beliefs of all men. True poetry always has the roots of its growth imbedded in the soil of common experience. Poetry deals most generally with personal experience, and with the instincts, feelings, and volitions of men. Whatever else a great poetry may deal with, it deals first of all with the abiding and universal experiences of the heart and mind and soul-with the whole life of man. Life, it has been urged by various and competent critics, is the proper subject matter of poetry. But three-fourths of life, it has been said upon high authority, is made up of conduct. It may, however, be added that at least three-fourths of conduct consists in the proper exercise of the will. And thus the will-its exercise, its power, its freedom-is a good half of life. Nor is this by any means an overstatement of the will's importance in the every-day experience of living. It is an understatement rather. If the race is ever going to be saved, it must first strongly will to receive salvation. We are in a constant state of probation, and life is full of choices. We are forever at the parting ways—we can and must choose at every moment between alternatives, either great or small, momentous or trivial. We must choose between reading a book or taking a walk, between wearing an overcoat or carrying an umbrella, between vocation and vocation, truth and falsehood, idealism and pessimism, religion and no religion. Each choice closes up that which has been a possibility hitherto, but also opens up new possibilities. Now, poetry seizes, more powerfully than science or philosophy, upon this practical phase of life and renders it concretely, and thereby purifies and strengthens our powers of choice. Lear makes his choice imperiously at the opening of the play, and the consequences of it are mercilessly followed out through his whole career. The Satan of "Paradise Lost" makes of

necessity a virtue, declares it is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, and, by choosing and striving to attain this ideal and by exercising an unconquerable energy of will, gathers much glory unto himself. Certain it is that the assumption of the will's free choice has not merely a speculative interest for philosophers but has tremendous issues in the common affairs of life. And since the poet keeps his ear close to the throbbing heart of humanity he assumes, as human beings practically assume, the freedom of the will to be one of the fundamentally true things both in his faith and in his practice.

Another and higher reason—an artistic reason-why the poet does not find himself at variance with the principle of freedom but embraces it as the law of his life is that in the art of poetry, as in kindred arts, the highest function of the artist is creation, of "widening nature without going beyond it," of enlarging the sphere of life and freedom. We demand from the poet enough contact with the actual to make us sure we are on solid ground, but we also demand new idealizations and creations that seem to us reasonable and worth while. The miracle of the art is that while the poet makes us feel that he has both feet planted solidly on this earth and that he is dealing with the deepest verities of actual and concrete experience, the poet's pen at the same time

Gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

This is what Macaulay calls "the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination," and the truth that results is, for Macaulay, the "truth of madness." As though the imagination were a

"Essay, "Milton."

faculty easy to be deceived, and as though all other kinds of truth except common sense truth were madness! No, the imagination sees straight, and the truth it finds is not the truth of madness but of creation. Poetry indeed produces an illusion, not on the imagination, but on common sense. Our common sense ideas find expression by means of our logical reason in forms other than poetry. Our feelings and volitions find expression by means of imaginative representation in poetry. And when, in reading poetry, we reach a certain imaginative intensity the imaginative representation seems illusory to the common sense element in us; but when with our imagination active we read a piece of scientific writing the work seems illusory to the imagination. The one strand in

us may thus seem unreal to the other, and vice versa. Common sense is the truth of our habitual matter-offact reactions. Imaginative truth is the truth of unusual moments of insight and creation,-a divine inspiration, as Plato calls it. And in this highly imaginative and creative process the poet feels that he is in a world where creation is still going on and that he is a participant in the act itself. He feels what philosophers sometimes insist upon, namely, that the world itself is still in the process of making, as it has been ever since the beginning of time. The philosopher arrives at this idea by theorizing about it, while the poet, on the contrary, feels its truth as a thing in his immediate experience, to which his whole passional nature gives assent.

The poet's experience is something like that of the musician in Browning's "Abt Vogler," who finds (seventh stanza) there is in the moment of creation a will behind all laws that made the laws themselves, and that this gift of will has been given to man, who therefore can frame out of three sounds "not a fourth sound, but a star,"

that is, he can create. Each tone in our scale, he says, is a very common thing-"it is every where in the world," -but when this commonplace tone is taken and mixed with two in the musician's thought, there is produced an absolutely new thing-a creation! "Consider and bow the head!" In order to heighten the conception of his own art the musician contrasts his own achievement with that of the poet. His own art is above law, but the poet's is "all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws." On the basis of creation, however, the two arts are identical. And in their highest moments of inspiration we claim for the poets the same gift that Browning's musician claims the gift of creation. Since the poet possesses this gift, he becomes conscious of the power of spiritual energy and spiritual freedom in the universe, of the fact that he himself possesses a will "existent behind all laws" that has the power to inform and to create. And he knows, therefore, in his own person the truth of the freedom of his will.

To state this truth in physiological terms, the poet in his higher inspirations and in the act of creation lives in that region of his brain that is plastic, as yet unformed -free. Here are not many obstructions in the way of pre-existent, habitual reflexes. Here is nothing of those few simple and treadmill operations of the mind characteristic of the matter-of-fact persons who seem not to know their capability of alternative choices. But here the mind, lifted as by inspiration above these treadmill operations, by one element of its power, perception, dips down into them and seizes upon common and matter-offact experience as a solid base upon which to rear its structure; and by the other element of its power, imagination, penetrates the cloudland of the unknown and flashes forth, by its own lightnings, unexpected vistas of hither

to unknown and uncreated truth-truth charged with the thunder roll of new harmonies and new melodies. Thus the brain, drawing its material from two opposite poles of our experience. "adverse, each from the other heavenhigh, hell-deep removed," shoots together new combinations of truth-sometimes ingenious, sometimes startling, sometimes with a vast economy and compression of experience, but always radiant with new born heavenly light and always drenched with the stuff reported by the senses, fresh from the world of fact and actuality. Here is God's plenty by way of evidence that the brain in its higher rounds is plastic and the will free. To doubt now is impertinence. It is only when the heavy-handed philosopher, for intellectual and logical reasons, demands that through a chain of causations each act must have had a sufficient preceding impingement, and that this impingement must have had a cause farther back, and so forth ad infinitum, that the question of freedom is at all attacked. When one's head is in an attitude to enjoy pure logic and is anxious for logic-chopping, it is always safe to take the side of determinism, predestination, and eternal necessity; but when one is in a practical frame of mind and takes counsel with the heart, one must insist on the freedom of the will. Thus according to the practical beliefs of all men and according to the deepest experience in his own personality, the poet finds the verification of his conviction that man is a free moral agent.

Now, what has this unique and indefinable power to do with the production of poetry? In the first place, if poetry is anything it is concrete and passionate. It is full of sensation and again sensation, full of sounds and sights. It has primitive freshness, flesh and blood qualities, oftentimes quite muscular and virile, at other times