mood, the fountain from its pool, all art out of the body, laughter from
a happy company. I longed to make all things over again, that she might
sing in some great hall, where there was no one that did not love life
and speak of it continually.

THE HOLY PLACES

When all art was struck out of personality, whether as in our daily
business or in the adventure of religion, there was little separation
between holy and common things, and just as the arts themselves passed
quickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation of
peasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken miller
and but half forgetting Cambynskan bold; so did a man feel himself near
sacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa
or of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to Homer or to
Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if but the
fashioners hands had loosened, have changed before the poem's end to
symbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging worlds
where religion only can discover life as well as peace. A man of that
unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, & yet use no image
unknown among the common people, and speak no thought that was not a
deduction from the common thought. Unless the discovery of legendary
knowledge and the returning belief in miracle, or what we must needs
call so, can bring once more a new belief in the sanctity of common
ploughland, and new wonders that reward no difficult ecclesiastical
routine but the common, wayward, spirited man, we may never see again a
Shelley and a Dickens in the one body, but be broken to the end. We have
grown jealous of the body, and we dress it in dull unshapely clothes,
that we may cherish aspiration alone. Moliere being but the master of
common sense lived ever in the common daylight, but Shakespeare could
not, & Shakespeare seems to bring us to the very market-place, when we
remember Shelley's dizzy and Landor's calm disdain of usual daily
things. And at last we have Villiers de L'Isle Adam crying in the
ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, 'as for living, our
servants will do that for us.' One of the means of loftiness, of
marmorean stillness has been the choice of strange and far away places,
for the scenery of art, but this choice has grown bitter to me, and
there are moments when I cannot believe in the reality of imaginations
that are not inset with the minute