ershadowing man and speaking through his lips, or a
Will working within the human will, but I think in this poetry we find
for the first time the revelation of the Spirit as the weaver of beauty.
Hence it comes that little hitherto unnoticed motions are adored:

You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
And bind up your long hair and sigh;
And all men's hearts must burn and beat.

This woman is less the beloved than the priestess of beauty who reveals
the divinity, not as the inspired prophetesses filled with the Holy
Breath did in the ancient mysteries, but in casual gestures and in a
waving of her white arms, in the stillness of her eyes, in her hair
which trembles like a faery flood of unloosed shadowy light over pale
breasts, and in many glimmering motions so beautiful that it is at once
seen whose footfall it is we hear, and that the place where she stands
is holy ground. This, it seems to me, is what is essential in this
poetry, what is peculiar and individual in it--the revelation of
great mysteries in unnoticed things; and as not a sparrow may fall
unconsidered by Him, so even in the swaying of a human hand His sceptre
may have dominion over the heart and His paradise be entered in the
lifting of an eyelid.

1902

THE BOYHOOD OF A POET

When I was a boy I knew another who has since become famous and who has
now written Reveries over Childhood and Youth. I searched the pages to
meet the boy I knew and could not find him. He has told us what he saw
and what he remembered of others, but from himself he seems to have
passed away and remembers himself not. The boy I knew was darkly
beautiful to look on, fiery yet playful and full of lovely and elfin
fancies. He was swift of response, indeed over-generous to the fancies
of others because a nature so charged with beauty could not but emit
beauty at every challenge. Even so water, however ugly the object we
cast upon it, can but break out in a foam of beauty and a bewilderment
of lovely curves.

Our fancies were in reality nothing to him but the affinities which by
the slightest similitude evoked out of the infinitely richer being
the prodigality of beautiful images with which it was endowed and made
itself conscious of itself. I have often thought how strange it is that
artist and poet have never yet revealed themselves to us except in verse
and painting, that there was among them no psychologist who could turn
back upon himself to search fo