Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/198

168 thing in poetry, it is the one thing indispensable, and therefore we give it earliest consideration. Besides, it so depends on the elements of emotion and truth that when these are not expressed in a poem you may suspect the beauty to be defective and your sense of it mistaken. It may be said to symbolize truth in pure form.

The young poet, as instinctively as a plant seeks The poet's instinct. the light, feels that he must worship and express the beautiful. His passion for it, both in his life and in his art, is his greatest strength and danger. It is that which must distinguish him from other men; for many will have more wisdom, more virtue, than himself, while only he who can inform these with beauty by that token is the poet. In the early poems of Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Tennyson, Rossetti, thought is wreaked "upon expression." Even the lyrists whose development stops at this point, such as Herrick, the cavalier singers, the Provençal minstrels, have no obscure stations in the hemicycle of song.

Why is it that all the relics of Grecian poetry Survival of the fittest and most beautiful. have such beauty? Were there no dullards, was there no inartistic versifying, even in Athens? It is my belief that for every poet whose works have reached us a score passed into obscurity, and their writings were lost; furthermore, that, in spite of the burning of the Alexandrian library, comparatively little has been lost since the