and assures us that “the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation,” so that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”  “And not only they,” he goes on, “but ourselves also”:  while the pagan poet has tears that reach the heart of the transitory show:  Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt—­“Tears are for Life, mortal things pierce the soul.”

And why not?  For the complete man—­totus homo—­has feelings as well as reason, and should have both active, in fine training, to realise the best of him.  Shelley obviously meant this when he defined Poetry as “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”  He did not mean that they are happy only in the sense of being “fortunate,” felices, in such moments, but that they were happy in the sense of being “blessed,” beati; and this feeling of blessedness they communicate.  “We are aware,” he goes on, “of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes requiring our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression ... so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object.  It is as it were the interpenetration of a divine nature through our own, ... and the state of mind produced is at war with every base desire.  The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is—­an atom in the universe.”  Every word italicised above by me carries Shelley’s witness that Poetry and joyous emotion are inseparable.  “Poetry,” he winds up, “redeems from decay the visitations of the Divinity in Man.”  How can we dissociate from joy the news of such visitations either on the lips that carry or in the ears that receive?

Yet, as has been hinted, the very simplicity of it puzzles the ordinary man, and not only puzzles the philosopher but exasperates him.  It annoys the philosopher, first, that the poet apparently takes so little trouble. (As a fact he takes endless trouble; but, to be sure, he saves an immense deal by going the right way to work.) All knowledge is notoriously painful (that is to say, to philosophers).  Moreover, the fellow mixes it up with emotion (an integral part of man which philosophy ignores, and stultifies itself, as a rule, by ignoring).  He is one with the Oracles, a suspected tribe.  He idles like an Oracle, attending on inspiration, and when he has received the alleged afflatus, the fellow—­so different from us—­is neither to hold nor to bind.  The easiest way with him seems to be a pitying contempt.  “For all good poets,” says Socrates sagely in the Ion, “epic as well as lyric, compose their lovely strains, not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.  And as the Corybantian