n
giving--no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. The
flower, I doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the Bee--its leaves
blush deeper in the next spring--and who shall say between Man and
Woman which is the most delighted? Now it is more noble to sit like
Jove than to fly like Mercury--let us not therefore go hurrying about
and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently
from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our
leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive--budding patiently
under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect
that favours us with a visit--sap will be given us for meat and dew
for drink. . . .

"O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he's awake who thinks himself asleep."

Still again he says: "The Genius of Poetry must work out its own
salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must
create itself."

A nature so constituted, a nature receptive and passive, is
necessarily withdrawn from practical affairs. To revert to Keats as
an example, for Keats is so wholly the artist, it is his remoteness
from the daily life about him that makes him the man of no one
country or time. His poetry has a kind of universality, but
universality within a definite sphere, and that sphere is the world of
things lovely and fair. In a playful mood Keats writes to his sister:
"Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little
music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know . . . and I can
pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat
Regent or the Duke of Wellington." These are trivial words; but they
serve to define in some measure the artistic temperament.

For this characteristic remoteness from affairs the artist is sometimes
reproached by those who pin their faith to material things. Such are
not aware that for the artist the only reality is the life of the spirit.
The artist, as Carlyle says of the Man of Letters, "lives in the inward
sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists
always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in
that." Temperament c