You would wave about and double up just as much, and be just as futile, with it as without it. Why do you crawl about on the top of that post, little worm? It should have been a tree, eh? with green leaves for eating. But it isn't, and you have crawled about it all day, looking for a new brown branch, or a green leaf. Do you know anything about tears, little worm? Or take McCarthy's lines to the honey bee: "Poor desolate betrayer of Pan's trust, Who turned from mating and the sweets thereof, To make of labor an eternal lust, And with pale thrift destroy the red of love, The curse of Pan has sworn your destiny. Unloving, unbeloved, you go your way Toiling forever, and unwittingly You bear love's precious burden every day From flower to flower (for your blasphemy), Poor eunuch, making flower lovers gay." Or this: GODLINESS I know a man who says That he gets godliness out of a book. He told me this as we sought arbutus On the April hills-- Little color-poems of God Lilted to us from the ground, Lyric blues and whites and pinks. We climbed great rocks, Eternally chanting their gray elegies, And all about, the cadenced hills Were proud With the stately green epic of the Almighty. And then we walked home under the stars, While he kept telling me about his book And the godliness in it. There are many great lyrics in our literature which have no palpable or deducible philosophy; but they are the utterance of deep, serious, imaginative natures, and they reach our minds and hearts. Wordsworth's "Daffodils," his "Cuckoo," his "Skylark," and scores of others, live because they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds and flowers themselves. Such a poem as Gray's "Elegy" holds its own, and will continue to hold it, because it puts in pleasing verse form the universal human emotion which all persons feel more or less when gazing upon graves. The intellectual content of Scott's poems is not great but the human and emotional content in them is great. A great minstrel of the border speaks in them. The best that Emerson could say of Scott was that "he is the delight of generous boys," but the spirit of romance offers as legitimate a field for the poet as does the spirit of transcendentalism, though yielding, of course, different human values. Every poet of a high order has a deep moral nature, and yet the poet is far from being a mere moralist-- "A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all." Every true poem is an offering upon the altar of art; it exists to no other end; it teaches as nature teaches; it is good as nature is good; its art is the art of nature; it brings our spirits in closer and more loving contact with the universe; it is for the edification of the soul. VI SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT