sal. The poets of the ages of
silver need no refusal of life, the dome of many-coloured glass is
already shattered while they live. They look at life deliberately and as
if from beyond life, and the greatest of them need suffer nothing but
the sadness that the saints have known. This is their aim, and their
temptation is not a passionate activity, but the approval of their
fellows, which comes to them in full abundance only when they delight in
the general thoughts that hold together a cultivated middle-class, where
irresponsibilities of position and poverty are lacking; the things that
are more excellent among educated men who have political preoccupations,
Augustus Caesar's affability, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies
the intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the Poetaster, that even
the best of men without Promethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a
studious man will commonly forget after some forty winters that of a
certainty Promethean fire will burn somebody's fingers. It may happen
that poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues,
for general praise is unlucky, as the villages know, and not merely as I
imagine--for I am superstitious about these things--because the praise
of all but an equal enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle
with every compliment.

All energy that comes from the whole man is as irregular as the
lightning, for the communicable and forecastable and discoverable is a
part only, a hungry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the
test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the
delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.
I knew an old man who had spent his whole life cutting hazel and privet
from the paths, and in some seventy years he had observed little but had
many imaginations. He had never seen like a naturalist, never seen
things as they are, for his habitual mood had been that of a man stirred
in his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto, though the times were
running out when Tintoretto painted, nearly all the great men of the
renaissance, looked at the world with eyes like his. Their minds were
never quiescent, never as it were in a mood for scientific
observations, always an exaltation, never--to use known words--founded
upon an elimination of the personal factor; and their attention and the
attention of those they worked for dwelt constantly with what is present
to the mind in ex