ct out of date; rather,
whatever of life and passion the world has known, in desert of Judaea or
in Arcadian valley, by the rivers of Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in
the crowded and hideous streets of a modern city or by the pleasant ways
of Camelot--all lies before him like an open scroll, all is still
instinct with beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for
his own spirit, no more; choosing some facts and rejecting others with
the calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of
beauty.

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but
all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred
house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or
disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing
about which men argue. He can steep himself, if he wishes, in the
discussion of all the social problems of his day, poor-laws and local
taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he
writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with
his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a
lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron:
Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that
we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and
perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work.
But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely Ode on a
Grecian Urn it found its most secure and faultless expression; in the
pageant of The Earthly Paradise and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones
it is the one dominant note.

It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a
clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to
placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus.
Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the
Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art is
very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth and
takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr. Swinburne insisting on
at dinner) that Achilles is even now more actual and real than
Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a type and figure
but more positive and real.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations
are no principle at all. For to the poet