102 The Future Poetry
most satisfied possible action, its purest zenith of native force.
An ideal and spiritual poetry revealing the spirit in itself and in
things, showing to us the unseen present in the seen, unveiling
ranges of existence which the physical mind ignores, pointing
man himself to undreamed capacities of godhead, future heights
of being, truth, beauty, power, joy which are beyond the high-
est of his common or his now realised values of existence, —
this will surely appear as the last potentiality of this high and
beautiful creative power. When the eye of the poet has seen the
life of man and the world externally or penetrated into its more
vital inwardness or has risen to the clarities and widenesses of a
thought which observantly perceives or intimately understands
it, and when his word has caught some revealing speech and
rhythm of what he has seen, much has been done, but not all
that is possible to poetic vision and utterance. This other and
greater realm still remains open for a last transcendence.
For the first time in occidental literature, we get in this fourth
turn of the evolution of English poetry some faint initial falling of
this higher light upon the poetic intelligence. Some ancient poets
may have received something of it through myth and symbol; a
religious mystic here and there may have attempted to give his
experience rhythmic and imaginative form. But here is the first
poetic attempt of the intellectual faculty striving at a high height
of its own development to look beyond its own level directly
into the unseen and the unknown and to unveil some ideal truth
of its own highest universal conceptions hidden behind the veil
of the ordinary mind and supporting them in their return to
their eternal source. This high departure was not an inevitable
outcome of the age that preceded Wordsworth, Blake and Shel-
ley. The intellectual endeavour had been in Milton inadequate
in range, subtlety and depth, in those who followed paltry, nar-
row and elegantly null, in both supported by an insufficient
knowledge. A new and larger endeavour in the same field might
rather have been expected which would have set before it the
aim of a richer, deeper, wider, more curious intellectual human-
ism, poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason
the ascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. That was