No More Learning

The world does not so exist--
no parts, palpable or impalpable, so exist--no result exists now without
being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so
backward without the farthest mentionable spot coining a bit nearer the
beginning than any other spot. . . . Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The
prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the
soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its
ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has
no particular Sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead
or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present,
matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible
forgiveness or deputed atonement--knows that the young man who composedly
perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while
the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches
and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning--and
that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to
prefer long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives
the indirect assuredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does
leaping onward and waiting to meet him again--and who in his spirit in any
emergency whatever neither hurries nor avoids death.

The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he
does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides--
and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang
on its neck with incomparable love--and if he be not himself the age
transfigured--and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives
similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and
inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its
inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day,
and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the
passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the
representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful
children of the wave--let him merge in the general run and wait his
development. . . . Still, the final test of poems or any character or work
remains. The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges
performer or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through
them? Does it still hold on untired?
Will the same style, and the direction
of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in
science, or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and
behaviour, fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have
the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing
detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved
long and long after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him?
and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old
think of him?

A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and
complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a
man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or
woman, but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last
under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and realise
and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring--
he brings neither cessation nor sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of
him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live
regions previously unattained. Thenceforward is no rest: they see the space
and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums.
The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars, and learns
one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and
chaos.