Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/193

Rh of the Greeks or Goths, yet absolutely different. Here we indeed enter a new world. Ideal beauty plainly lies in adaptation of the spirit to Fitness, material and spiritual. the circumstances, though not always to the apparent material exigencies. La Farge, whom I have before quoted,—and upon the subject of beauty the sayings of a painter or an architect (mutatis mutandis) apply just as fully to poetry as to his own art,—La Farge says, in speaking of the adaptation of Japanese buildings to resistance against earthquakes, that

No better illustration could be given of the relations of fitness and beauty; but he soon has occasion to add:—

We see, then, every people recognizing an extra-mundane conception of beauty, founded in the spirit of man, and this again conforms itself to the spirit of each race. Through it the poets become creative rather than adaptive,—the beauty of their imaginings coming from within, just as the beauty of nature is the efflux of the universal spirit. So far