the rejection of the very sources from which springs the life
of the fair art. Melody, and a love of the green earth,
and a yearning for God are of the very fabric of poetry, deny it who will.
The Muses still reign on Parnassus, wax the heathen never so furious.
Poets who love poetry better than their own fame in Grub Street
will do well to remember

The flame, the noble pageant of our life;
The burning seal that stamps man's high indenture
To vain attempt and most forlorn adventure;
Romance and purple seas, and toppling towns,
And the wind's valiance crying o'er the downs.

It is a poor business to find in such words only the illusions of youth and
a new enthusiasm. The desire for novelty, the passion for force and dirt,
and the hankering after freakishness of mood, which many have attempted
to substitute for the older and simpler things, are themselves
the best evidence of disillusion and jaded nerves. There is a weariness
and a disgust in our recent impatience with beauty which indicate too clearly
the exhaustion of our spiritual resources. It may well be that
the rebirth of poetry is to be manifest in a reappearance of the obvious, --
in a love of the sea and of the beauty of clouds, in the adventure of death
and the yet more amazing adventure of living, in a vital love of colour,
whether of the Orient or the drug-shop, in childlike love of melody,
and the cool cleansing of rain, in strange faces and old memories.
This, in the past, has been poetry, and this will be poetry again.
The singer who, out of a full heart, can offer to the world his vision
of its beauty, and out of a noble mind, his conception of its destiny,
will bestow upon his time the most precious gift which we can now receive,
the gift of his healing power.