Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/108

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The gift of unconditioned vision has been vouchsafedThe Creative and Impersonal. both to the primitive world, and to races at their height of action and invention. The objective masterpieces of poetry consist, first, of those whose origin is obscure, and which are so naturally inwrought with history and popular traits that they seem growths rather than works of art. Such are the Indian epics, the Northern sagas, the early ballads of all nations, and of course the Homeric poems of Greece. These are the lusty Juventus mundi.product of the youth of mankind, the song and story that come when life is unjaded, faith unsophisticated, and human nature still in voice with universal Pan. The less spontaneous but equally vital types are the fruit of later and constructive periods,—"golden" ages, the masterpieces of which are composed with artistic design and still unwearied genius. Whether epic or dramatic, and whether traditional or the product of schools and nations in their prime, the significance of objective poetry lies in its presentment of the world outside, and not of the microcosm within the poet's self. His ideal mood is that of the Chinese sage from whose wisdom, now twenty-six centuries old, the artist John La Farge, himself imbued with the spirit of the "most eastern East," has cited for me these phrases: "I am become as a quiet water, or a mirror reflecting what may be. It keeps nothing, it refuses nothing. What it reflects is there, but I do not keep it: it is not I." And again: "One should