little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
certain outward respects, but essentially the same.

And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epea
pteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferring
good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as