204 The Future Poetry
strikes out in a brief verse the living spiritual perception of the
universal and infinite source of love, —
We bade adieu to love the old,
We heard another lover then,
Whose forms are myriad and untold,
Sigh to us from the hearts of men.He lives on the spiritual plane to which so much of this poetry
is an indistinct or a less distinct aspiration, and his whole self-
expression is bathed, perhaps rendered sometimes a little remote
and unseizable by its immergence, in an unusual light, the light of
the spirit breaking through the veils of the intelligence in which
it has to find its means of speech. This is not the frank marriage
and close unity of the earth and heavens of which Whitman and
Meredith speak, but a rare, high and exclusive pinnacle of the
soul’s greater sight. The rest of this side of recent poetry is a
climbing or pointing up from the earth-levels to the heights of
Truth; but from one region of those loftiest elevations this sight
looks down and opens its eye of light on the life of man and the
cycles of the universe.