Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/171

Rh well-used emblems of all arts, the ruins of past achievements, the materials for effort yet to come. Toil is her inspiration, exploration her instinct: she broods, she suffers, she wonders, but must still explore and design. The new learning is her guide, but to what unknown lands? The clew is almost found, yet still escapes her. Of what use are beauty, love, worship, even justice, when above her are the magic square and numbers of destiny, and the passing-bell that sounds the end of all? Before, stretches an ocean that hems her in. What beyond, and after? There is a rainbow of promise in the sky, but even beneath that the baneful portent of a flaming star. Could Dürer's "Melencolia" speak, she might indeed utter the sweet and brave, yet pathetic, poetry of our own speculative day.

Our view of the poetic temperament is doubtless a modern conceit. The ancient took life Neurotic sensitiveness. as he found it, and was content. Death he accepted as a law of nature. Desire, the lust for the unattainable, aspiration, regret,—these are our endowment, and our sufferings are due less to our slights and failures than to our own sensitiveness. Effort is required to free our introspective rapture and suffering from the symptoms of a disease. Yet there is no inevitable relation between disease and genius, and it is chiefly in modern song that "great wits are sure to madness near allied." Undoubtedly at feverish crises a flood of wild imaginings overwhelms us. Typical poets have acknowledged