See how the Christian Theism, for instance, has held itself high above most men’s heads till now; its tender truths above all cavil and debate by their transcendent purity and ideal beauty! how these truths still survive in all their freshness, keeping verdant the Founder’s memory! and shall to distant generations; churches, peoples, persons, a widening Christendom, flourishing or fading as they spring forth, or fall away from this living stem. “The Sun of Man, at last the son of woman, Brother of all men, and the Prince of Peace, Grafts, on the solemn valor of the Roman, _Fresh Saxon service_, and the wit of Greece.” Now, am I saying that our poet is inspiring this fresher Faith? Certainly I mean to be so understood; he, the chiefest of its bards and heralds. Not spoken always, ’tis implied, nevertheless, in his teachings; defective, it is admitted, as colored by his temperament, which trenches on Personal Theism not a little by the stress he lays on Nature, on Fate; yet more nearly complementing the New England Puritanism than aught we have, and coming nearest to satisfying the aspirations of our time. But it were the last thought of his, this conceiving himself the oracle of any Faith, the leader of any school, any sect of religionists. His genius is ethical, literary; he speaks to the moral sentiments through the imagination, insinuating the virtues so, as poets and moralists of his class are wont. The Sacred Class, the Priests, differ in this,—they address the moral sentiment directly, thus enforcing the sanctions of personal righteousness, and celebrating moral excellence in prophetic strain. ’Tis everything to have a true believer in the world, dealing with men and matters as if they were divine in idea and real in fact; meeting persons and events at a glance directly, not at a million removes, and so passing fair and fresh into life and literature, the delight and ornament of the race. Pure literatures are personal inspirations, springing fresh from the Genius of a people. They are original; their first fruits being verses, essays, tales, biographies—productions as often of obscure as of illustrious persons. And such, so far as we have a literature, is ours. Of the rest, how much is foreign both in substance and style, and might have been produced elsewhere! His, I consider original and American; the earliest, purest our country has produced,—best answering the needs of the American mind. Consider how largely our letters have been enriched by his contributions. Consider, too, the change his views have wrought in our methods of thinking; how he has won over the bigot, the unbeliever, at least to tolerance and moderation, if not to acknowledgment, by his circumspection and candor of statement.