Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/251

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I wiped away the weeds and foam,

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar."

Disappointed, he forswears the pursuit of beauty, and declares:—

But, even as he speaks, the ground-pine curls its pretty wreath beneath his feet, "running over the club-moss burrs;" he scents the violet's breath, and therewithal

This recognition, at which the idealist arrives, of the intertransmutations of beauty and truth, Labor est etiam ipsa pietas. is a kind of natural piety, and renders the labor of the poet or other "artist of the beautiful" a proper form of worship. His heart tells him that this is so: it is lightest when he has worked at his craft with diligence and accomplishment; it is light with a happiness which the religious say one can know only by experience. The piety of his labor is not yet sufficiently comprehended; even the poet, having listened all his life to other tests of sanctification, often mistrusts his own conscience, looks