Madam, but do you happen to be the Almighty, or are you playing Egeria to his Numa? You are constructing admirably comprehensive schemes and systems for His guidance, if your hints will but be taken. But if you address yourself to Man, you will find that his business is not at all to comprehend the Universe; for this, if he could achieve it, would make him equal with God. What he more humbly aspires to, is to apprehend; to pierce by flashes of insight to some inch or so of the secret, to some star to which he can hitch his waggon. Now there are," Poetry goes on, "certain men, granted to dwell among us, of more delicate mental fibre than their fellows; men whose minds have as it were exquisite filaments which they throw out to intercept, apprehend and conduct home to Man stray messages between the outer mystery of the Universe and the inner mystery of his soul; even as modern telegraphy has learnt to search out, snatch and gather home messages wandering astray over waste waters of Ocean. Such men are the poets, my servants."

"Moreover," Poetry will continue, "these men do not collect their messages as your philosophers do, by vigorous striving and learning; nor, as the priests of Baal did, by cutting themselves and crying; but by schooling their souls to harmony and awaiting the moment of apprehension with what one of them has called 'a wise passiveness.' For it is not their method to wrestle with God, like Jacob, or to hold Him up with a 'Stand and deliver.' It is enough for them to be receptacles of His passing breath, as the harps abandoned and hung on willow-trees by the waters of Babylon may have caught, at evening, and hummed the wind whispering from Israel. And for this, while they hang and wait, they will be despised by the commonalty for indolent fellows, as indeed they are; as when the wind inspires and sets them hymning, they will be accused of insobriety. Yet always they excel your philosophers, insomuch as they accept the transcendental as really transcendental and do not profess to instruct the Almighty in it; and chiefly, perhaps, they excel your philosophers by opposing a creativeness, potential at any rate, against a certain and foredoomed barrenness. For the philosophers would get at the secret by reason, contemning emotion; whereas the poet knows that creation implies fatherhood, and fatherhood implies emotion, even passionate emotion. It is (take it as a cold fact) only on the impulse of yearning, on the cry of Abba, that the creature can leap to any real understanding of the Creator."

Yet the philosopher will go on to the end of time despising the poet, who grasps at mysteries per saltum, neglecting the military road of logic.

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