Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/159

Rh have been charged with "the longing for freedom, the same impulse toward unity, toward nationality, toward Italy." Poetry that has been the voice and force of a nation occupies, as I have said, a middle ground between our two extremes. It has an altruistic quality. The same generous fervor impetuously distinguished the trumpet-tongued lyrics of our Hebraic Whittier, and the unique outgivings of Lowell's various muse, in behalf of liberty and right. Those were "Noble Numbers;" and, in truth, the representative national sentiment—of which ideas of liberty, domesticity, and religion are chief components—pervades the lyrics of our elder American poets from Bryant to Taylor and Stoddard. Whitman's faith in the common people, in democracy strong and simple, has gained him world-wide honor. Subjective as they are, few poets, in any era or country—and historians will come to recognize this clearly—have been more national than our own.

The latest school, with its motto of art for art's sake, has industriously refined music, Self-conscious technicists. color, design, and the invention of forms. But its poets and painters show a kind of self-consciousness in the ostentatious preference of their art to themselves, even in their prostration at the feet of "Our Lady of Beauty." Their motive is so intrusive that the result, although alluring, often smacks of artisanship rather than of free and natural