There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It is expressed in the opening of Shelley's _Alastor_, and informs the whole of the _Ode to the West Wind_. It pervades Wordsworth, for if he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute poetry. Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming "into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the revelation is given to him,--ancient and modern writers alike describe the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the singer, One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall; The next he writes his soul's memorial. [Footnote: _A Visit to Burns' Country_.] So Shelley describes the experience: Meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration. [Footnote: _Alastor_.] The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, enabling them, like Lucy, to be Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees. Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer cannot escape Plato's conclusion, There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote: _Ion_, Sec.534.] And again,