n of mind with mind in thought and without words, foreknowledge in
dreams and in visions, and the coming among us of the dead, and of much
else. We are, it may be, at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment
when man is about to ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long
gathering, upon his shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from
the first days. The first poets, if one may find their images in the
_Kalevala_, had not Homer's preoccupation with things, and he was not so
full of their excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic
which, although he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention
of minds trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among many things,
and not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare
shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might fill them with
things and their accidental relations to one another.

Each of these writers had come further down the stairway than those who
had lived before him, but it was only with the modern poets, with Goethe
and Wordsworth and Browning, that poetry gave up the right to consider all
things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols and began to call
itself a critic of life and an interpreter of things as they are.
Painting, music, science, politics, and even religion, because they have
felt a growing belief that we know nothing but the fading and flowering of
the world, have changed in numberless elaborate ways. Man has wooed and
won the world, and has fallen weary, and not, I think, for a time, but
with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars
shall be blown away like withered leaves. He grew weary when he said,
'These things that I touch and see and hear are alone real,' for he saw
them without illusion at last, and found them but air and dust and
moisture. And now he must be philosophical above everything, even about
the arts, for he can only return the way he came, and so escape from
weariness, by philosophy. The arts are, I believe, about to take upon
their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of
priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with
the essences of things, and not with things. We are about to substitute
once more the distillation of alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and
for some other sciences; and certain of us are looking everywhere for the
perfect alembic that no silver or golden drop may