spirit, and not derived from contemporary thinkers." I do not know
what original ideas these great poets discovered and promulgated;
their ideas seem to have been "in the air." These poets "made them
current coin." Shelley thought that he owed many of his ideas to
Godwin, a contemporary thinker. Wordsworth has a debt to Plato, a
thinker not contemporary. Burns's democratic independence was "in
the air," and had been, in Scotland, since Elder remarked on it in a
letter to Ingles in 1515. It is not the ideas, it is the expression
of the ideas, that marks the poet. Tennyson's ideas are relatively
novel, though as old as Plotinus, for they are applied to a novel, or
at least an unfamiliar, mental situation. Doubt was abroad, as it
always is; but, for perhaps the first time since Porphyry wrote his
letter to Abammon, the doubters desired to believe, and said, "Lord,
help Thou my unbelief." To robust, not sensitive minds, very much in
unity with themselves, the attitude seems contemptible, or at best
decently futile. Yet I cannot think it below the dignity of mankind,
conscious that it is not omniscient. The poet does fail in logic (In
Memoriam, cxx.) when he says -


"Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape,
But I was BORN to other things."


I am not well acquainted with the habits of the greater ape, but it
would probably be unwise, and perhaps indecent, to imitate him, even
if "we also are his offspring." We might as well revert to polyandry
and paint, because our Celtic or Pictish ancestors, if we had any,