as welcome to ignore the higher and enhance the minor merits of a foreign literature; to mistake for the causes the effects of these minor merits, which in their turn become {as in this case of the Academy) causes of grave error and defect, weakening where they should strengthen the hands and eyes they have in training. But in a child and champion of the light the least obliquity or obscurity of vision is to be noted as dangerous. If to any one these seem things of minor moment, to a poet such as he is they cannot; to him they must be more serious than to another. We owe him too much to keep silence here, though we might allow as harmless such graceful errors of pastime or paradox as the faith in Oxford which will not allow that she has ever "given herself to the Philistines;" the beauty of the valley of Sorek has surely blinded him to the nation and nature of the Gazites and Ascalonites who have dwelt there now and again as surely as have many of their betters. Both here and in the Academy there may be a profession, a tradition of culture, of sweetness, urbanity, loyalty to the light; but where, we may too often have had to ask, are the things themselves? By their fruits ye shall know them; and what are these? In them both, if not of them, there may be good men and great; have such been always their leaders? or were ever such their types?
"Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee;
But where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea."
There, and not in the academies or the market-places of the Philistines, for peace or war; there, where all airs are full of the breath and all fields of the feet of the gods;
