rue poet, whether he writes verses or novels, is the
greatest of teachers, not because he trains and drills the mind, but
because he makes the thing he speaks of appear so beautiful and
desirable that we are willing to undergo the training and drilling
that are necessary to be made free of the secret. He brings out, as
Plato beautifully said, "the beauty which meets the spirit like a
breeze, and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into
harmony with the beauty of reason." The work of the poet then is "to
elicit the simplest principles of life, to clear away complexity, by
giving a glowing and flashing motive to live nobly and generously, to
renew the unspoiled growth of the world, to reveal the secret hope
silently hidden in the heart of man."

_Renovabitur ut aquila juventus tua_--thy youth shall be renewed as an
eagle--that is what we all desire! Indeed it would seem at first sight
that, to gain happiness, the best way would be, if one could, to
prolong the untroubled zest of childhood, when everything was
interesting and exciting, full of novelty and delight. Some few people
by their vitality can retain that freshness of spirit all their life
long. I remember how a friend of R. L. Stevenson told me, that
Stevenson, when alone in London, desperately ill, and on the eve of a
solitary voyage, came to see him; he himself was going to start on a
journey the following day, and had to visit the lumber-room to get out
his trunks; Stevenson begged to be allowed to accompany him, and,
sitting on a broken chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of
the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we
most of us find to be impossible as we grow older; and we are
confronted with the problem of how to keep care and dreariness away,
how to avoid becoming mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all
we have to do and bear. Can we not find some medicine to revive the
fading emotion, to renew the same sort of delight in new thoughts and
problems which we found in childhood in all unfamiliar things, to
battle with the dreariness, the daily use, the staleness of life?

The answer is that it is possible, but only possible if we take the
same pains about it that we take to provide ourselves with comforts,
to save money, to guard ourselves from poverty. Emotional poverty is
what we most of us have to dread, and we must make investments if we
wish for revenues. We are many of us hampered, as I have said,