Clear and
sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul,"
[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] and then records his zest in throwing
himself into all phases of life.

It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop
from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to
develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in
_Pauline_,

I had resolved
No age should come on me ere youth was spent,
For I would wear myself out,

Omar Khayyam's

While you live
Drink!--for once dead you never shall return,

Swinburne's cry of despair,

Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has
grown gray with thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the
fullness of death,[Footnote: _Hymn to Proserpine_.]

show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less
than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become
easy for the poet to carry his _carpe diem_ philosophy very far. His
talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to
guide aright his

principle of restlessness
That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all
[Footnote: _Pauline_.]

The puritan sees, with grim pleasure, that an occasional poet confesses
that his sense of beauty is not strong enough to lead him at all times.
Emerson admits this, telling us, in _The Poet_, that although the
singer perceives ideals in his moments of afflatus which

Turn his heart from lovely maids,
And make the darlings of the earth
Swainish, coarse, and nothing worth,

these moments of exaltation pass, and the singer finds himself a mere
man, with an unusually rich sensuous nature,

Eager for good, not hating ill;
On his tense chords all strokes are felt,
The good, the bad, with equal zeal.

It is not unheard-of to find a poet who, despite occasional expressions
of confidence in the power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage
at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is
quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth's
_Ode to Duty_ does not altogether embody the aesthetic conception
of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the
grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for
poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic
principles. Not thus, however, may one account for the self-tortures of
A