A spirit of joy he is, to beauty vowed, Made to be loved, and every sluggish sense In him is amorous and passionate. Whence danger is; therefore I seek him out So with pure thought and care of things divine To touch his soul that it partake the gods. This does not imply that romantic love is the only avenue to ideal beauty. Rupert Brooke's _The Great Lover_ might dissipate such an idea, by its picture of childlike and omnivorous taste for sensuousbeauty. These I have loved, Brooke begins, White plates and cups, clean gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood. And so on he takes us, apparently at random, through the whole range of his sense impressions. But the main difficulty with having no more than such scattered and promiscuous impressionability is that it is likely to result in poetry that is a mere confusion of color without design, unless the poet is subject to the unifying influence of a great passion, which, far from destroying perspective, as was hinted previously, affords a fixed standard by which to gauge the relative values of other impressions. Of course the exceptionally idealistic poet, who is conscious of a religious ideal, can say with Milton, "I am wont day and night to seek the _idea_ of beauty through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on with certain assured traces." [Footnote: _Prose Works_, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symmons ed.] To him there is no need of the unifying influence of romantic love. In his case the mission of a strong passion is rather to humanize the ideal, lest it become purely philosophical (as that of G. E. Woodberry is in danger of doing) or purely ethical, as is the case of our New England poets. On the other hand, to the poet who denies the ideal element in life altogether, the unifying influence of love is indispensable. Such deeply tragic poetry as that of James Thomson, B. V., for instance, which asserts Macbeth's conclusion that life is "a tale told by an idiot," is saved from utter chaos sufficiently to keep its poetical character, only because the memory of his dead love gives Thomson a conception of eternal love and beauty by which to gauge his hopeless despair. In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same class as the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's perturbation. He inquires: