Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/19

 There are two other obvious instances, of course, of the same instinct, the perennial poetry of islands, and the perennial poetry of ships. A ship like the Argo or the Fram is valued by the mind because it is an island, because, that is, it carries with it floating loose on the desolate elements the resources, and rules, and trades, and treasuries of a nation, because it has ranks, and shops, and streets, and the whole clinging like a few limpets to a lost spar. An island like Ithaca or England is valued by the mind because it is a ship, because it can find itself alone and self-dependent in a waste of water, because its orchards and forests can be numbered like bales of merchandise, because its corn can be counted like gold, because the starriest and dreariest snows upon its most forsaken peaks are silver flags flown from familiar masts, because its dimmest and most inhuman mines of coal or lead below the roots of all things are definite chatels stored awkwardly in the lowest locker of the hold.

In truth nothing has so much spoilt the right artistic attitude as the continual use of such words as "infinite" and "immeasurable." They were used rightly enough in religion because religion, by its very nature, consists of paradoxes. Religion speaks of an identity which is infinite, just as it spoke of an identity that was at once one and three, just as it might possibly and rightly speak of an identity that was at once black and white.

The old mystics spoke of an existence without end or a happiness without end, with a deliberate defiance, as they