The poet’s gift, then, is that of seer. He it is that discovers the truth as it exists in types and images; that is the spiritual meaning, which abides forever under the sensual. And his instinct is to express himself also in types and images. But it was not only necessary that he himself should be delighted with his vision, but that he should interest his hearers with the faculty divine. Pure truth is not acceptable to the mental palate. It must be diluted with character and incident; it must be humanized in order to be attractive. If the bones of a mastodon be exhumed, a crowd will gather out of curiosity; but let the skeleton of a man be turned up, and what a difference in the expression of the features! Every bystander then creates his little drama, in which those whitened bones take flesh upon them and stalk as chief actor. The poet is he who can best see or best say what is ideal; what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he celebrates the brave and good, or the gods, or the beautiful as it appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still clings to him. He may be unconscious of his mission; he may be false to it, but in proportion as he is a great poet, he rises to the level of it more often. He does not always directly rebuke what is bad or base, but indirectly, by making us feel what delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil it is with such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the mean and low and bad. It is something to be thought of, that all the great poets have been good men. He who translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual, is the reverse of a poet.