Chapter LXXVI

"Take wings of fancy," and imagine that you have the whole "starry heavens of space" revealed to one glance--"sharpen'd to a needle's end."[51]

"Take wings of foresight," and see in the future how thy best poems are dumb, before a yew tree moulders; and though the writings of _the great early Poets_--"the matin songs that woke the darkness of our planet"--may last, thy songs in fifty years will have become vain; and have ceased to be known by the time when the oak tree has withered into a hollow ruin.[52]