No More Learning

Its quality goes
through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be
chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and that finish the
verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative,
and has vista. Here comes one among the well-beloved stone-cutters, and
plans with decision and science, and sees the solid and beautiful forms of
the future where there are now no solid forms.

Of all nations, the United States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most
needs poets, and will doubtless have the greatest, and use them the
greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as
their poets shall. Of all mankind, the great poet is the equable man. Not
in him, but off from him, things are grotesque or eccentric, or fail of
their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good, and nothing in its place is
bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions, neither
more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse, and he is the key. He is
the equaliser of his age and land: he supplies what wants supplying, and
checks what wants checking. If peace is the routine, out of him speaks the
spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building vast and populous cities,
encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce--lighting the study of
man, the soul, immortality--federal, state or municipal government,
marriage, health, free-trade, intertravel by land and sea--nothing too
close, nothing too far off,--the stars not too far off. In war, he is the
most deadly force of the war.
Who recruits him recruits horse and foot: he
fetches parks of artillery, the best that engineer ever knew. If the time
becomes slothful and heavy, he knows how to arouse it: he can make every
word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or
obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master
him, he masters it. High up out of reach, he stands turning a concentrated
light; he turns the pivot with his finger; he baffles the swiftest runners
as he stands, and easily overtakes and envelops them. The time straying
toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by his steady
faith; he spreads out his dishes; he offers the sweet firm-fibred meat that
grows men and women. His brain is the ultimate brain. He is no arguer, he
is judgment. He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling
around a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest, he has the most faith.
His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. In the talk on the soul
and eternity and God, off of his equal plane, he is silent. He sees
eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement: he sees eternity
in men and women,--he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. Faith
is the antiseptic of the soul,--it pervades the common people and preserves
them: they never give up believing and expecting and trusting. There is
that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person
that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet
sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and
perfect as the greatest artist.