fford us. But we shall not find it fully if we look for something else.

[Sidenote: THE FURTHER MEANING OF POETRY]

And yet, when all is said, the question will still recur, though now in
quite another sense, What does poetry mean? This unique expression,
which cannot be replaced by any other, still seems to be trying to
express something beyond itself. And this, we feel, is also what the
other arts, and religion, and philosophy are trying to express: and that
is what impels us to seek in vain to translate the one into the other.
About the best poetry, and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere
of infinite suggestion. The poet speaks to us of one thing, but in this
one thing there seems to lurk the secret of all. He said what he meant,
but his meaning seems to beckon away beyond itself, or rather to expand
into something boundless which is only focussed in it; something also
which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole of
us; that something within us, and without, which everywhere

Makes us seem
To patch up fragments of a dream,
Part of which comes true, and part
Beats and trembles in the heart.

Those who are susceptible to this effect of poetry find it not only,
perhaps not most, in the ideals which she has sometimes described, but
in a child's song by Christina Rossetti about a mere crown of
wind-flowers, and in tragedies like _Lear_, where the sun seems to have
set for ever. They hear this spirit murmuring its undertone through the
_Aeneid_, and catch its voice in the song of Keats's nightingale, and
its light upon the figures on the Urn, and it pierces them no less in
Shelley's hopeless lament, _O world, O life, O time_, than in the
rapturous ecstasy of his _Life of Life_. This all-embracing perfection
cannot be expressed in poetic words or words of any kind, nor yet in
music or in colour, but the suggestion of it is in much poetry, if not
all, and poetry has in this suggestion, this 'meaning,' a great part of
its value. We do it wrong, and we defeat our own purposes when we try to
bend it to them:

We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
For it is as the air invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.

It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our
bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our
master.

FOOTNOTES.

[1] What is here called