decide which is intrinsically the better thing, a column of a newspaper
or a column of attack, Wordsworth's "Lines on Immortality" or
Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done,
though posterity seems to remember literature the longest. The writer
is not celebrated for having been the favorite of the conqueror, but
sometimes the conqueror only for having favored or even for having
spurned the writer. "When the great Sultan died, his power and glory
departed from him, and nothing remained but this one fact, that he knew
not the worth of Ferdousi." There is a slight delusion in this dazzling
glory. What a fantastic whim the young lieutenants thought it, when
General Wolfe, on the eve of battle, said of Gray's "Elegy," "Gentlemen,
I would rather have written that poem than have taken Quebec." Yet,
no doubt, it is by the memory of that remark that Wolfe will live the
longest,--aided by the stray line of another poet, still reminding us,
not needlessly, that "Wolfe's great name's cotemporal with our own."

Once the poets and the sages were held to be pleasing triflers, fit for
hours of relaxation in the lulls of war. Now the pursuits of peace are
recognized as the real, and war as the accidental. It interrupts
all higher avocations, as does the cry of fire: when the fire is
extinguished, the important affairs of life are resumed. Six years ago
the London "Times" was bewailing that all thought and culture in England
were suspended by the Crimean War. "We want no more books. Give us good
recruits, at least five feet seven, a good model for a floating-battery,
and a gun to take effect at five thousand yards,--and Whigs and Tories,
High and Low Church, the poets, astronomers, and critics, may settle it
among themselves." How remote seems that epoch now! and how remote will
the present soon appear! while art and science will resume their sway
serene, beneath skies eternal. Yesterday I turned from treatises on
gunnery and fortification to open Milton's Latin Poems, which I had