What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and
eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? What all
through the wanderings of Virgil's Aeneas? Then to Shakspere's
characters--Hamlet, Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What
was Nature to Rousseau, to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his
little classical court gardens? In those presentments in Tennyson (see
the "Idylls of the King"--what sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold
Nature, inimitably described, better than any, fit for princes
and knights and peerless ladies--wrathful or peaceful, just the
same--Vivien and Merlin in their strange dalliance, or the death-float
of Elaine, or Geraint and the long journey of his disgraced Enid and
himself through the wood, and the wife all day driving the horses,) as
in all the great imported art-works, treatises systems, from Lucretius
down, there is a constantly lurking often pervading something, that
will have to be eliminated, as not only unsuited to modern democracy
and science in America, but insulting to them, and disproved by
them.[37]
Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior,
but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man.
I haven't said anything about the imperative need of a race of giant
bards in the future, to hold up high to eyes of land and race the
eternal antiseptic models, and to dauntlessly confront greed,
injustice, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots
never die--(my opinion is, that after all the rest is advanced, _that_
is what first-class poets are for; as, to their days and occasions,
the Hebrew lyrists, Roman Juvenal, and doubtless the old singers of
India, and the British Druids)--to counteract dangers, immensest ones,
already looming in America--measureless corruption in politics--what
we call religion, a mere mask of wax or lace;--for _ensemble_, that
most cankerous, offensive of all earth's shows--a vast and varied
community, prosperous and fat with wealth of money and products and
business ventures--plenty of mere intellectuality too--and
then utterly without the sound, prevailing, moral and esthetic
health-action beyond all the money and mere intellect of the world.
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