Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/263

The Symbolism of Poetry. whose souls austerity withdrew, even more perfectly than madness could withdraw his soul, from hope and memory, from desire and regret, that they might reveal those processions of symbols that men bow to before altars, and woo with incense and offerings. But being of our time, he has been like Maeterlinck, like Villiers de l'Isle Adam in Axël, like all who are preoccupied with intellectual symbols in our time, a foreshadower of the new sacred book, of which all the arts, as somebody has said, are begging to dream, and because, as I think, they cannot overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands, upon men's heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times.

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If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its symbolism, 253