devote it all to poetry. The bard asks us to believe that love of poetry
is as thrilling a passion as any earthly one. His usual emotions are
portrayed in Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, where the hero agonizes for
relief from his too ardent love:

O that my heart was quiet as a grave
Asleep in moonlight!
For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold
Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul
A passion burns from basement to the cope.
Poesy, poesy!
But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly
unrelated to any other, is confusing poetry with religion, or possibly
with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to
the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher
described in the _Phaedo_. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness,
is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to
be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without
doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse.
One of our minor American poets declares,

The bard who yields to flesh his emotion
Knows naught of the frenzy divine.
[Footnote: _Passion_, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest
against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of _Endymion_.]

But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a
Platonist--and "all poets are more or less Platonists" [Footnote: H. B.
Alexander, _Poetry and the Individual_, p. 46.]--the poet is led upward
to the love of ideal beauty through its incarnations in the world of