yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtile that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only find by slow mining for it,—­which is withheld on purpose, and close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it in a furnace of your own heating.  And this withholding of their meaning is continual, and confessed, in the great poets.  Thus Pindar says of himself:  “There is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the wise, but, for the many, they need interpreters.”  And neither Pindar, nor AEschylus, nor Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional reservation; nay, beyond this, there is often a meaning which they themselves cannot interpert [sic],—­which it may be for ages long after them to intrepert [sic],—­in what they said, so far as it recorded true imaginative vision.  For all the greatest myths have been seen by the men who tell them, involuntarily and passively,—­seen by them with as great distinctness (and in some respects, though not in all, under conditions as far beyond the control of their will) as a dream sent to any of us by night when we dream clearest; and it is this veracity of vision that could not be refused, and of moral that could not be foreseen, which in modern historical inquiry has been left wholly out of account; being indeed the thing which no merely historical investigator can understand, or even believe; for it belongs exclusively to the creative or artistic group of men, and can only be interpreted by those of their race, who themselves in some measure also see visions and dream dreams.

* Note, once for all, that unless when there is question about some particular expression, I never translate literally, but give the real force of what is said, as I best can, freely.

So that you may obtain a more truthful idea of the nature of Greek religion and legend from the poems of Keats, and the nearly as beautiful, and, in general grasp of subject, far more powerful, recent work of Morris, than from frigid scholarship, however extensive.  Not that the poet’s impressions or renderings of things are wholly true, but their truth is vital, not formal.  They are like sketches from the life by Reynolds or Gainsborough, which may be demonstrably inaccurate or imaginary in many traits, and indistinct in others, yet will be in the deepest sense like, and true; while the work of historical analysis is too often weak with loss, through the very labor of its miniature touches, or useless in clumsy and vapid veracity of externals, and complacent security of having done all that is required for the portrait, when it has measured the breadth of the forehead and the length of the nose.