INTRODUCTION
examining, tasting, refusing. In those alternate drives of the thought in his South Sea idyl (clever as tennis play) how he slips from phenomenon to idea and reverses, happy with either, it seems, "were t'other dear charmer away." How bravely he tries to free himself from the cling of earth, at the close of the "Great Lover!" How little he succeeds! His muse knew only earthly tongues,—so far as he understood.
Why this persistent cling to mortality,—with its quick-coming cry against death and its heaped anathemas on the transformations of decay? It is the old story once more:—the vision of the first poets, the world that "passes away." The poetic eye of Keats saw it,—
"Beauty that must die,
And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."
The reflective mind of Arnold meditated it,—
"the world that seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new.
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."—
So Rupert Brooke,—
"But the best I've known,
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains."
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