philosophy, or some other chemic stuff, to hold the immortality about which you keep such a clutter. But in the end all goes into the crucible of History, and the residue, after refining, is pure historical value. A poet is popular to-day; the popularity is stripped off him tomorrow, and what is left? Nothing but his historical value. A religion perishes, or rather it does not perish, it sheds its followers, and leads a new and more assured existence in the pages of History. What a granite-like calm stability it has then compared with its fume and fret while it believed itself the absolute! Listen to the noisy declamations of a latter-day Protestant against the Romishness of Rome and the Papistry of the Pope, and then read the tremendous history of the Papacy. Which is the greater reality? Believe me, there is nothing but History in the world. A knowledge of History is the panacea for ignorance and prejudice; it checks the utterance of a thousand foolishnesses, and paralyses hundreds of idle tongues. Even our conversation, I venture to think, might have been some sentences shorter if you had studied. History. But like it or not, to this favour you must come. It is the history of Poetry that will interest the men of the future. They will have tunes of their own to tinkle in their idle hours.
Poet. See the avarice of knowledge. No single art ever says to another, "Stand aside, I can do your work." I do not stop the brass-beater with an offer to describe the shield he is making.But
