The second part will have for its object an application of these principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealise the modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. FOOTNOTES: [1] _De Augment. Scient._, cap. 1., lib. iii. [2] See the _Filum Labyrinthi_, and the Essay on Death particularly. [3] Macbeth, act iii. scene 2. [4] A misquotation of Mark iv. 25.--Ed. [5] A misquotation of Ecclesiastes vii. 2.--Ed. [6] Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners. [_Author’s note._] [7] Paradise Lost, Book I. l, 254-5. [Decoration] ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS. A Fragment.