_]

Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every
verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of
the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example,
John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benet,
_The Falconer of God._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged
persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the
present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his
birds are

Summer-saulting for God's sake.

Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and
spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at
best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas
Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought
"thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously
excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause
of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas
which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated,
however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost
reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the
flower itself. He muses,

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;--
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets
designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning
of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the
instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All
poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the
sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one.

A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's
unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as
Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to
do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If
he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina
Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by

The foolishest fond folly of a heart
Divided, neither here nor there at rest,
That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth.
[Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.]

On