M. Valéry’s account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine, and with the tendencies of such a work as William James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_. The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he _sees_, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite—that is not even a test of his success—but to set something down; the state of the reader is merely that reader’s particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in words. Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory (in the modern and not the Greek sense of that word) or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something _perceived_. When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted. * * * * * NOTE.—My friend the Abbé Laban has reproached me for attributing to Landor, in this essay, sentiments which are merely the expression of his dramatic figure Petrarch, and which imply rather Landor’s reproof of the limitations of the historical Petrarch’s view of Dante, than the view of Landor himself. The reader should therefore observe this correction of my use of Landor’s honoured name. Transcriber’s Notes: Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected. Typographical errors were silently corrected. Spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed. Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sacred Wood, by T. S. Eliot