“O Love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
And answer, echoes, answer, Dying, dying, dying.”
Is not this a new form to the thought--a form which makes us feel the
truth of it afresh? And every new embodiment of a known truth must be a
new and wider revelation. No man is capable of seeing for himself the
whole of any truth: he needs it echoed back to him from every soul in
the universe; and still its centre is hid in the Father of Lights. In so
far, then, as either form or thought is new, we may grant the use of the
word Creation, modified according to our previous definitions.
This operation of the imagination in choosing, gathering, and vitally
combining the material of a new revelation, may be well illustrated from
a certain employment of the poetic faculty in which our greatest poets
have delighted. Perceiving truth half hidden and half revealed in the
slow speech and stammering tongue of men who have gone before them, they
have taken up the unfinished form and completed it; they have, as it
were, rescued the soul of meaning from its prison of uninformed crudity,
where it sat like the Prince in the “Arabian Nights,” half man, half
marble; they have set it free in its own form, in a shape, namely, which
it could “through every part impress.” Shakespere’s keen eye suggested
many such a rescue from the tomb--of a tale drearily told--a tale which
no one now would read save for the glorified form in which he has
re-embodied its true contents. And from Tennyson we can produce one
specimen small enough for our use, which, a mere chip from the great
marble re-embodying the old legend of Arthur’s death, may, like the hand
of Achilles holding his spear in the crowded picture,
“Stand for the whole to be imagined.”
In the “History of Prince Arthur,” when Sir Bedivere returns after
hiding Excalibur the first time, the king asks him what he has seen, and
he answers--
“Sir, I saw nothing but waves and wind.”