ead alone, but "we live by admiration, hope
and love." Man must have ideals and aspirations and mental ecstasies.
And this, in other words, means that he must live the poetical as well
as the material half of life.

What is our own state of mind--yours and mine--when we contemplate the
threatened unpoetical future? Is it not one of alarm and disgust? Do we
not almost rejoice to think that we ourselves shall not live to shiver
in its bleakness? When we contemplate such a time, we say with
Wordsworth--

Great God, I'd rather be
A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on the pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn

than the dull and melancholy prospect which is conjured up before us.
Even in this age of science, we entertain such feelings. And if we
ourselves feel so, it is simply because humanity is so constituted, and
no science, no democracy, no learning, invention or legislation can ever
drive out human nature from human beings. It is on grounds like these
that Matthew Arnold declares, "More and more mankind will discover that
we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to
sustain us. Without Poetry our science will appear incomplete."
"Incomplete" is a right word, though a very weak one; "incomplete," not
untrue, not pernicious, but terribly inadequate. For there are two
manners of looking at the universe and at the life of men, and human
nature demands that we should exercise and enjoy them both. "The words
poetry, philosophy, art, science," says Renan, "betoken not so much
different objects proposed for the intellectual activity of man, as
different manners of looking at the same object--which object is
existence in all its manifestations," and, "if we understand by poetry
the faculty which the soul has of being touched in a certain manner, of
giving forth a certain sound of a particular and indefinable nature in
the face of the beauty of things, he who is not a poet is not a man."
True poetry does not imply fiction, unreality, misrepresentation. The
true poet is not a deluded dreamer and a visionary. The scientist tells
us certain facts about existing things, the poet draws forth the
beauties and suggestions of those facts, brings them into moral and
emotional connexion with ourselves, makes them, at his best, effective
on our conduct. Human nature can never be satisfied with the bare
objective facts. It must "disengage the elements of beaut