inst their successors. Instead of the hopeless
struggle of ascetic morality, which divides man against himself, they
awakened him to that sense of his reconciliation with his ideal which
religion gives: "Psyche drinks its stream and forgets her sorrows."

Now, this is just the soil where art blooms. For what is beauty but the
harmony of thought and sense, a universal meaning caught and tamed in
the particular? To the poet each little flower that blooms has endless
worth, and is regarded as perfect and complete; for he sees that the
spirit of the whole dwells in it. It whispers to him the mystery of the
infinite; it is a pulse in which beats the universal heart. The true
poet finds God everywhere; for the ideal is actual wherever beauty
dwells. And there is the closest affinity between art and religion, as
its history proves, from Job and Isaiah, Homer and Aeschylus, to our own
poet; for both art and religion lift us, each in its own way, above
one-sidedness and limitation, to the region of the universal. The one
draws God to man, brings perfection _here_, and reaches its highest form
in the joyous life of Greece, where the natural world was clothed with
almost supernatural beauty; the other lifts man to God, and finds this
life good because it reflects and suggests the greater life that is to
be. Both poetry and religion are a reconciliation and a satisfaction;
both lift man above the contradictions of limited existence, and place
him in the region of peace--where,

"with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
He sees into the life of things."[A]

[Footnote A: _Tintern Abbey._]

In this sense, it will be always true of the poet, as it is of the
religious man, that

"the world,
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,"[A]

[Footnote A: _Fra Lippo Lippi_.]

lead him back to God, who made it all.

He is essentially a witness to the divine element in the world.

It is the rediscovery of this divine element, after its expulsion by the
age of Deism and doubt, that has given to this century its poetic
grandeur. Unless we regard Burke as the herald of the new era, we may
say that England first felt the breath of the returning spirit in the
poems of Shelley and Wordsworth.

"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a d