Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/306

276 water-beetles perceiving only the ripples, comprehending little of the great waves of thought and expression, upon which we are borne along. The truth is that, alike in savagery and civilization, there never is a change from stagnation to life, from bondage to freedom, from apathy to feeling and passion, that does not beget its poets. At such a period we have the making of new names in song, as surely as deeds and fame in great wars come to men unknown before. It is true that the greatest compositions, in all the arts, are usually produced at culminating epochs of national development. But the period of that eminent group, the "elder American poets," surely has not been that of our full development. Theirs has been the first inspiring rise of the foot-hills, above which—after a stretch of mesa, or even a slight descent—range upon range are still to rise before we reach that culminating sierra-top whose height none yet can measure. Throughout this mountain-climbing, every time that a glowing and original poet appears, his art will be in vogue again.

Now, is such a poet the child of his period, or When comes the poet. does he come as if by warrant and create an environment for himself? From the first it seemed to me a flaw in the armor of Taine, otherwise our most catholic exponent of the principles of art, that he did not allow for the irrepressibleness of genius, for the historic evidence that now and then "God lets loose a man in the world." Such