And, first, is there any basis whatever in _history_ for the notion that poetry flourishes best where enlightenment is least; that it is some sort of noxious weed which cannot bear the intellectual sunshine? Do we find the most consummate poets in a semi-barbarian world? Do we find our Anglo-Saxon fore-fathers in this respect superior to Chaucer, Chaucer superior to Shakespeare? Is Goethe the inferior of Hans Sachs in any poetic quality, or still more the inferior of the nameless author of the _Nibelungen Lied_? Is the verse of Caedmon of imagination more compact than _Paradise Lost_? Or is the _Roman de la Rose_ more poetical, in any sense ever attributed to the term, than _La Legende des Siecles_? No one, however bold, will say "yes" to questions put with this undisguised directness. The poetical pessimists will not dispassionately examine plain facts. They take English literature and point to the now remote date of Shakespeare; they take Italian literature and remind us that Dante has been dead nearly six centuries; they take the literature of Greece and triumphantly observe that its greatest poet, Homer, was its earliest. They ignore the essential fact that transcendent genius is the phenomenon of a thousand years; that we must not demand a recurrence even of second-rate genius in every generation or even in every century. Without the altogether extraordinary genius of Shakespeare, English poetry culminates, not in the age of Elizabeth, but in the nineteenth century. Without the unique marvel of the mind of Dante, the poetry of Italy is at its highest in the sixteenth century of Tasso and Ariosto, not in the fourteenth century of the subtle amorist Petrarch. Remove the one name of Homer, and you bring the crowning glory of Grecian poetry at least three or four centuries later, to the era of Pindar, AEschylus, and Sophocles. We cannot judge the laws of general progress by unique instances of individual genius. These are the comets and meteors of the literary heavens. To judge of a generation's capacity for poetry, we must compare, not a Shakespeare with a Shelley or a Wordsworth, but the _average_ spirit, the average power of insight and expression, of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, with those of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. And who will maintain, that in force of imagination, in truth of vision, in grasp of the ideal side of things, in beautiful expression of elusive thoughts, in lyric rapture, the Elizabethans are equal to the Georgian and Victorian poets?