feeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discover
excellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it is
forever striving upward. Without the spiritual fervor of the
beautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your science
cramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles a
flame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightning
bares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid than
lightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presence
of God.




II.

WHAT IS POETRY?


The better to meet the question, _What_ is poetry? we begin by putting
before it another, and ask, _Where_ is poetry? Poetry is in the mind.
Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the
stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no
appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining
intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught
but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal
life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in
the best and deepest part of that life.

The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of
his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or