Goethe!—Here is Byron: grand, dark poet; a great spirit—a soul like the ocean; generous lover of America; fiery trumpet of liberty; a sword for the human cause in Greece; a torch for the human mind in _Cain_; a life that redeemed its every fault by taking a side, which was the human side; tempest of scorn in his first poem, tempest of scorn and laughter in his last poem, only against the things that wrong man; vast bud of the Infinite that Death alone prevented from its vaster flower; immense, seminal, electrical, dazzling Byron.—But _Beppo_—O! But _Don Juan_—O fie! Not to mention the Countess Guiccioli—ah, me! Prepare quickly the yellow envelope, and out with Byron!—Here is Cervantes: open _Don Quixote_, paragon of romances, highest result of Spain, best and sufficient reason for her life among the nations, a laughing novel which is a weeping poem. But talk such as this of Sancho Panza and Tummas Cecial under the cork-trees, and these coarse stories and bawdy words and this free and gross comedy—is it to be endured? Out with Cervantes!—Here is another, a sun of literature, moving in a vast orbit with dazzling plenitudes of power and beauty; the one only modern European poet and novelist worthy to rank with the first; permanent among the fleeting; a demigod of letters among the pigmies; a soul of the antique strength and sadness, worthy to stand as the representative of the high thought and hopes of the nineteenth century—Victor Hugo! Now open _Les Misérables_. See the great passages which the American translator softens and the English translator tears away. Open this other book of his, _William Shakespeare_, a book with only one grave fault, the omission of the words “A Poem” from the title-page; a book which is the courageous arch, the comprehending sky of criticism, but which no American publisher will dare to issue, or, if he does, will expurgate. Out with Hugo, of course!—Here is Juvenal, terrible and splendid fountain of all satire; inspiration of all just censure; exemplar of all noble rage at baseness; satirist and moralist sublimed into the poet; the scowl of the unclouded noon above the low streets of folly and of sin. But what he withers, he also shows. The sun-stroke of his poetry reveals what it kills. Juvenal tells all. His fidelity of exposure is frightful. Mr. Harlan would make short work of him. Out with Juvenal!—Open the divine _Apocalypse_. What words are these among the thunderings and lightnings and voices? Is this a poem to be read aloud in parlors (for such appears to be the test of propriety and purity)? At least, John might have been a little more choice in language. Some of these texts are “indecent.” Yes, indeed! John must go.—Here is Spenser. Encyclopædic poet of the visioned chivalry. It is all there. Amadis, Esplandian, Tirante the White, Palmerin of England, all those Paladin romances were but the leaves: this is the flower. A lost dream of valor, chastity, courtesy, glory—a dream that marks an age of human