us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and man’s infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records.  Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son.  The tree of knowledge is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin guardians of the soul,—­the poet and the priest.  Conscience and imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their treasures, there is wisdom.  I desire to renew the long discussion of the nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry, or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this wisdom, which is the soul’s knowledge of itself, is stored up for the race in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms.  It is, by literary tradition and association, a proud task.  May I not take counsel of Spenser and be bold at the first door?  Sidney and Shelley pleaded this cause.  Because they spoke, must we be dumb? or shall not a noble example be put to its best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips?  The old hunt is up in the Muses’ bower; and I would fain speak for that learning which has to me been light.  I use this preface not unwillingly in open loyalty to studies on which my youth was nourished, and the masters I then loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made eloquent; my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they before drank from old fountains; but chiefly I name them as a reminder that the main argument is age-long; it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thus ceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of our warring nature where conflict is perpetual.  It goes on in the lives as well as on the lips of men.  It is a question how to live as well as how to express life.  Each race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but, change the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner of his few great thoughts.

The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age.  Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work of the past.  Victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns them to dark closets.  New times, new weapons, is the history of all warfare.  The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one quarter passes into denial.  Literature and the other arts of expression suffer throughout the world.  To that point is it come that those of the old stock who believe that the imagination