The epochs of AEschylus and Shakespeare make us feel
their preeminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of
literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only
beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall
die in the wilderness: but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted
it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among
contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with
posterity.
THE STUDY OF POETRY[62]
"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy
of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever
surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an
accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received
tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has
materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached
its emotion to the fact, and how the fact is failing it. But for poetry
the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine
illusion.
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