Excerpt from Why Is It That Scotland, England, Ireland, Greece, Rome, Palestine, Arabia, and Young America Have All Had First-Rate Poets, While Many Other Countries Never Had Any?

In a well written criticism on a Scottish Poet which appeared in an American periodical many years ago, I met with this -question How is it that the popular mind or the Scotch has produced so large a portion of the very best poett ry The writer left the question unanswered. The inquiry struck me at the time, whether viewed in its national or phil osophical aspect, as worthy of serious consideration for I do not know any country in which poetry of such a high order has been produced by the. Popular mind, and where poetry, in all its excellencies, is so fully appreciated by the laboring people, as in Scotland. The poetry of a people is the cream of their thinking, and when the product is oi a high order, it is natural to inquire into the causes for no doubt, whether we can detect them or no, there are causes that account for this. But the attempt to reach these may be difficult, as this, if done at all. Can only be successfully done by a thorough analysis of some ofthe deepest and nicest elements of national character. Every scholar must regret that something of this kind was not done by some master mind among the Greeks. Had Plato or Aristotle - either of whom was quite capable of the task - investigated the causes whence Sprung the wonder ful poetry of Greece, the investigation would assuredly have t brown not only much light on the peculiar qualities of the poetiy of that people, but would have also unfolded manyof the deeper principles of the Greek mind, and explained not a' few of the social conditions of Grecian Society. It is true that somewhat of all this, bearing on the question under con sideration, may be gathered from the works of ancient histo rians, and more especially from the labors of critics and philosophers in their disquisitions on Greek poetry; yet it is plain that the special undertaking to which I refer, cannot be well accomplished now in reference either to the poetry of Greece or of Rome. For he who would successfully anal yze national character, so as to discern the elementary causes that have given rise to the poetry of a people, must not only know from written remains what that people were and what they did, but he must have lived among them, so as to have had a full Opportunity for observing all the nicer and deeper infi'uences by which the popular mind is moulded.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.