the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine
illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea _is_ the
fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious
poetry."[63]

Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as uttering the
thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our
study of poetry. In the present work it is the course of one great
contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to
follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. But
whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several
streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know
them all, our governing thought should be the same. We should conceive
of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to
conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and
called to higher destinies than those which in general men have
assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we
have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to
sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most
of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced
by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it. For finely
and truly does Wordsworth call poetry "the impassioned expression which
is in a countenance of all science"[64] and what is a countenance
without its expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry
"the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge":[64] our religion,
parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now;
our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and
finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and
false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at
ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously;