In short, -- and here I am ending this course with the idea
with which I began it, -- in short, it is the poet who must sit
at the centre of things here, as surely as some great One sits
at the centre of things Yonder, and who must teach us how to control,
with temperance and perfect art and unforgetfulness of detail,
all our oppositions, so that we may come to say with Aristotle, at last,
that poetry is more philosophical than philosophy and more historical
than history.
"Permit me to thank you earnestly for the patience with which
you have listened to many details that must have been dry to you;
and let me sincerely hope that, whatever may be your oppositions in life,
whether of the verse kind or the moral kind, you may pass, like Shakspere,
through these planes of the Dream Period and the Real Period,
until you have reached the ideal plane from which you clearly see
that wherever Prospero's art and Prospero's love and Prospero's
forgiveness of injuries rule in behavior, there a blue sky and a quiet heaven
full of sun and stars are shining over every tempest."*
--
* `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 328. I have quoted freely
from these lectures because they are in a form not easily accessible
to the general reader, and because, more than any other of his prose works,
they reveal the inner man.
--
One of the things which enabled Lanier to produce the effect that he did
in teaching literature was the fact that he was an excellent reader.
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