The various things I have been saying have been said, or, better
still, taken for granted, by Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Ruskin,
Pater, Stevenson, by all our poets in verse and prose. What I wish to
add is that, being a poet, seeing and feeling like a poet, means
quite miraculously multiplying life's resources for oneself and
others; in fact the highest practicality conceivable, the real
transmutation of brass into gold. Now what we all waste, more even
than money, land, time and labour, more than we waste the efforts and
rewards of other folk, and the chances of enjoyment of unborn
generations (and half of our so-called practicality is nothing but
such waste), what we waste in short more than anything else, is our
own and our children's inborn capacity to see and feel as poets do,
and make much joy out of little material.