184 LITERARY VALUES 



we do not get anything. His style is the main 

 thing, as it is with the Greek poets. In other 

 words, there is nothing in Milton that makes a per- 

 sonal appeal. One cannot conceive of any reader 

 taking him to his heart, appropriating him, and find- 

 ing his life colored and changed by him, as by some 

 later poets. Wordsworth was a revelation to Mill; 

 Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman have in the 

 same way been revelations to many readers, and for 

 the same reason, — their intense individual point of 

 view. Their appeal is a personal and a religious 

 one as well as a poetic. No one who has not some- 

 thing of the modern pantheistic feeling toward na- 

 ture will be deeply touched by Wordsworth. No 

 one who has not felt the burden of modern problems, 

 the decay of the old faiths, will be moved by Arnold's 

 poetry. His " sad lucidity of soul " belongs to our 

 age. No one who has not broken away from the 

 old traditions in art and religion and in politics, and 

 possessed himself emotionally of the point of view 

 afforded by modern science, will make much of 

 Whitman. Without a certain mental and spiritual 

 experience and a certain stamp of mind Emerson 

 will not be much to you. In Poe one's sense of 

 artistic forms and verbal melody are alone appealed 

 to. He is more to a Frenchman than to an Ameri- 

 can. If you are ahungered for the bread of life do 

 not go to Poe, do not go to Landor or to Milton, 

 do not go to the current French poets. Go sooner 

 to Goethe, to Tennyson, to Browning, to Arnold, to 

 Whitman, — the great personal poets, the men who 



