APPENDIX A LXVII 



tude as a witness one who was not a dreamer, one who was a child of 

 his age and that not a poetical age, one who loved the excitement of 

 an aristocratic society, insolent with the feeling of class, dissolute and 

 irresponsible, one whose genius exerted itself in a political life, soiled 

 with corruption and intrigue but dealing with events of incomparable 

 gravity. Charles James Fox said of poetry: "It is the great refresh- 

 ment of the human mind" . . . "The greatest thing after all". 

 To quote the words of his biographer, the Poets "consoled him for 

 having missed everything upon which his heart was set; for the loss 

 of power and fortune; for his all but permanent exclusion from the 

 privilege of serving his country and the opportunity of benefiting his 

 friends". 



I should like to close this address upon that tone, upon the idea 

 of the supremacy of poetry in life — not a supremacy of detachment, 

 but a supremacy of animating influence — the very inner spirit of 

 life. Fox felt it in his day, when the conditions in the world during 

 and after the French Revolution were not very different from the 

 confused and terrifying conditions we find around us now. He took 

 refreshment in that stream of poetry, lingering by ancient sources of 

 the stream, the crystal pools of Greece and Rome. The poetry of 

 his day did not interest him as greatly as classical poetry, but it did 

 interest him. The poetry of the 18th century was a poetry with the 

 ideals of prose: compared with the Classics and the Elizabethans, it 

 lacked poetic substance. The poetry of our day may not satisfy us, 

 but we have, as Fox had, possession of the Classics and the Eliza- 

 bethans, and we have, moreover, the poetry of a later day than his 

 that is filled with some of the qualities that he cherished. 



If the poetry of our generation is wayward and discomforting, 

 full of experiment that seems to lead nowhither, bitter with the 

 turbulence of an uncertain and ominous time, we may turn from it 

 for refreshment to those earlier days when society appears to us to 

 have been simpler, when there were seers who made clear the paths 

 of life and adorned them with beauty. 



