The Poets of the Dawn – 3 141the very stumblings of his life came from the difficulty of such
a nature moving in the alien terrestrial environment in which
he is not at home nor capable of accepting its muddy vesture
and iron chain, attempting impatiently to realise there the law
of his own being in spite of the obstruction of the physical clay.
This mind and nature cannot live at ease in their dusk day and
time, but escape to dwell prophetically in a future heaven and
earth in which the lower life shall have accepted the law of his
own celestial worlds. As a poet his intellect is suffused with their
light and his imagination is bathed in it; they are steeped in the
brilliances of a communion with a higher law, another order of
existence, another meaning behind Nature and terrestrial things.
But in addition he possesses the intellectual equipment possible
in his age and can speak with a subtle beauty and perfect melody
the tongue of the poetic intelligence. He is a seer of spiritual
realities, much more radiantly near to them than Wordsworth,
has, what Coleridge had not, a poetic grasp of metaphysical
truths, can see the forms and hear the voices of higher elemental
spirits and natural godheads than those seen and heard by Blake,
while he has a knowledge too of some fields of the same middle
realm, is the singer of a greater and deeper liberty and a purer
and nobler revolt than Byron, has the constant feeling of a high
spiritual and intellectual beauty, not sensuous in the manner of
Keats, but with a hold on the subtler beauty of sensible things
which gives us not their glow of vital warmth and close material
texture, but their light and life and the rarer atmosphere that
environs them on some meeting line between spirit and body.
He is at once seer, poet, thinker, prophet, artist. In his own day
and after, the strangeness of his genius made him unintelligible
to the rather gross and mundane intellectual mind of the nine-
teenth century; those who admired him most, were seized only
by the externalities of his work, its music, delicacy, diffusely
lavish imaginative opulence, enthusiasm, but missed its inner
significance. Now that we are growing more into the shape of
his ideas and the forms of his seeing, we can get nearer to the
hidden heart of his poetry. Still high-pinnacled as is his flight,
great as is his work and his name, there is in him too a limitation