The chief trait of any given poet is always the spirit he brings to the observation of Humanity and Nature⁠—the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects. What kind of temper and what amount of faith report these things? Up to how recent a date is the song carried? What the equipment, and special raciness of the singer⁠—what his tinge of coloring? The last value of artistic expressers, past and present⁠—Greek aesthetes, Shakespeare⁠—or in our own day Tennyson, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Emerson⁠—is certainly involv’d in such questions. I say the profoundest service that poems or any other writings can do for their reader is not merely to satisfy the intellect, or supply something polish’d and interesting, nor even to depict great passions, or persons or events, but to fill him with vigorous and clean manliness, religiousness, and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit. The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuyed for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all. Fortunately there is the original inexhaustible fund of buoyancy, normally resident in the race, forever eligible to be appeal’d to and relied on.