A MODERN SYMPOSIUM
even be worse than the first, because they will have lost the natural instinctive acceptance of life, without learning how to accept it on the higher plane.
"And that is why—now comes what I really do care about, and what I've been wanting to say—that is why there is nothing so important for the future or the present of the world as poetry. Allison, for instance, and Wilson would be different men if only they would read my works! I'm not sure even if I may say so, that Remenham himself wouldn't be the better." Remenham, however, smilingly indicated that he had read them. Whereat Coryat rather comically remarked, "Oh, well! Yes! Perhaps then my poetry isn't quite good enough. But there's Shakespeare, and Milton, and—I don't care who it is, so long as it has the essential of all great poetry, and that is to make you feel the worth of things. I don't mean by that the happiness, but just the extraordinary value, of which all these unsolved questions about Good and Evil are themselves part. No one, I am sure, ever laid down a great tragedy—take the most terrible of all, take 'Lear'—without an overwhelming sense of the value of life; life as it is, life at its most pitiless
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