vil 
shall be, but of ‘divine putting on.”” We do not choose our 
dream, but our dream chooses us, fastens on us like a sort of 
spiritual microbe, and we are a doomed man. But what is this 
better than witchcraft ? A mere revival of old superstition in a 
new form. It may be, but I have not said there was no element 
of truth in the old superstitions. ‘Oh, never rudely will I 
blame his faith in the night of stars and angels.’’ At any rate, 
this dream of Wordsworth’s seemed to me better than the old 
superstitions it displaced. They were ugly. This is beautiful : 
and beauty, says Emerson, “is the creator of the universe.” 
They were mean, and vulgar, and impure and cruel. This is 
noble, and in harmony with all that is best and noblest in man, 
*“‘ the likest God within the soul.’’ Moreover, it is the dream of 
the nineteenth century, and not of the thirteenth. The vision 
of Wordsworth, not of Dante. So much for the dream, and it is 
no part of my present purpose to give the interpretation thereof. 
I remember a time when I was in the habit of repeating to one or 
two old friends passages from Gray, Collins, Coleridge, Keats, 
Shelley, Wordsworth, and they said, yes, they were very beautiful, 
but they never read these things for themselves—they preferred 
other reading—the novel, the history, the sermon, the treatise 
on logic. They did not care for dreams. To me the dreams 
seemed the reality. But at odd times I have thought they 
might be right, and that I was under a spell; that I was 
bewitched, as surely as ever Pendle Forester was bewitched in the 
old time ; that the divine ideas and the heavenly music of these 
poets of nature were but a sort of modern gramarie, and that 
my friends were the wise men and I was the fool. But one day 
I read some words of Matthew Arnold’s, in which he said: ‘* The 
future of poetry is immense; because in poetry, where it is 
worthy of its high destinies, our race as time goes on will find 
an ever surer and surer stay.” And again, ‘‘ We should 
conceive of poetry worthily. We should conceive of it as capable 
of higher uses and called to higher destinies than those which 
men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will 
discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, 
to console us, to sustain us. Wordsworth finely and truly calls 
poetry ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.’ Our 
religion parading evidence, such as those on which the popular 
mind relies now ; our philosophy pluming itself on its reasoning, 
about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but 
the shadows and dreams aud false shows of knowledge? The 
day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having 
trusted them, for having taken them seriously ; and the more we 
perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize the breath 
and finer spirit of knowledge offered to us by poetry.” Need I 
say that these words were reassuring? Could it be, I thought, 
