Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/59

 Rh colored by his mood. Of these images he weaves a pattern of words, which re-create the beauty he has seen and are charged with that deeper significance he has divined within the outward manifestation. It is just because he sees farther and feels more intensely that he is a poet; and then because he is able to phrase his experience in words which have the power to create the vision and the meaning in us. So the poet fashions that fairer world of which the heart has dreamed; and by the mediation of his art it becomes ours for an enduring possession. If this be indeed the office and destiny of poetry, we may well ask whence it draws its inspiration and by what means it accomplishes its high ends.

The older poetry of a people takes shape around a story. Childhood dearly loves a tale; for its simple heart finds the way out of a reality it does not understand by contriving a world of make-believe. The young imagination, not yet beset by too urgent actualities, admits no bounds to its wide exercise. In the childhood of the race, objects are spirits, moved by their own inner life. Natural forces are gods, acting capriciously upon the fortunes of men. A man more cunning or more powerful than his fellows becomes a hero or a demigod in memory and tradition. So a child too animates the common things of his little world with a life of their own that suits the purposes of his active fancy. He endows them with a part in his play, and they act out the story that he weaves around them. The imagination of childhood demands action, deeds done and stories told, high adventures of gods and heroes, or the tangled fortunes of princes and damsels, of knights and captive ladies, of fairies and sprites. So a fable builds itself out of free imaginings.

The love of a story never passes. All through its long history, in every land and among every people, poetry has not ceased to interest itself in all conceivable happenings of life. But the stream of poetry is fed by many sources, and it takes color and volume according to the channels through which it flows. From the "Iliad" to "Enoch Arden," to cite typical instances which by no means set the farther or the nearer bounds of narrative poetry, both the subject and the form have undergone varied and profound changes. This movement,