Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/34

4 most sane poetic impulse, in the spirit of its founder, devoted though he was, through a long and sturdy lifetime, to material pursuits. Its growth must largely depend on the awakening from time to time, in other generous spirits, of a like energy, a similarly constructive imagination.

Amongst all gracious evidences of this ideality The Percy Turnbull Memorial Lectureship: thus far calendared, I think of few more noteworthy, of none more beautiful, than those to which we owe the first endowed lectureship of poetry in the United States; the second foundation strictly of its kind, if I mistake not, throughout the universities of the English-speaking world.

Whenever a university foundation is established for the study of elemental matters,—of scientific truth or human ideality,—we return to motives from which the antique and the mediæval schools chiefly derived their impulse, if not their constitution. The founders would restore a balance between the arbitrary and the fundamental mode of education. The resulting gain is not the overflow of collegiate resources, not the luxury of learning; not decoration, its fine significance. but enhanced construction. We have a fresh search after the inmost truth of things, the verities of which the Anglo-Florentine songstress was mindful when she averred that poets are your only truth-tellers; of which, also, Lowell, in his soliloquy of "Columbus," was profoundly conscious when he made the discoverer say:—