Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/20

14 humanity, of the senses and the emotions, makes life of them, that is. There is less mystery, less magic in its poetry. It does not demand of its reader so profound or so complete a surrender. But if any youthfulness is left in us, we can share its courage, enthusiasm and energy, its zest and enterprise, its penetrating thought, its wit, fervour, passion, and we should not find it impossible to sympathise with its wild revulsions of faith and feeling, its creative scepticism.

Without imagination of the one kind or the other mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business. The moment we begin to live—when we meet the friend of friends, or fall in love, or think of our children, or make up our minds, or set to the work we burn to do, or make something, or vow a vow, or pause suddenly face to face with beauty—at that moment the imagination in us kindles, begins to flame. Then we actually talk in rhythm. What is genius but the possession of this supreme inward energy in a rare and intense degree? Illumined by the imagination, our life—whatever its defeats and despairs—is a never-ending, unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery. This is the fountain of our faith and of our hope.

And so, by what I am afraid has been a tediously circuitous route, I have come at length to