The Power of the Spirit 271the rhythm and chant of the revelation of an eternal presence.
The voice of the poet will reveal to us by the inspired rhythmic
word the God who is the Self of all things and beings, the Life
of the universe, the Divinity in man, and he will express all
the emotion and delight of the endeavour of the human soul
to discover the touch and joy of that Divinity within him in
whom he feels the mighty founts of his own being and life and
effort and his fullness and unity with all cosmic experience and
with Nature and with all creatures. The note which has already
begun and found many of its tones in Whitman and Carpenter
and A. E. and Tagore will grow into a more full and near and
intimate poetic knowledge and vision and feeling which will
continue to embrace more and more, no longer only the more
exceptional inner states and touches which are the domain of
mystic poetry, but everything in our inner and outer existence
until all life and experience has been brought within the mould
of the spiritual sense and the spiritual interpretation. A poetry
of this kind will be in a supreme way what all art should be,
a thing of harmony and joy and illumination, a solution and
release of the soul from its vital unrest and questioning and
struggle, not by any ignoring of these things but by an uplifting
into the strength of the self within and the light and air of its
greater view where there is found not only the point of escape
but the supporting calmness and power of a seated knowledge,
mastery and deliverance. In the greatest art and poetry there
should be something of the calm of the impersonal basing and
elevating the effort and struggle of the personality, something
of the largeness of the universal releasing and harmonising the
troubled concentrations of the individual existence, something
of the sense of the transcendent raising the inferior, ignorant and
uncertain powers of life towards a greater strength and light and
Ananda. And when art and poetry can utter the fullest sense of
these things, it is then that they will become the greatest fortifiers
and builders of the soul of man and assure it in the grandeur of
its own largest self and spirit. The poetry of Europe has been
a voice intensely eager and moved but restless, troubled and
without a sure base of happiness and repose, vibrating with the