of others, live
because they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds and flowers
themselves.

Such a poem as Gray's "Elegy" holds its own, and will continue to hold
it, because it puts in pleasing verse form the universal human emotion
which all persons feel more or less when gazing upon graves.

The intellectual content of Scott's poems is not great but the human and
emotional content in them is great. A great minstrel of the border
speaks in them. The best that Emerson could say of Scott was that "he is
the delight of generous boys," but the spirit of romance offers as
legitimate a field for the poet as does the spirit of transcendentalism,
though yielding, of course, different human values.

Every poet of a high order has a deep moral nature, and yet the poet
is far from being a mere moralist--

"A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual all-in-all."

Every true poem is an offering upon the altar of art; it exists to no
other end; it teaches as nature teaches; it is good as nature is
good; its art is the art of nature; it brings our spirits in closer
and more loving contact with the universe; it is for the edification
of the soul.

VI

SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS

THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT

The clouds are transient, but the sky is permanent. The petals of a
flowering plant are transient, the leaves and fruit are less so, and
the roots the least transient of all. The dew on the grass is
transient, as is the frost of an autumn morning. The snows and the
rains abide longer. The splendors of summer and sunrise and sunset
soon pass, but the glory of the day lasts. The rainbow vanishes in a
few moments, but the prismatic effect of the drops of rain is a law of
optics. Colors fade while texture is unimpaired.

Of course change marks everything, living or dead. Even the pole star
in astronomic time will vanish. But consider things mundane only. How
the rocks on the seacoast seem to defy and withstand the waves that
beat against them! "Weak as is a breaking wave" is a line of
Wordsworth's. Yet the waves remain after the rocks are gone. The sea
knows no change as the land does. It and the sky are the two
unchanging earth features.

In our own lives how transient are our moments of inspiration, our
morning joy, our ecstasies of the spirit! Upon how much in the world
of art, literature, invention, modes, may be written the word
"perishable"! "All flesh is grass," says the old Boo