The Ideal World—Its realm is everywhere around us—Its inhabitants are the immortal personifications of all beautiful thoughts—To that World we attain by the repose of the senses.
Section II.
Our dreams belong to the Ideal—The diviner love for which youth sighs, not attainable in life—But the pursuit of that love, beyond the world of the senses, purifies the soul, and awakes the Genius—Instances in Petrarch—Dante.
Section III.
Genius, lifting its life to the Ideal becomes itself a pure idea—It must comprehend all existence: all human sins and sufferings—But, in comprehending, it transmutes them—The Poet in his twofold being—The actual and the ideal—The influence of Genius over the sternest realities of earth—Over our passions—wars and superstitions—Its identity is with human progress—Its agency, even where unacknowledged, is universal.
Section IV.
Forgiveness to the errors of our benefactors.
Section V.
The Ideal is not confined to Poets—Algernon Sydney recognizes his Ideal in liberty, and believes in its triumph where the mere practical man could behold but its ruins—Yet liberty in this world must ever be an Ideal, and the land that it promises can be found but in death.
Section VI.