hy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?"

He may, or may not, believe that the same duty governs his
infinitesimal activity and the motions of the heavenly bodies--

"Awake, my soul, and _with the sun_
Thy daily stage of duty run . . ."

--That his duty is one with that of which Wordsworth sang--

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are
fresh and strong."

But in a higher order of some sort, and his duty of conforming with
it, he does not seem able to avoid believing.

This, then, is the need which Poetry answers. It offers to bring men
knowledge of this universal order, and to help them in rectifying and
adjusting their lives to it. It is for gleams of this spiritual
country that the poets watch--

"The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land. . . ."

"I am Merlin," sang Tennyson, its life-long watcher, in his old age--

"I am Merlin,
And I am dying;
I am Merlin,
Who follow the gleam."

They do not claim to see it always. It appears to them at rare and
happy intervals, as the Vision of the Grail to the Knights of the
Round Table. "Poetry," said Shelley, "is the record of the best and
happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

If this be the need, how have our poets been answering it of late
years? How, for instance, did they answer it during the South
African War, when (according to our newspapers) there was plenty of
patriotic emotion available to inspire the great organ of national
song? Well, let us kick up what dust we will over 'Imperial ideals,'
we must admit, at least, that these ideals are not yet 'accepted of
song': they have not inspired poetry in any way adequate to the
nobility claimed for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted the
Boer War in verse of much truculence, but no quality; and when Mr.
Swinburne and Mr. Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into
causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, Muddied Oafs, Goths and
Huns, invited one to consider why he should so often be first-rate
when neglecting or giving the lie to his pet political doctrines, and
invariably below form when enforcing them. For the rest, the Warden
of Glenalmond bubbled and squeaked, and Mr. Alfred Austin, like the
man at the piano, kept on doing his