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For there might be a poetry which would be the hymn of divine

perfection, the harmony of goodness and truth among men: a strain

which should renew the youth of the world, and bring back the

ages in which the poet was man's only teacher and best

friend,-which would find materials in the living present as well

as in the romance of the past, and might subdue to the fairest

forms of speech and verse the intractable materials of modern

civilisation,-which might elicit the simple principles, or, as

Plato would have called them, the essential forms, of truth and

justice out of the variety of opinion and the complexity of

modern society,-which would preserve all the good of each

generation and leave the bad unsung,-which should be based not on

vain longings or faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into

the nature of man.