The limitations of his theme and measure forbid more than a hint at this vocation of the poet, but it happens that we have a somewhat more explicit statement of the same general idea in a prose form. A very few weeks after the revelation referred to in the letter to Dr. Loring, too soon certainly for it to have faded from his mind, he sat down to write a paper on “The Plays of Thomas Middleton,” and the introductory passages contain what may fairly be taken as snatches from that music of the spheres which he seems suddenly to have overheard. “Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world. Driven, by their finer nature, to search into and reverently contemplate the universal laws of soul, they find some fragments of the broken tables of God’s law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity.... “The dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and day-breaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with quarrelling about the meaning of creeds which have no meaning at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying incredulity: for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and infallible saints in the next.” In such rhetorical terms did Lowell, all aflame himself with poetic zeal, try to outline the divine call of the poet, and the “Conversations” reënforce a doctrine which was held more firmly since the preacher was eager to display it in his own practice. At this time, certainly, Lowell’s conception of the function of the poet was blended with his apprehension of the divine order, and he entered upon the discharge of poetic duties with the seriousness which a young priest might have carried to the sacred office. The very suppression of his native humor, so that it makes only a few furtive leaps in his poetry up to this time,--for we are setting aside his boyish pranks in verse,--illustrates the exalted mood in which he was living. * * * * * The “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” was published, as we have seen, in January, 1845,[45] but as soon as his own part of the book was done, he was free for a more vital venture: on the 26th of December, 1844, after a five years’ betrothal, he was married in her father’s house at Watertown to Maria White. CHAPTER IV IN THE ANTI-SLAVERY RANKS 1845-1849