Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the "aesthetic repose." Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning, Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine. [Footnote: _Poets._] Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, John Masefield, _Prayer,_ and _The Seekers;_ and William Rose Benet, _The Falconer of God._] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his birds are Summer-saulting for God's sake. Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought "thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the flower itself. He muses, Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;-- I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower--but if I could understand What you are, root and all and all in all, I should know what God and man is. By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one.