I conclude with what I said at the beginning:  to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.  Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation.  And at some epochs no other creation is possible.

Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that.  But what true man of letters ever can forget it?  It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it.  The epochs of AEschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their preeminence.  In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon.  That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness:  but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.

THE STUDY OF POETRY[62]

“The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.  There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve.  Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and how the fact is failing it.  But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.  Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact.  The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."[63]

Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as uttering the thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our study of poetry.  In the present work it is the course of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow.  We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry.  But whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought should be the same.  We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it.  We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies than those which in general men have assigned