Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/170

140 feeling—a sense that nourishes the flame of consolation and proffers sympathy even as it craves it;—

This sympathy, this divinely human love, is our legacy from the Teacher who read all joys and sorrows by reading his own heart, being of like passions with ourselves,—a process wisely learned by those fortunate poets who need not fear to obey the maxim, "Look in thy heart and write!"

The Christian motive has intensified the self-expression Conventual introspection. of the modern singer. That he is subject to dangers from which the pagan was exempt, we cannot deny. His process may result in egotism, conceit, the disturbed vision of eyes too long strained inward, delirious extremes of feeling, decline of the creative gift. Probably the conventual, middle-age Church, with its retreats, penances, ecstasies, was the nursery of our self-absorption and mysticism, the alembic of the vapor which Heine saw infolding and chilling the Homeric gods when the pale Jew, crowned with thorns, entered Dürer's "Melencolia" as the Muse of Christendom. and laid his cross upon their banquet-table. It is not the wings alone of Dürer's mystic "Melencolia" that declare her to be a Christian figure. She sits among the