hythm: its
joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight: its
surge and turbulence under passing tempests: below all, the deep oceanic
music. There are, of course, many to whom the sea is but a waste of
water, at best useful as a highway and as the nursery of the winds and
rains. For them there is no hint "of the incommunicable dream" in the
curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the
short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands
for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure,
imponderable, a weariness. The "profundity" of Browning, so dear a claim
in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense,
only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's
Song of Innocence, "Piping down the valleys wild," or in Wordsworth's
line, "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," or in Keats'
single verse, "There is a budding morrow in midnight," or in this
quatrain on Poetry, by a young living poet--

"She comes like the husht beauty of the night,
But sees too deep for laughter;
Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after--"

there is more "profundity" in any of these than in libraries of "Sludge
the Medium" literature. Mere hard thinking does not involve profundity,
any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. _De
profundis,_ indeed, must the poet come: there must the deep rhythm of
life have electrified his "volatile essence" to a living rhythmic joy.
In this deep sense, and this only, the poet is born, not made. He may
learn to fashion anew that which he hath seen: the depth of his insight
depends upon the depth of his spiritual heritage. If wonder dwell not in
his eyes and soul there can be no "far ken" for him. Here it seems apt
to point out that Browning was the first writer of our day to indicate
this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is
the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry.
Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy
German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied,
metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke: "Keep but ever
looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon
find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?--there
follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at
men?--th