The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty 267illumined by the wonder of the secret spiritual self that is the
inhabitant and self-sculptor of form, the beauty and delight of
the thousand-coloured, many-crested, million-waved miracle of
life made a hundred times more profoundly meaningful by the
greatness and the sweetness and attracting poignancy of the self-
creating inmost soul which makes of life its epic and its drama
and its lyric, the beauty and delight of the spirit in thought, the
seer, the thinker, the interpreter of his own creation and being
who broods over all he is and does in man and the world and
constantly resees and shapes it new by the stress and power of
his thinking, this will be the substance of the greater poetry that
has yet to be written. And that can be discovered only if and so
far as the soul of man looks or feels beyond even these things
and sees and voices the eternal and knows its godheads and gets
to some close inward touch of the infinite ecstasy which is the
source of the universal delight and beauty. For the nearer we
get to the absolute Ananda, the greater becomes our joy in man
and the universe and the receptive and creative spiritual emotion
which needs for its voice the moved tones of poetic speech.