ch harm."

What we persistently fail to understand is that in these primitive
things are the potentialities of all the most lasting satisfactions of
later life.

Browning tells us how the boy David felt when he watched his sheep:--

Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep
Fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the
sky:
And I laughed,--"Since my days are ordained to be passed with my
flocks,
Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know."

All this is natural enough, we say, in a mere boy,--but he will outgrow
it. But now and then some one does not outgrow it. He has become a man,
and yet in his mind fancies are still rife. They throng upon him and
crave expression. The things he sees, the people he meets, are all
symbols to him, just as the one eagle which "wheeled slow as in sleep"
was to the shepherd lad the symbol of a great unknown world. That which
he sees of the actual world seems still to him only a strip "'twixt the
hill and the sky,"--all the rest he imagines. He fills it with vivid
color and absorbing life. He peoples it with his own thoughts.

We call such a person a poet; and if he is a very good poet, we call him
a genius; and, in order to do him honor, we pretend that we cannot
understand him, and we employ people to explain him to us. We treat his
works as alcohol is treated in the arts. It is, as they say,
"denaturized," that is, something is put into it that people don't
like, so that they will not drink it "on the sly!"

Yet all the time the plain fact is that the poet is simply a person who
is still in possession of all his early qualities. Wordsworth gave away
the secret. He is a boy who keeps on growing. He is

One whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure.

Where others see a finished world, he sees all things as manifestations
of a free power.

Even in their fixed and steady lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying.

This ebbing and flowing mind with its ever-changing expression is the