In another order, moral education would be best crowned if
it proved to have quick and profound control over the first
impulses; its finished work would be to set the soul in a state of
law, delivered from the delays of self-distrust; not action only,
but the desires would be in an old security, and a wish would come
to light already justified. This would be the second--if it were
not the only--liberty. Even so an intellectual education might
assuredly confer freedom upon first and solitary thoughts, and
confidence and composure upon the sallies of impetuous courage. In
a word, it should make a studious anthologist quite sure about
genius. And all who have bestowed, or helped in bestowing, the
liberating education have given their student the authority to be
free. Personal and singular the choice in such a book must be, not
without right.
Claiming and disclaiming so much, the gatherers may follow one
another to harvest, and glean in the same fields in different
seasons, for the repetition of the work can never be altogether a
repetition. The general consent of criticism does not stand still;
and moreover, a mere accident has until now left a poet of genius
of the past here and there to neglect or obscurity. This is not
very likely to befall again; the time has come when there is little
or nothing left to discover or rediscover in the sixteenth century
or the seventeenth; we know that there does not lurk another
Crashaw contemned, or another Henry Vaughan disregarded, or another
George Herbert misplaced.
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