So, then, there is room for a new Virgil, but his theme is _here_;--one who need not despair, if he be able to bring to his subject those excellent parts this author speaks of, of getting as much glory of eloquence, wit, and learning, in the expressing of the _observations of this husbandry_, as those have had who have sketched the ideal forms of the human life, the dream of what should be. The copies and exemplars of good,--that vision of heaven,--that idea of felicity, and beauty, and goodness that the human soul brings with it, like a memory,--those celestial shapes that the thought and heart of man, by a law in nature, project,--that garden of delights that all men remember, and yearn for, and aspire to, and will have, in one form or another, in delicate air patterns, or gross deceiving images,--that large, intense, ideal good which men desire--that perfection and felicity, so far above the rude mocking realities which experience brings them,--that, _that_ has had its poets. No lack of these exemplars the historian finds, when he comes to make out his report of the condition of his kind--where he comes to bring in his inventory of the human estate: when so much is wanting, that good he reports '_not_ deficient.' Edens in plenty,--gods, and demi-gods, and heroes, _not_ wanting; the purest abstract notions of virtue and felicity, the most poetic embodiments of them, are put down among the goods which the human estate, as it is, comprehends. This part of the subject appears, to the critical reviewer, to have been exhausted by the poets and artists that mankind has always employed to supply its wants in this field. No room for a poet here! The draught of the ideal Eden is finished;--the divine exemplar is finished; that which is wanting is,--_the husbandry thereunto_. Till now, the philosophers and poetic teachers had always taken their stand at once, on the topmost peak of Olympus, pouring down volleys of scorn, and amazement, and reprehension, upon the vulgar nature they saw beneath, made out of the dust of the ground, and qualified with the essential attributes of that material,--kindled, indeed, with a breath of heaven, but made out of clay,--different kinds of clay,--with more or less of the Promethean spark in it; but always clay, of one kind or another, and always compelled to listen to the laws that are common to the kinds of that substance. And it was to this creature, thus bound by nature, thus _doubly_ bound,--'crawling between earth and heaven,' as the poet has it,--that these winged philosophers on the ideal cliffs, thought it enough to issue their mandates, commanding it to renounce its conditions, to ignore its laws, and come up thither at a word,--at a leap,--making no ado about it. 'I can call spirits from the vasty deep.' 'And so can I, and so can any man;' Says the new philosopher-- 'But will they _come?_ _Will they come_--when you do call for them?'