Poet lore Author:Maurice Maeterlinck Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The " Moral " Of The Play. Like ' King John ' the play is a lesson in political ethics; and, as in that, the doctrine of "expediency " is shown to be as danger... more »ous, as fatal in the long run, as it is ignoble. In the words of another, " if even Brutus, seeking with the noblest motives to make evil his good, found that evil sown was evil reaped, still less can men of lower lives hope for success in an attempt to advance public good by means that, if suggested for their private good, they would avoid as infamous: there is no distinction between private and public morality." Assassination is no legitimate means of political reform ; least of all when the evils it would cure are only those that may come, not such as are known to exist,the serpent's egg that may not prove to be a serpent's, or, if it is, may never be hatched. They that take the sword, except as the last resort in desperate straits, shall perish by the sword! W. J. Rolfe. PAPERS OF THE BOSTON BROWNING SOCIETY: BROWNING AS A DRAMATIC POET. There is perhaps no lesson which the literary critic should lay to heart more constantly than that of estimating different poets in different ways and according to different standards. Every great poet is, in the main, his own criterion, and is to be truly seen only in his own light. Philosophers fall into schools, and scientific men into groups and classes. Not that they lack individuality, no effective thinker can lack this, but that the qualities they have in common are more on the surface than their distinctive differences. But the poets resist all grouping and classification, unless they are small and imitative. Each great poet stands by himself like a Greek god, isolated from all others by his own peculiar perfection. No doubt he is the child of his time and his ...« less