Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/163

 follies and phantasms. That which actually is, is not in them. They are in the apparent, not the real world. Why should we walk through their mud and lade ourselves with their thick clay? The constancy of energy, the correlation of physical forces, natural selection, the struggle for existence, the descent of man, whether the Bible be infallible or not—if it be beautiful and instil peace is all we care for—are outside our world. For us, they might as well be discussed in Sirius. Let us get away from this vain disquiet to quiet, from futile argument to fruitful contemplation, from materialism to the spiritual, from this ugly world to a beautiful one, from theological squabbles to religious symbols, from fighting sects to the invisible Church, from Science and its quarrels to the great creations of imagination, from convention to truth in art, from imitation of dead forms of art to Nature herself. Let us leave a world, noisy, base through money-seeking, torn and confused with physical and mental ugliness, worried with dry criticism of history and futile contentions of doctrine, to the realm of pure faith, or, if we cannot or do not care to believe, to that pure image of beauty which we see once more rising from the Sea of Time. And for that we will turn back to the bygone centuries, to their thought and their work, to a world noble, lovely, joyous, full of passionate subjects, close to Nature, thrilling with possibilities for the imagination; a world which believed in a spiritual life; which understood how to love, how to forgive,