path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralist would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make men more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. The greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the extreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this scene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world of good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula. Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our double attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open to question whether There is a fountain filled with blood 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. IX.--EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC