252 The Future Poetry
being, and to know the other countries of the soul is to widen
our bounds and make more opulent and beautiful the earth on
which we live. To bring the gods into our life is to raise it to
its own diviner powers. To live in close and abiding intimacy
with Nature and the spirit in her is to free our daily living from
its prison of narrow preoccupation with the immediate moment
and act and to give the moment the inspiration of all Time and
the background of eternity and the daily act the foundation
of an eternal peace and the large momentum of the universal
Power. To bring God into life, the sense of the self in us into
all our personality and becoming, the powers and vistas of the
Infinite into our mental and material existence, the oneness of
the self in all into our experience and feelings and relations of
heart and mind with all that is around us is to help to divinise
our actual being and life, to force down its fences of division
and blindness and unveil the human godhead that individual
man and his race can become if they will and lead us to our
most vital perfection. This is what a future poetry may do for
us in the way and measure in which poetry can do these things,
by vision, by the power of the word, by the attraction of the
beauty and delight of what it shows us. What philosophy or
other mental brooding makes precise or full to our thought,
poetry can by its creative power, imaging force and appeal to
the emotions make living to the soul and heart. This poetry
will present to us indeed in forms of power and beauty all the
actual life of man, his wonderful and fruitful past, his living
and striving present, his yet more living aspiration and hope of
the future, but will present it more seeingly as the life of the
vast self and spirit within the race and the veiled divinity in the
individual, as an act of the power and delight of universal being,
in the greatness of an eternal manifestation, in the presence and
intimacy of Nature, in harmony with the beauty and wonder
of the realms that stretch out beyond earth and its life, in the
march to godhead and the significances of immortality, in the
ever clearer letters and symbols of the self-revealing mystery
and not only in its first crude and incomplete actualities; these
actualities will themselves be treated with a firmer and finer