For this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired
poets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most
appealing companions. In their simplicity and abstraction from the
world they come very near the heart. They say little and help much.
They do not picture life, but have life, and give it. So we may say, I
think, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it
"Must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime
Which frowns above the idle foam of time."
"Frowns," says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something
timeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could
threaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat. Tremendous
error! Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those
who instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to
reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal
possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of
other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite
unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal
essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian
calm.
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