Lectures on English Poets

In literature, as in religion and politics, there is a class of men who may be called Fore-runners. As there were brave men before Agamemnon, so there must have been brave poets before Homer. All of us, the great as well as the little, are the result of the entire Past. It is but just that we should remember now and then that the very dust in the beaten highways of thought is that of perhaps nameless saints and heroes who thought and suffered and died to make commonplace practicable to us. Men went to the scaffold or the stake for ideas and principles which we set up in our writings and our talk as thoughtlessly as a printer sticks his type, and the country editor, when he wrote his last diatribe on the freedom of the press, dipped his pen without knowing it in the blood of the martyrs. It would be well for us to remember, now and then, our dusty benefactors, and to be conscious that we are under bonds to the Present to the precise amount that we are indebted to the Past.

Thus, from one point of view, there is nothing more saddening than a biographical dictionary. It is like a graveyard of might-have-beens and used-to-be's, of fames that never ripened and of fames already decayed. Here lies the great Thinker who stammered and could not find the best word for his best thought, and so the fame went to some other who had the gift of tongues. Here lies the gatherer of great masses of learning from which another was to distil the essence, and to get his name upon all the phials and show-bills. But if these neglected headstones preach the vanity of a selfish ambition, they teach also the better lesson that every man's activity belongs not to himself but to his kind, and whether he will or not must serve at last some other, greater man. We are all foot-soldiers, and it is out of the blood of a whole army of us that iron enough is extracted to make the commemorative sword that is voted to the great Captain.