The Power of the Spirit 273unity with that spirit. The more intuitive human mind of the
future, delivered from its present limitation of sympathy by the
touch of the one self in all being, will feel as has not been felt
before a unity with other consciousness in Nature and hear the
voice of self-revelation of all that is mute to us, the soul and
life of things that now seem inert and lifeless, the soul and life
of the animal world, the soul and life of the things that grow
in silence and are enclosed in the absorbed dream of their own
half-conscient existence. And it will open to and interpret not
only man and terrestrial Nature, for a poetry concerned with
that alone excludes large ranges of self-experience, but other
domains also of our spirit. It will give the key of the worlds of
supernature, and allow us to move among the beings and scenes,
images and influences and presences of the psychic kingdoms
which are near to us behind their dark or luminous curtain and
will not be afraid to enter into vaster realms of the self and other
universal states and the powers that stand behind our life and
the soul’s eternal spaces. It will do this not merely in a symbol of
greatened human magnitudes, as the old poets represented the
gods, or in hues of romantic glamour or in the far-off light of a
mystic remoteness, but with the close directness and reality that
comes from intimate vision and feeling, and make these things
a part of our living experience.
A poetry of large spiritual inspiration must necessarily be,
when it is not dealing directly with eternal things and turns its
eye on the movement of time and the actual life and destiny of
man, largely present and futurist in its insistence. The poet will
continue though in a new way and with a new eye to transfigure
the past for us, but will not feel that need to live in an imaginative
preoccupation with the past which withdraws compelled from
the unmanageable and transformable actuality of the present:
for to live in the spirit is to be able to distinguish the eternal in
the transient forms of the moment and to see too in these forms
a revelation of the spirit’s greater significances. His vision will
search all the ways of the present and interpret deeply to man the
sense of that which is making him and which he is making: it will
reveal the divinity in all its disguises, face all even that is ugly and