the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example,
John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benet,
_The Falconer of God._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged
persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the
present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his
birds are

Summer-saulting for God's sake.

Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and
spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at
best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas
Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought
"thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously
excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause
of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas
which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated,
however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost
reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the
flower itself. He muses,

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;--
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets
designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning