it, others retort. The poet
should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things,
which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in
this world.

Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way
through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the
opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying
their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet
should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life,
he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we
maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? Then, being alone
of all men transported by his vision into this ideal realm, he will have
no competitors to dispute his place as chief character.

At first thought it may have appeared obvious to us that the idealistic
poet, who claims that his art is a revelation of a transcendental
entity, is soaring to celestial realms whither his mundane personality
cannot follow. Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual
world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by
his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet
cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals
nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable
from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the
other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be
embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the _Phaedrus_,
"This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the
ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: Sec. 251.] Now,
whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art,
one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run,
personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures
of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization
of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered
to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the
habiliments of his thought. Reflection leads us to agree with Coleridge:

In our life alone does nature live,
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shrowd.
[Footnote: _Ode to Dejection._]

The poet may not always be conscious of this, any more than Keats was;
his tr