e poet's demand that He shall include all
life, satisfy every impulse, be as personal as the poet himself, and
embody only the harmony of beauty, is bound to be a long one. It appears
inevitable that the poet should never get more than incomplete and
troubled glimpses of such a deity, except, perhaps, in

The too-bold dying song of her whose soul
Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died.
[Footnote: Said of Emily Bronte. Arnold, _Haworth Churchyard._]

A complete view of the poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous
as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. Browning conceived of him,

Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, "No God,"
Finding no bottom.
[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets._]

If the poet's independent quest of God is doomed to no more successful
issue than this, it might seem advisable for him to tolerate the
conventional religious systems of his day. Though every poet must feel
with Tennyson,

Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they,
[Footnote: _In Memoriam._]

yet he may feel, with Rossetti, that it is best to

Let lore of all theology
Be to thy soul what it can be.
[Footnote: _Soothsay._]

Indeed, many of the lesser poets have capitulated to overtures of
tolerance and not-too-curious inquiry into their private beliefs on the
part of the church.

In America, the land of religious tolerance, the poet's break with
thechurch was never so serious as in England, and the shifting creeds of
the evangelical churches have not much hampered poets. In fact, the
frenzy of the poet and of the revivalist have sometimes been felt as
akin. Noteworthy in this connection is George Lansing Raymond, who
causes the heroes of two pretentious narrative poems, _A Life in Song,_
and _The Real and the Ideal,_ to begin by being poets, and end by
becoming ministers of the gospel. The verse of J. G. Holland is hardly
less to the point. The poet-hero of Holland's _Bitter Sweet_ is a
thoroughgoing evangelist, who, in the stress of temptation by a woman
who would seduce him, falls upon his knees and saves his own soul and
hers likewise. In _Kathrina,_ though the hero, rebellious on account of
the suicide of his demented parents, remains agnostic till almost the
end of the poem, this is clearly regarded by Holland as the cause of his
i