Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/241

Rh evident that we cannot live by bread alone, even at the hands of the great mother. There '''Her triumph too prolonged. Cp. "Poets of America": pp. 464-466.''' is a longing and a need for emotion excited by action and life, for a more impassioned and dramatic mode,—that of a figure-school, so to speak, in both poesy and art. Not to "fresh woods and pastures new," but to human life with its throes and passions and activity, must the coming poet look for the inspirations that will establish his name and fame.

In my censure of didacticism I used that word in the usually adopted sense. Its radical '''Philosophic truth. The higher didacticism.''' meaning is not to be dismissed so lightly. If there is a base didacticism false to beauty and essentially commonplace, there is a nobly philosophic strain which I may call the poetry of wisdom. There is an imagination of the intellect, and its utterance is of a very high order,—often the prophecy of inspiration itself.

Were this not so, we should have to reverse time's judgment of intellectually poetic masterpieces from which have been derived the wisdom and the rubrics of many lands. Shall we rule out Ecclesiastes. the lofty voice of the Preacher, whose lesson that all save the fear of God is vanity has been reaffirmed by a cloud of witnesses, down to the chief of imaginative homilists in our own time? Whether prose or verse, I know nothing grander than Ecciesiastes in its impassioned survey of mortal pain and