Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/95

 Rh in us a passionate ardor to know and to do. The revelation which poetry affords carries us beyond the enjoyment of the instant; as it leads us out into a more beautiful world, it brings us deeper into the true significance of things, and so it widens our spiritual horizon. As we see farther and feel more intensely, we are enabled more amply to understand the meaning of our own life in its relation to the whole.

The reading of poetry, therefore, helps toward the organization of experience. The ideal waits in the actual. It is the privilege of the poet, gifted with vision, to discern the ideal, and by the energy of creative phrase to summon it into warm and vivid reality. He marshals the fragments of experience into a harmony with which we may link up our own broken efforts; disclosing the inner meaning of our blind purposes, he brings them into a unity of direction and achievement. So he reveals us to ourselves. As the poet interprets it for us, the big scheme of things is seen to be more beautiful and more intelligible. In effect, the real appreciation of poetry is communion with the great souls of earth: In their struggles and their conquests we read the purpose of our own efforts and the aspiration of our hearts.

Yet the beauty and significance which perhaps we had missed without his leading the poet but restores to us after all. For the poet is not final; nor is poetry, with the appreciator, an end in itself. In the result it sends us back to life, to possess the world more abundantly in ourselves. It gives us, in terms of wide-ranging subject and in varied forms, the great moments of experience; but it is to make those moments intimately and wholly our own. We must love poetry, if we are to understand it: appreciation, therefore, is a discipline and a development. But if we are to win from poetry its deepest final meaning, we must actually live it. Though it has power to console, sustain, inspire, poetry is not a substitute for life, it is not an escape or refuge. Rather, it is a challenge to fuller living; and to that end it is a guide and a support.

Poetry is a fruition and a promise. Exhaustless and immortal, the spirit of poetry is ever conquering new beauty and new truth. So equally there is no limit set to what we may compass for ourselves in appreciation. Our enjoyment at any moment is the measure of