140 BIRDS AND POETS 
taigne. The quality of simple manhood, and the 
universal human traits which form the bond of 
union between man and man,— which form the basis 
of society, of the family, of government, of friend- 
ship,— are quite overlooked; and the credit is given 
to some special facility, or brilliant and lucky hit. 
Does, any one doubt that the great poets and artists 
are made up mainly of the most common universal 
human and heroic characteristics? —that in them, 
though working to other ends, is all that construct 
the soldier, the sailor, the farmer, the discoverer, 
the bringer-to-pass in any field, and that their work 
is good and enduring in proportion as it is saturated 
and fertilized by the qualities of these? Good hu- 
man stock is the main dependence. No great poet 
ever appeared except from a race of good fighters, 
good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders. Litera- 
ture dies with the decay of the wn-literary element. 
It is not in the spirit of something far away in the 
clouds or under the moon, something ethereal, vis- 
ionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo, Dante, and 
Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of the common 
Nature and the homeliest facts; through these, and 
not away from them, the path of the creator lies. 
It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less 
marked in highly refined and cultivated times, to 
forget or overlook the primary basic qualities, and 
parade and make much of verbal and technical ac- 
quirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bit- 
ter scorn of the “‘sensual caterwauling of the liter- 
ary classes,” for this is not the only country in which 
