out of the stuff of his imagination; a world sublimely ordered, as I looked into it, by the harmony of the imagination and the practical reason; the one building out of unsubstantial thought and touching with a bewildering and elusive beauty, the other molding the structure to human needs and shaping it to human ends. The day made some escape from its somber realities almost inevitable. Since early morning the rain had fallen ceaselessly, with a melancholy monotone that beat on one's heart. Even the cheerful notes of the fire, singing lustily as if to exorcise the demon of gloom and ennui, failed to shut out the steady murmur of the water falling from the leaden skies. Against such invasions of darkness there is always a refuge in the imagination, and I fled early to that nameless island in the undiscovered sea where Shakespeare's "Tempest" finds its sublime stage. Under the spell of this magical vision I had forgotten lowering skies and leaden-footed hours, and I was still in Shakespeare's world when Rosalind read the words from the "Defense of Poesy" which I have quoted.

I had but to stretch my hand to a shelf at my side to match the immortal young Elizabethan with the deeper eloquence of the Greek thinker whose speculations so often lead into the fields of poetry. It is to the well-worn words of Socrates to Ion that I open and read: "As the Corybantian revelers, when they dance, are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when

they are composing their beautiful strains; but when falling under the power of music and meter they are inspired and possessed, like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysius, but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us; for they tell us that they gather their strains from honeyed fountains out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired, and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him. . . . For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us, and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human or the work of man, but divine and the word of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed."

One needs nowadays to reinforce his faith in the ancient supremacy of the imagination by some such words as these from those masters of the higher reason who have established the reality of their faith by the sublimity and substance of their works. It is as idle to question the authority of the imagination in the presence of Shakespeare's "Tempest," or Plato's "Ion" or "Phædo," as to dispute the reality of music while Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" or Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" hold us silent and

responsive to we know not what unspoken messages from some vaster world. It is not a matter of demonstration, of evidence or proof or logical deduction; it is always and only a flash of intelligence through the spiritual sense. Well says Abt Vogler in Robert Browning's wonderful exposition of the whole matter:

"Why rushed the discords on, but that harmony should be prized?

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear;

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and

the woe;

But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason, and welcome; 'tis we musicians

know."

Literary epochs come and go, forms of expression change, but the method of the true poet remains the same; he does not reason-he sees, he hears, he knows. The reality of the Ideal, of the Spiritual, is never an open question with him; when it becomes one he ceases to be a poet. Skepticism which stimulates science blights poetry; the doubt which sends the mind restlessly abroad destroys in the same moment the home in which are the sources of its joy and its inspiration. Nothing in life is quite so pathetic as the artist who clings to his work after he has begun to question its authority and validity. The toil remains, but the unspeakable joy of it is gone; and so also is that chance of possible perfection for the winning of which genius never hesitates

to stake its all. It were better that the painters who doubt whether it is worth while to paint, and the musicians who question the sincerity of their art, and the poets who are haunted with the fear that the day of verse has gone, should refrain from all endeavor, and the world wait for the sure hands and the ringing voices that must bring back the Ideal once more as certainly as the birds of April will announce the summer, coming swiftly northward with leaf for tree, and flower for stalk, and green for brown, and the splendor of overflowing light for days that are brief and shadowed. It is easy to deny the existence of that which one does not and cannot see, and this must be the cloak of charity which one casts over those who write the epitaph of the Imagination and record with funereal reiteration. the decline and disappearance of poetry. They do not write poetry: therefore poetry has ceased to be. Its sublime course runs out in a thin ripple of musical verse which only makes the glitter of the bare sand beneath the more obtrusive. There is a sure refuge from all these faint and querulous voices which make the silence of the great woods, once overflowing with affluent melodies, the more apparent. These light-voiced singers sing their little songs, not for the wide skies and the great stars and the silent day perfumed with hidden flowers, but for the ears of men. One has but to leave the outer edges of the woodland to forget these feeble cries; one has but to seek the heart of the ancient forest

to hear once more those magical notes which seem to rise out of the hidden world about him and to carry from its heart some secret to his own. The voices are still there; and, better than all, the sublime mysteries which charge those voices with thrilling music are there also.

verse.

Nature is still what she has been to all the great poets from Eschylus to Emerson, although the critics announce the final disappearance of the "pathetic fallacy" which underlies Wordsworth's Poor critics! their offense lies not in their failure to see, but in their denial that Wordsworth saw. Their own defect of vision makes them certain that there is no true sight among men. But those who see are not concerned with such denials; for them the sky is blue, though an army of blind men swear it black; and to those who hear, life is still thrilled with mysterious voices though the deaf proclaim an eternal silence. Among so many doubters and skeptics it is pleasant to hear still the unbroken testimony of the older poets to the truths that were clear to them when life and youth were one. In his latest verse Browning strikes the old chords with a virile touch which evokes no uncertain sound. He pictures the Fates couched dragonwise in the heart of night, casting over the upper world a darkness as impenetrable as that in which they measure and cut the threads of existence, and summing up life in words that seem, save for their vigor, borrowed from some of our minor singers: