I am aware that this sounds dangerously like an attempt to be darkly metaphysical; but it is impossible to talk on high themes without to some extent using high terms. It is useless to hope to put into words all the mysteries of the relations of art to life, yet it is not impossible to approximate somewhat to what must be the truth of the matter, although in doing it one inevitably runs the risk of seeming to attempt to say what cannot be said. What I have been endeavoring to convey will perhaps be plainer if I say that for purposes of our discussion man is practically alive only in so far as he realizes life. This realization of life, this supreme triumph of inner consciousness, comes to him through his feelings,--indeed, is perhaps to be considered as identical with his feelings. His sensations affect him only by the emotions which they excite. His emotion, in a word, is the measure of his existence. Now the emotion of man always responds, in a degree marked by appreciation, to certain presentations of the relation of things, to certain considerations of the nature of human life, and above all to certain demonstrations of the possibilities of human existence. If these are made actual and clear to the mind, they cannot fail to arouse that engrossing realization which is the height of consciousness. To enable a man to seize with his imagination the ideal of love or hate, of fear or courage, of shame or honor, is to make him kindle and thrill. It is to make him for the time being thoroughly and richly alive, and it is to increase greatly his power of essential life. These are the things which most deeply touch human creatures; they are the universal in that they appeal to all sane hearts and minds; they are the eternal as measured by mortal existence because they have power to touch the men of all time; hence they are the real truths; they are, for beings under the conditions of earthly existence, the only verities. The ordinary life of man is not unlike the feeble flame of a miner's lamp, half smothered in some underground gallery until a draught of vital air kindles it into sudden glow and sparkle. Most human beings have but a dull flicker of half-alive consciousness until some outward breath causes it to flash into quick and quivering splendor. Poetry is that divine air, that breeze from unscaled heights of being, the kindling breath by which the spark becomes a flame.