i8 7 7] POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 413 



inclines to look at everything in its logical and causal 

 relations, and the primitive, childlike habit of thought 

 which is completely absorbed in the one thing that is 

 immediately before the mind. The first kind of thought 

 makes science, the second makes poetry. For, as we have 

 seen, the characteristic mark of poetry as a fine art is that 

 it has its end within itself. A poetic theme, therefore, is 

 a theme in which the mind finds such interest as to have 

 no impulse to pass away from it, such delight as to strive 

 by every effort to attain full sympathy with its beauty, 

 full mastery over its details. To the primitive and 

 childlike mind every emotion that rises above sensuality, 

 every aspect of nature that is not directly interwoven with 

 bodily needs, possesses these qualities and invites poetic 

 treatment. Each new thought is a lyric unity answering 

 to a unity of feeling. The thinker is of necessity a poet, 

 whose task is not to display his idea in its relation to other 

 thoughts, but to grasp it as it is in itself, to put upon it the 

 impress of his own mastery, and give it enduring shape 

 and comeliness by clothing it in articulate form. For it 

 is not as mere inarticulate impression or emotion that the 

 new thing which confronts the poet with vivid concreteness 

 and force of absorbing passion can be rightly felt and 

 understood. Only when bound down in fit utterance, and 

 so made subject to the sovereignty of thought, do the 

 subtle and many-sided phases of nature reveal themselves 

 in their true significance and beauty. The simplest 

 impression of inner or outer nature bears within it some 

 thing of infinitude which only the artist can grasp aright 

 and reduce to finite expression. Nowhere is the task of 

 the nature-poet more pregnantly set forth than in the 

 myth of the binding of Proteus. The simplest manifesta 

 tion of nature has countless shapes and changeful aspects, 

 which by their glamour deceive the eyes and delude the 

 grasp of men. The true artist is he who, casting over 

 Proteus the chain of artistic expression, sets forth in a 

 single and adequate form the mobile many-sidedness of 



