296 The Future Poetry
admits the soul to a most spiritually profound light of seeing
and ecstasy of feeling even of ordinary ideas and objects and in
its highest force to thoughts and things that surpass the manner
and range and limits of depth of the normal intelligence. The
greatest poets have been those in whom these moments of a
highest intensity of intuitive and inspired speech have been of
a frequent occurrence and in one or two, as in Shakespeare,
of a miraculous abundance. There is however this subtle farther
variation that this kind of utterance, though essentially the same
always, takes a different colour according to the kind of object
vision and subjective vision which is peculiar to the mind of
the poet in its normal action. The citations I have made have
been all taken from writers in whom the poetic intelligence and
its type of imagination have been the leading forces. The same
power in poets who speak more with the direct voice of the
life-soul assumes quite another hue and seems even of a very
different texture of language. The characteristic distinction of
its note from that of the more intellectualised intuition can best
be illustrated from Shakespeare and by such a passage as the
speech of Claudio,
Ay, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod: and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world:and the rest. There is an illumination, an intuitive intensity
of the life spirit and its feeling in that thought and its speech
which we can no longer command in the same direct and
essential manner. And even the ideas that seem to belong to
the region of the thinking intelligence have subtly in these
poets the same inspiration. It is sufficient to compare Shake-
speare’s