Spenser in believing it the fruit of a "certain
enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr.
Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymns
to the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sincerity
that you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In his
own words:--

The spirit in man is not a product of nature, but antecedes nature,
and is above it as sovereign, being of the very essence of that
spirit which breathed on the face of the waters, and whose song,
flowing from the silence as an incantation, summoned the stars into
being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual consciousness, with
its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every mystic. That ecstasy
is the poetic passion.... The act which is inspired by the Holy
Breath must needs speak of things which have no sensuous existence,
of hopes all unearthly, and fires of which the colors of day are
only shadows.

About a score of the less than tenscore poems of "A.E." are definitely
declarations of belief, but declarations so personal, so undogmatic,
that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A
New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy
praise," of his venturing

"in the untrodden woods
To carve the future ways."

Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that
his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the
prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his
inspiration:--

"When twilight over the mountains fluttered
And night with its starry millions came,
I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered
Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";--

that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep
unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came
and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same
union through the soul's flame "A.E." presents in his pictures, and in
his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his
reader

"To see one elemental pain,
One light of everlasting joy."

This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in
its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off
from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable.
The "everlasting joy"