The best
books are indeed the cheapest. For the price of a little beer, a little
tobacco, we can buy Shakespeare or Milton--or indeed almost as many books
as a man can read with profit in a year.
Nor, in considering the advantage of Poetry to man, must we limit
ourselves to its past or present influence. The future of Poetry, says Mr.
Matthew Arnold, and no one was more qualified to speak, "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. But for Poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of
illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the
idea _is_ the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its
unconscious Poetry. We should conceive of Poetry worthily, and more highly
than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as
capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies than those which in
general men have assigned to it hitherto.
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