a very few, have seen and heard—Homer, Shakespeare—and these are the greatest of mankind.
Again, Arnold says—the poet is a priest of the wonder and bloom of the world. We see with his eyes and are glad. But he does not see all. As human life is wider than he, so Nature is greater, vaster than the singer. Her mighty march moves and will move on, when all our poetry of her is dead; nor can it ever express the thousandth part of her over-brimming life. Yet if the poet love, he has charm; and to charm the heart of man, to loose our heart in tears and joy, to give us the freshness of the early world, to heal the soul, to make us see and feel and know,—this is the poet's dignity and use.
But he takes another view. The poet is, by his nature, alone (and here the personality of Arnold intrudes), and solitude oppresses him. He flies from the noise of men which jars him. But can Life reach him in the solitude, and he is to express Life; and fenced from the multitude, who will fence him from himself? He hears nothing then but the mountain torrents and the beating of his own heart. Wherefore, tormented in exile, he flies back into the world of men. And there he is again unhappy. Absence from himself (for in the turmoil of men he cannot hear the voice of his soul) tortures him. Again he refuges in silence, and again the air is too keen to breathe, the loneliness unendurable. Thus, miserably bandied to and fro, only death can heal the long disease of his life.
