appeals to deeper principles, stirs more powerful emotions, imparts an assured sense of strength, is more intimate with our nature, or certainly it would not be tolerated.  There is no delight in the exhibition of misery as such, it is only painful and repulsive; we discard all vulgar horrors utterly, and keep no place for them in the mind.  Let, however, a poet touch the string, and there is another response when he brings before us pictures of regal grief, and gives grandeur to humiliation and penalty.  Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us.  His humbler minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of “Lycidas” to the elegiac verse of Tennyson.  George Herbert still speaks to this generation as two centuries ago he spoke to his own.  His quaint verses gather new beauties from time as they come to us redolent with the prayers and aspirations of many successions of the wives, mothers and daughters of England and America; bedewed with the tears of orphans and parents; an incitement to youth, a solace to age, a consolation for humanity to all time.

These have been costly gifts to our benefactors.  “I honor,” says Vaughan, “that temper which can lay by the garland when he might keep it on; which can pass by a rosebud and bid it grow when he is invited to crop it.”  This is the spirit of self-devotion in every worthy action, and especially of the pains and penalties by which poets have enriched our daily life.  We are indebted to the poets, too, for something more than the alleviation of sorrow.  Perhaps it is, upon the whole, a rarer gift to improve prosperity.  Joy, commonly, is less of a positive feeling than grief, and is more apt to slip by us unconsciously.  Few people, says the proverb, know when they are well off.  It is the poet’s vocation to teach the world this—­

            —­“to be possess’d with double pomp,
    To guard a title that was rich before,
    To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
    To throw a perfume on the violet.”

The poet lifts our eyes to the beauties of external nature, educates us to a keener participation in the sweet joys of affection, to the loveliness and grace of woman, to the honor and strength of manhood.  His ideal world thus becomes an actual one, as the creations of imagination first borrowed from sense, alight from the book, the picture or the statue once again to live and walk among us.

The resemblances which have induced us to bring together our sacred triumvirate of poets, are the common period in which they lived, their similar training in youth, a congenial bond of learning, a certain generous family condition, the inspiration of the old mother church out of which they sprung, the familiar discipline of sorrow, the early years in which they severally wrote.

A brief glance at their respective lives may indicate still further these similarities and point a moral which needs not many words to express—­which seems to us almost too sacred to be loudly or long dwelt upon.