144 The Future Poetry
light, love and freedom intimate and near to men; he has, as in
thePrometheus, to go for them to his imagination or to some
remote luminous experience of ideal worlds and to combine
these beautiful ideal images, too delicately profound in their
significance, too veiled in robe upon robe of light to be distinct
in limb and form, with traditional names and symbols which are
converted into this other sense and fail to be perfect links because
by the conversion they cease to be familiar to the mind. To bring
his difficult significance home he lavishes inexhaustibly image on
radiant image, line on dazzling beauty of line, the sense floats in
a storm of coruscations and dissolving star-showers; the more
we look and accustom our eyes to this new kind of light, the
more loveliness and light we see, but there is not that immediate
seizing and taking captive of the whole intelligence which is the
sign of an assured and sufficient utterance.
He is in revolt too against the law of earth, in arms against
its dominations and powers, and would substitute for it by some
immediate and magical change the law of heaven; but so he fails
to make the needed transition and reconciliation and his image
of the thing to be remains too ideal, too fine and abstract in spite
of the beauty of the poetical forms he gives it as its raiment or
atmosphere. Heaven cannot descend to take possession of the
gross, brute and violent earth he sees around him, therefore he
carries up the delivered earth into a far and ideal heaven. Some-
thing of the same excess of another light than ours surrounds
and veils his intercourse with the spirit in Nature. He sees her
earthly forms in a peculiar radiance and light and through them
the forms and spirits of his ideal world. He has not Wordsworth’s
distinctness and intimate spiritual communion with Nature as
she is on earth; the genii of the worlds of dream and sleep cluster
too thickly round all that his waking eye seizes. He tries to let
them in through the force of crowding images, brilliant tossings
aside of the lucent curtain,tiraskarin. ̄ı, which veils them from us:
but they remain half-hidden in their means of revelation. The
earth-nature is seen in the light of another nature more than in
its own, and that too is only half visible in the mixed luminosity,
“burning through the vest that hides it.” Tradition governs very