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1828] BEAUTY— ENGLISH POETS 253

of the house they want to buy. The chance is very greatly against her possessing those virtues and general principles which they most value. For they know of what delicacy and rarity is the nature of those fruits, and with what difficult and long separated steps they themselves reached them. Yet a mighty testimony is afforded to the moral harmony of human nature, in the fact that the deportment of a beautiful woman in the presence of her admirer never offends point blank against the great laws whose violation would surely shock him.

the

[THE SPLENDOUR OF ENGLISH POETRY]

Is it not true, what we so reluctantly hear, that men are but the mouthpiece of a great progressive Destiny, in as much as regards literature? I had rather asked, is not the age gone by of great splendour of English poetry, and will it not be impossible for any age soon to vie with the pervading etherial poesy of Herbert, Shakspeare, Marvell, Herrick, Milton, Ben Jonson; at least to represent anything like their peculiar form of ravishing verse? It is the head of human poetry. Homer and Virgil and Dante and Tasso and Byron and Wordsworth have powerful genius whose amplest claims I cheerfully ac

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knowledge. But 't is a pale ineffectual fire when theirs shines. They would lie on my shelf in undisturbed honour for years, if these Saxon lays stole on my ear. I have for them an affectionate admiration I have for nothing else. They set me on speculations. They move my wonder at myself. They suggest the great endowment of the spiritual man. They open glimpses of the heaven that is in the intellect. When I am caught by a magic word and drop the book to explore the infinite charm-to run along the line of that ray-I feel the longevity of the mind; I admit the evidence of the immortality of the soul. Well, as I said, I am afraid the season of this rare fruit is irrecoverably past; that the earth has made such a nutation of its nodes, that the heat will never reach again that Hesperian garden in which alone these apricots and pomegranates grew.

[FORGIVENESS]

DIVINITY HALL, December 20, 1828. "Forgive our sins." Were it not desirable that we should have a guardian angel that should go on our errands between heaven and earth, that should tell us how God receives our actions; when he smiles and when he frowns; what peti

1828]

ELLEN TUCKER

255

tions he hears with favour, and what he rejects? Well, we have such a report rendered back to us. Consider this prayer, Forgive our sins. I believe every man may answer to himself when he utters this ejaculation, the precise degree of consideration it has received from the Almighty mind. That consideration depends wholly upon the sentiment which accompanied the prayer. If when I say Forgive my sins, I am in a frame of mind that sorrowfully repents of all my perversity, if I am struck with a deep and contrite sense of the enormity of sin; if I feel the evil of guilt and the virtue to sin no more, then God hears

me.

CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE,

December 21, 1828.

I have now been four days engaged to Ellen Louisa Tucker. Will my Father in Heaven regard us with kindness, and as he hath, as we trust, made us for each other, will he be pleased to strengthen and purify and prosper and eternize our affection!

[On Edward's happy recovery of his mental balance, though his general health was permanently broken, Waldo took him, for a change, with him to Concord, New Hampshire, where

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