Till America has learned to love Art, not as an amusement, not as a mere ornament of her cities, not as a superstition of what is _comme il faut_ for a great nation, but for its harmonizing and ennobling energy, for its power of making men better by arousing in them the perception of their own instincts for what is beautiful and sacred and religious, and an eternal rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people, and raises it from a dead name to a living power. Were our little mother-island sunk beneath the sea; or worse, were she conquered by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakspeare would be an immortal England, and would conquer countries when the bones of her last sailor had kept their ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside the quenched thunders of her navy. This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair, the noble, and the true will never cease out of the world till the God from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that the sacred duty and noble office of the poet is to reveal and justify them to man; that as long as the soul endures, endures also the theme of new and unexampled song; that while there is grace in grace, love in love, and beauty in beauty, God will still send poets to find them, and bear witness of them, and to hang their ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. _God with us_ is forever the mystical theme of the hour that is passing. The lives of the great poets teach us that they were men of their generation who felt most deeply the meaning of the Present. I have been more painfully conscious than any one else could be of the inadequacy of what I have been able to say, when compared to the richness and variety of my theme. I shall endeavor to make my apology in verse, and will bid you farewell in a little poem in which I have endeavored to express the futility of all _effort_ to speak the loveliness of things, and also my theory of where the Muse is to be found, if ever. It is to her that I sing my hymn. Mr. Lowell here read an original poem of considerable length, which concluded the lecture, and was received with bursts of applause.