Poetry and the Criticism of Life

THROUGHOUT this book "Cambridge" means Cambridge, Massachusetts, and "Oxford" means Oxford, England.

Either city is the seat of a great university; and in both these universities there is — what no other university has — a Professorship of Poetry. Passing, as it was my good fortune to do, from the one Professorship to the other, I was anxious to find, for the subject of my Lectures in Cambridge, persons and causes which had connexions with both universities. Three of the Lectures here printed concern themselves with Matthew Arnold — I did not know how I could better illustrate the meaning and purpose of a Professorship of Poetry. Moreover, Matthew Arnold had himself lectured in Cambridge; and he had been a friend of Charles Eliot Norton, in whose memory the Harvard Professorship is founded. With Arnold, it was natural that I should conjoin Emerson and Clough, both of them, like Arnold, friends of Norton, and having, both of them, special associations with Cambridge.

The first and the last of the Lectures plead a cause no longer fashionable, I fancy, either in Oxford or in Cambridge; but a cause which interested profoundly all the great writers whom I have named — with his lifelong championship of the Moral Muse Arnold's fame is especially bound up.

Of the creations of the Moral Muse, Mr. Bridges' Testament of Beauty is the latest-born, and among the most lovely. The greatness of this poem seemed to me to be either missed in America or not justly apprehended. When I lectured upon it, Mr. Bridges was still living; and it was but a year or two since that he visited Harvard and received there an honorary doctorate. The Lecture upon the "Testament of Beauty" I have felt, therefore, to have a proper place in this volume.

The Note which accompanies the first paragraph of the lecture on Clough I owe to the kindness of Dr. H. S. White, Emeritus Professor of German in Harvard University.

H. W. G.