The Breath of Greater Life 251what to the normal mind was only romance, illusion or dream.
A larger field of being made more real to man’s experience will
be the realm of the future poetry.
These things are often given an appearance of remoteness, of
withdrawal from the actuality of life, because to discover them
the mind had at first to draw away from the insistent outward
preoccupation and live as if in a separate world. The seeker of the
Self and Spirit, the God-lover, tended to become the cloistered
monk, the ascetic, the mystic, the eremite and to set the spiritual
apart from and against the material life. The lover of Nature
went away from the noise of man and daily things to commune
with her largeness and peace. The gods were found more in the
lights of solitude than in the thoughts and actions of men. The
seer of other worlds lived surrounded by the voices and faces of
supernature. And this was a legitimate seclusion, for these are
provinces and realms and presences and one has often to wander
apart in them or live secluded with them to know their nearest
intimacies. The spirit is real in itself even apart from the world,
the gods have their own home beyond our sky and air, Nature
her own self-absorbed life and supernature its brilliant curtains
and its dim mysterious fences. None of these things are unreal,
and if the supernatural as handled by older poets seemed often
mere legend, fancy and romance, it was because it was seen from
a distance by the imagination, not lived in by the soul and in its
spirit, as is done by the true seer and poet of this supernature or
other-nature. And all these things, because they have their own
reality, have their life and a poetry which makes them its subject
can be as vital, as powerful, as true as the song which makes
beautiful the physical life and normal passions and emotions of
men and the objects of our bodily sense-experience.
But still all life is one and a new human mind moves towards
the realisation of its totality and oneness. The poetry which
voices the oneness and totality of our being and Nature and
the worlds and God, will not make the actuality of our earthly
life less but more real and rich and full and wide and living
to men. To know other countries is not to belittle but enlarge
our own country and help it to a greater power of its own