Still, works of art have a permanent element; they idealize and detain the passing thought, and are the intermediates between sense and ideas.
In the present stage of the human mind, poetry and other forms of fiction may certainly be regarded as a good.

But we can also imagine the existence of an age in which a severer conception of truth has either banished or transformed them.

At any rate we must admit that they hold a different place at different periods of the world's history.

In the infancy of mankind, poetry, with the exception of proverbs, is the whole of literature, and the only instrument of intellectual culture; in modern times she is the shadow or echo of her former self, and appears to have a precarious existence.

Milton in his day doubted whether an epic poem was any longer possible.