IX.

Only the

same

criticism

applies to

to Milton's.

CHAPTER himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale when he stood crying, 'Open wheat, Open barley,' to the door which obeyed no sound but 'Open sesame."" This is admirably expressed, with the fault, however, of attributing all poetry as magic to Milton's poetry alone, while denying well as that magic belongs to poetry in general. The fact is, that all poetry, all art, has more or less of the same magic in it. We are touched less by the obvious meaning of the poet than by an occult power which lurks in his words. This is what I have been all along enforcing, that art affects us not as a mode of knowledge or science, but as suggesting something which is beyond and behind knowledge, a hidden treasure, a mental possession whereof we are ignorant. Given the magic words, given the magic touch, and not only Milton's poetry, but all good poetry and art will force the burial places of memory to render up their dead, will set innumerable trains of thought astir in the mind, fill us with their suggestiveness, and charm us with an indefinable sense of pleasure.

It is implied in Moore's

verses.

Precisely in this vein of thought sings Thomas
Moore :

Oh, there are looks and tones that dart
An instant sunshine through the heart:
As if the soul that minute caught

Some treasure it through life had sought;
As if the very lips and eyes

Predestined to have all our sighs,
And never be forgot again,

Sparkled and spoke before us then.

IX.

He is here referring to the action of love in CHAPTER that sense of it which suggested the well known sentence that the poet, the lunatic, and the lover, are of imagination all compact. Love, says Shakespeare, is too young to know itself. It belongs to the secret forces of the mind, and is connected with them by a freemasonry which mere consciousness may recognise but cannot penetrate. There is a passing glance, a sign, a tone, a word. In the lover as in the poet, it appeals not to the conscious intelligence, but to the secret places of the soul; it illumines them. with an instant gleam, which allows us no time to see what passes there; it gives light without information; and the light as it vanishes leaves us with a vague sense of possessing, we know not where, some hidden treasure of the mind for which all our lives we have been searching.

refers to it.

Now let us turn to Byron for a change. He Byron also takes a gloomy view of the strange power of the mind which we are considering, but he dwells on its existence as a great fact. He refers to it again and again, but the best known passage in which he makes mention of it will be found in the fourth canto of Childe Harold, where he describes with much force the insidious return of grief:

But ever and anon of griefs subdued

There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,
Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued;
And slight withal may be the things which bring

CHAPTER
IX.

It is implied in Wordsworth's poetry.

Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside for ever: it may be a sound-

A tone of music-summer's eve-or spring

A flower-the wind-the ocean-which shall wound,
Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound;
And how and why we know not, nor can trace
Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind,
But feel the shock renewed, nor can efface
The blight and blackening which it leaves behind,
Which out of things familiar, undesigned,
When least we deem of such, calls up to view

The spectres whom no exorcism can bind,

The cold, the changed, perchance the dead-anew
The mourned, the loved, the lost,-too many!-yet too few!

Let me ring another change upon the same idea by next quoting Wordsworth. One of the most admired passages in his works, and frequently cited as a perfect embodiment of the poetical spirit, is the following from the poem on Tintern Abbey:

I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,

Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; 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. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows, and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world,

Of eye and ear-both what they half create,
And what perceive.

IX.

The mean

ing of some

intelligible

ference to

soul.

What is the meaning of it? Does he simply CHAPTER mean that sunsets and other sights of nature are so beautiful as to afford him great pleasure? He says much more, which it is not easy to passages unput into clean-cut scientific language. Any without reman of poetical temperament knows what it the hidden means, though he might be puzzled to express it logically. What is the presence which surprises the poet with the joy of high thought? What is that something in the light of setting suns which is far more deeply interfused than the five wits can reach, and is to be apprehended only by a sense sublime? Is it fact or fiction? It is but Wordsworth's favourite manner of indicating the great fact upon which all art, all poetry, proceeds. Nature acts upon him as Milton's words upon Macaulay, like magic. It appeals to his hidden soul, and awakens the sense of a presence which is not to be caught and made a show of. The light of setting suns, the round ocean, and the living air, arouse in him a demi-semi-consciousness of a treasure trove which is not in the consciousness proper. What that treasure, what that presence is, it would pose Wordsworth or any one else to say. All he knows is that nature finely touches a secret chord within him, and gives him a vague hint of a world of life beyond consciousness, the world which art and poetry are ever pointing and working towards.

The poetry of Wordsworth abounds with But there

VOL. I.

Y

CHAPTER
IX.

are many

sages in

Wordsworth.

passages that vividly refer to the concealed life of the mind and the secret of poetry. Some such pas- of these were quoted in the last chapter, and I will now, even at the risk of becoming tedious, quote another, which is one of the finest descriptions of that which we are to understand by the know-not-what of art. I should like to cite every line of the Ode on Immortality, but restrict myself to the following verses, in which the poet raises the song of praise. It is not simply because of the delights of childhood and its simple creed that he gives thanks for the remembrance of his youth:

the Ode on

Immortality.

What a

Saturday

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised;

And for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day;

Are yet a masterlight of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish us, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence; truths that wake

Now, it

may be interesting to read the com

ment which a very intelligent critic makes