which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
system.

But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because _he_
is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of