Recent English Poetry – 4 197the community of the race and in all its immense past action
opening down through the broadening eager present to an im-
menser future, of the greater self of Nature and of the eternal, the
divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over these things,
who awaits them and in whom they come to the sense of their
oneness. That which the old Indian seers called themahan ̄ atm ̄ a ̄,
the Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast
strain of the cosmic thought and the cosmic life, — the French
poets, influenced in their form and substance by Whitman, have
seized on this element with the clear discernment and intellectual
precision and lucidity of the Latin mind and given it the name of
unanimism, — is the subject of some of his highest strains. He
gets to it repeatedly through his vision of the past opening to the
ideal future, the organic universal movement of bygone nations
and ages and the labour and creation of the present and some
nobler coming turn to a freedom of unified completion, —
The journey done, the journeyman come home,
And man and art with Nature fused again...
The Almighty leader now for once has signalled with his wand.Andsomepartofhiswork,asinthePassage to India, opens out
even into a fuller and profounder sense of its meaning. He sees
it here as a new voyage of the human spirit, — “O farther sail!”
Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only...
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all...
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?And with a singularly clear first seeing of the ideal goal and the
ideal way of the conversion of the intellectual and vital into the
spiritual self, he calls the spirit of man to the adventure.
The circumnavigation of the world begin,
Of man, the voyage of his mind’s return,
To reason’s early paradise,
Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions,
Again with fair creation.