t leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate
egotism.

The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats
poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be
able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralist
would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make
men more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. The
greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the
extreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of
delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the
purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this
scene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world of
good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an
enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and
heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always
fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so
resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula.
Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the
home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use
the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our
double attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for
absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in
the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open to
question whether

There is a fountain filled with blood

expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as

And now my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

There are many details on which one would like to join issue with Sir
Henry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathies
so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing with
him about questions of scansion or of the relation of Blake to
contemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies. His book is the
reply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered to
poets by Keats in _The Fall of Hyperion_, where Moneta demands:

What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe
To the great world?

and declares:

None can usurp this height ...
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let t