A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things.
The great things of the past in all nations, history can teach us; the possible, both literature and philosophy can teach us. We must forego no noble expression of idealistic faith, lest we impoverish our own souls, and beggar those who come after us. The pure intellectual passion of Bacon's _Advancement of Learning_, the noble stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, the spiritual vision of Plato, of Spenser, the heroic strain of Wordsworth's 'Liberty Sonnets' and his 'Happy Warrior,' Shelley's ardent and generous sympathy, Browning's dynamic spiritual force, should make up part of our life and thought, checking our insistent impulse toward mechanical things, and correcting the evil within and without. More than anything else, we need a revival of interest in great poetry.
'Now therein of all sciences,' said Sir Philip Sidney, 'is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter it.... He cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.'
The poet's 'perfect picture' of the good, the great image, causes noble passion, wakes us out of our 'habitual calm,' and stirs us almost beyond our possibilities. The imagination is the miracle-working power in human nature; through it alone can the human soul come to its own. Only that which is fine and high can feed it aright, while baseness can make of it a destructive tool of terrible power. As I think back to childhood, I can remember the devastating effect that one tale of cruelty had upon my mind, haunting me by day in vivid pictures, turning my dreams to horror, and making me, while the obsession lasted, believe that the world of grown folk must be all alike cruel. So, too, the compelling vision of the good came through concrete instances; and the people, both the living and the dead, in whom I passionately believed, shaped all my faith.