It is so with the poets who sing you a song or breathe a sentiment that is not oral, not didactic, not purposeful, but of the stuff that thrills the spirit of man,—their charm is impossible to define, it must be felt, and for having felt it, your spirit is of a color different from what it was before. As Corot’s landscapes painted in the forest of Fontainebleau are said to express the emotion of the painter when in the presence of nature, so does the lyric poet of magical gift express his feelings, lay bare his soul with its emotions and vacillations. The sadness and sensuous mystery of Edgar Allan Poe, the marvellous ability of Tennyson to fit the most exquisite words to the most subtle incantations of beauty, the thrill of romance in Shakespearean England as depicted by our contemporary, Alfred Noyes, the appetite for sensuous delights of Keats, the tuneful, heartfelt songs of the Cavalier poets—these are of natural magic, of delight to the human soul, of the spirit of art. When Shakespeare wrote, Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie, he had no moral to expound, he merely sung from his heart with the beauties of nature and the ways of fairy-land as an open book before him. If we wish (and there is no rightful reason why we should not) to drain the very dregs of living for the richest drops of wine, let us enrich, make more virile our enjoyment by seeking nourishing draughts of experience from the poets who have expressed those sweetest joys on earth in poems that have cleansed the souls of men for generation upon generation. There is the other phrase of Matthew Arnold, "Moral Profundity." It is when we seek wisdom from the poets that we find this attribute. When the greatest of them give us their innermost thought, not the record of experiences, but the essential deductions from all their experiences, we have their true wisdom. When Wordsworth in "The Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." wrote the words, Therefore am I still .....well pleased to recognize, In Nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian, of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being; or when, in his "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," he wrote, Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: and when Shelley wrote, We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. or when Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall," wrote, This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.