This gives to his work a certain fixity both of mood and form; his thoughts are as gems that flash without heat, not the ruby-hearted, passion-dyed gems, but the pale topaz or the amber, holding the imprisoned glow of reflection. If this may seem to limit Mr. Santayana’s achievement, it is not so intended, but rather to reveal his distinction. He is not only a true poet, but one of rare accomplishment; his work, however, is for those who are deeply subjective, who trance themselves with the beautiful as an anodyne for pain; those who subordinate to-day to the storied charm of yesterday, and look backward to the twilight of the gods, rather than forward to the renewing sunrise. It is not for those whose creed of poetry is that it should be all things to all men; that life, in travail to deliver truth, should utter its cries through the poet. It is for those who know that poetry can no more be adapted to all than could the spoken words of a great teacher reach equally the diverse minds of a multitude whom he might address; and that while it may be the office of one poet to interpret the struggles, the activities, the aims of life, it may be equally the part of another to penetrate to that calm at the depth of the soul where throes have brought forth peace. Not only are there various natures to whom poetry speaks, but natures within natures, so that all poets speak to different phases of our consciousness: some to the mind,—and here the range is infinite,—some to the heart, and some to the soul, and of the last is Mr. Santayana. He is for the meditative hours when we are sounding the depths of ourselves and come back to the surface of things, bringing with us the unsatisfied pain of being. Hours when we turn instinctively to a sonnet like this to find our mood expressed: I would I might forget that I am I, And break the heavy chain that binds me fast, Whose links about myself my deeds have cast. What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky, Lord of the future, guardian of the past, And soon must forth to know his own at last. In his large life to live, I fain would die. Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food, But calling not his suffering his own; Blesséd the angel, gazing on all good, But knowing not he sits upon a throne; Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, And doomed to know his aching heart alone. The much-mooted, but vaguely understood, sub-conscious mind, speaks in this sonnet in terms of the conscious. It is a subtle bit of philosophy, but not more so than several others in the same sequence which show the evolution of Mr. Santayana’s attitude toward life. One may not in a brief space follow out the clews to this development, whose beginning was in religious emotion: