At least let us have healthy books, a stout horse-rake or a kitchen range which is not cracked.  Let not the poet shed tears only for the public weal.  He should be as vigorous as a sugar-maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds.  The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter.  He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.  We love to think in winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick folds of fur, impervious to cold.  Alas, the poet too is, in one sense, a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances; his words are the relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom drawn from the remotest experience.  Other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile, like hawks, that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then.

There are already essays and poems, the growth of this land, which are not in vain, all which, however, we could conveniently have stowed in the till of our chest.  If the gods permitted their own inspiration to be breathed in vain, these might be overlooked in the crowd, but the accents of truth are as sure to be heard at last on earth as in heaven.  They already seem ancient, and in some measure have lost the traces of their modern birth.  Here are they who

   “ask for that which is our whole life’s light,
   For the perpetual, true and clear insight.”

I remember a few sentences which spring like the sward in its native pasture, where its roots were never disturbed, and not as if spread over a sandy embankment; answering to the poet’s prayer,

                “Let us set so just
   A rate on knowledge, that the world may trust
   The poet’s sentence, and not still aver
   Each art is to itself a flatterer.”

But, above all, in our native port, did we not frequent the peaceful games of the Lyceum, from which a new era will be dated to New England, as from the games of Greece.  For if Herodotus carried his history to Olympia to read, after the cestus and the race, have we not heard such histories recited there, which since our countrymen have read, as made Greece sometimes to be forgotten?—­Philosophy, too, has there her grove and portico, not wholly unfrequented in these days.

Lately the victor, whom all Pindars praised, has won another palm, contending with

   “Olympian bards who sung
   Divine ideas below,
   Which always find us young,
   And always keep us so.”

What earth or sea, mountain or stream, or Muses’ spring or grove, is safe from his all-searching ardent eye, who drives off Phoebus’ beaten track, visits unwonted zones, makes the gelid Hyperboreans glow, and the old polar serpent writhe, and many a Nile flow back and hide his head!