out, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory.
Your dinner is _your_ dinner--your exclusive proprietorship of lower
pleasure--in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver and
radiant flowers upon the table are not yours only because they are
sharable. If music follows the dinner, though it be your favorite tune, it
is nevertheless not yours as what you have eaten is yours. Acute observers
like Santayana have denied or minimized this distinction, but the general
instinct of men persists in calling the pleasures of color and form and
sound "sharable," because they exist for all who can appreciate them.
The individual's happiness in these pleasures is not lessened, but rather
increased, by the coexistent happiness of others in the same object.

There is one other aspect of the artistic impulse which is of peculiar
importance to the student of poetry. It is this: the impulse toward
artistic creation always works along lines of order. The creative impulse
may remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct, as many
philosophers have supposed; a portion of the divine energy which is
somehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad, cultured and savage,
have now and again possessed this vital creative power. They have been
able to say with Thomas Lovell Beddoes:

"I have a bit of fiat in my soul,
And can myself create my little world."

The little world which their imagination has created may be represented
only by a totem pole or a colored basket or a few scratches on a piece of
bone; or it may be a temple or a symphony. But if it be anything more than
the mere whittling of a stick to exercise surplus energy, it is ordered
play or labor. It follows a method. It betrays remeditation. It is the
expression of something in the mind. And even the mere whittler usually