THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 209 
by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time of 
sane and beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor 
in either of the others is there the building-up of a 
fair verbal structure, a symmetrical piece of mechan- 
ism, whose last stone is implied and necessitated in 
the first. 
“The critic’s great error,” says Heine, “lies in 
asking, ‘ What ought the artist to do?’ It would 
be far more correct to ask, ‘ What does the artist 
intend?’ ” 
It is probably partly because his field is so large, 
his demands so exacting, his method so new (neces- 
sarily so), and from the whole standard of the poems 
being what I may call an astronomical one, that the 
critics complain so generally of want of form in him, 
And the critics are right enough, as far as their ob- 
jection goes. There is no deliberate form here, any 
more than there is in the forces of nature. Shall 
we say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The 
void is filled by a Presence. There is a controlling, 
directing, overarching will in every page, every 
verse, that there is no escape from. Design and 
purpose, natural selection, growth, culmination, etc., 
are just as pronounced as in any poet. 
There is a want of form in the unfinished statue, 
because it is struggling into form; it is nothing 
without form; but there is no want of form in the 
elemental laws and effusions —§in fire, or water, or 
rain, or dew, or the smell of the shore or the plung- 
ing waves. And may there not be the analogue of 
this in literature,—a potent, quickening, exhilara- 
