It is here, however, that Pushkin is unsurpassed. One must go to Heine, one must go to Uhland, to Goethe, to find the like of him. And what makes him master here is the fact that his sentiment comes out pure, that it comes forth fused. And it comes thus because it comes from the depths; and as such it must find response even in an Anglo-Saxon heart, provided it has not yet been eaten into by Malthusian law and scientific charity. Pushkin's sentiment extorts respect even where it finds no longer any response; and as the sight of nobility stirs a healthy soul to noble deeds, as the sight of beauty refines the eye, so the presence of true sentiment can only awaken whatever sentiment already sleeps within us. It is for supplying this glaring defect in the English poets that a reading of Pushkin becomes invaluable. I almost fear to quote or compare. Sentiment cannot be argued about; like all else of the highest, deepest, like God, like love, it must be _felt_. Where it is understood, nothing need be said; where it is not understood, nothing can be said.... 31. And yet a single example I venture to give. Pushkin's "Inspiring Love" and Wordsworth's "Phantom of Delight" treat of the same theme. Pushkin sees his beloved again, and after years-- "Enraptured beats again my heart, And risen are for it again Both reverence and Inspiration And life, and tears, and love." Wordsworth also gets now a nearer view of his "Phantom of Delight;" and the sight rouses him to this pitch of enthusiastic sentiment: "And now I see with eye serene, The very pulse of the _machine_." In the presence of such bungling, I am almost ashamed to call attention, not to the machine that has a pulse, but to that noble woman who, purified, clarified in the imagination by the heat of a melted heart, can only become to the poet, a--machine. And this is the poet (whose very essence should be sensitiveness, delicacy, _sentiment_) who is ranked by Matthew Arnold as the greatest poet since Shakespeare.... 32. I have given only one example, though there is hardly a volume of English poetry, with the possible exception of those of Burns, which does not furnish dozens of examples. If I give only one, it is because I have in mind Æsop's lioness, who gave such smart reply when chided for giving birth to only one young.... 33. There is, indeed, one poet in the English language whose pages throb with sentiment, and who is moreover singularly free from that literary vice which I have called insincerity of imagination; in purity of pictures, in simplicity of sentiment, Goldsmith is unsurpassed in any tongue, but Goldsmith was not an Anglo-Saxon. And even Macaulay's great praise of "The Traveller" has not been sufficient to give it a place of _authority_ among readers. The persons that read "The Traveller" once a year, as such a possession for all times should be read by rational readers, are very few.