expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as
And now my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
There are many details on which one would like to join issue with Sir
Henry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathies
so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing with
him about questions of scansion or of the relation of Blake to
contemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies. His book is the
reply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered to
poets by Keats in _The Fall of Hyperion_, where Moneta demands:
What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe
To the great world?
and declares:
None can usurp this height ...
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here
Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how noble is
Keats's dissatisfaction with himself! It is such noble dissatisfaction as
this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry and
religion--the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but a
parlour-game.