Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's
Hills_.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See _Genius_.] and George Edward
Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur
in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply
because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the
cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he
prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than
the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the
writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world,
are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he
leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered
in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal
realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is
not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The
tone of his poem, _Tasso and Leonora_, is very gloomy. The Italian
poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms
where eternal beauty dwells. He muses,

Yes--as Love is truer far
Than all other things; so are
Life and Death, the World and Time
Mere false shows in some great Mime
By dreadful mystery sublime.

But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders,

For were life no flitting dream,
Were things truly what they seem,
Were not all this world-scene vast
But a shade in Time's stream glassed;
Were the moods we now display
Less phantasmal than the clay
In which our poor spirits clad
Act this vision, wild and sad,
I must be mad, mad,--how mad!

However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly
convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the
manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not
merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come
upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not
understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal
inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been
applied to the works of all poets. [Footnote: See _Kathrina_, by J.
G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern
poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares,

As for the old seers
Whose eyes God touched with vision of the life
Of t