delicate and sensitive-but always sensuous. On the other hand, poetry draws just as freely from the purely transcendental and spiritual qualities of our experiences, the highest and most refined of which we are capable. The things of sense which form its ground work become refined and are lifted up to a purified and lofty level. The body of sense, under the formative power of poetry, becomes, as it were, the temple of refined spirits. Now the power which draws these remote ends of our being together in a poem, which saves the things of sense from going the way of the world and transforms them into vessels fit to hold the precious essence of divinity, is the power of will. This, then, is what will has to do with the production of poetry. It is the power which penetrates, which restrains, which expands, and which elevates.

It may be urged, nevertheless, that however strongly a poet may believe in the freedom of the will, poets generally are notoriously weak in the exercise of their individual wills. It must at once be granted that in special cases there are some grounds for this objection. The case that comes to mind first of all as an illustration is that of Robert Burns one of the most beautiful lyric singers in the world and the most wayward and weak-willed of the sons of men, it is said. There is indeed a considerable portion of his poetry that one might fairly wish otherwise and the failure of which one can trace directly to his weakness. But there are two things to be said on the point of the weaknessthat poets more than other men are besieged by temptations of the sort to which Burns was a victim, and that the will in some men seems to work intermittently. We have just seen that sensuousness and passion are the outer materials with which the poet must deal. And if he is not especially gifted with the will to restrain, direct,

and control passion and sense, he is very liable to abuse them. But Robert Burns was determined to write poetry, and particularly ennobling and highly moral poetry. His will to write poetry was at most times quite steadfast. Long he pondered and often he improvised, and in the heart and will of him he was genuine. He was insistent on producing some good poetry for his country:

Ev'n then a wish, (I mind its power),

A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast;

That I for poor auld Scotland's sake,
Some usefu' plan, or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least.3

In speaking of some favorite passages from Young and from Thomson, Burns says, "Though I have repeated them ten thousand times, still they rouse my manhood and steel my resolution like inspiration," and the thought of one of these passages is:

What proves the hero truly great
Is never, never to despair.*

The result of these aspirations, endeavors and resolves was high and pure poetry-the product indeed of a sturdy, determined will of a Scotchman, blessed with the gift of song. And yet his will sometimes faltered. There were indeed days and months continuously when the will unfalteringly carried the man forward in paths of virtue, self-restraint, and high achievement; but suddenly when the will was off guard and seemed strangely paralyzed and helpless, there came a vast inundation of passion flooding the life of the man into hopeless confusion and self-abasement. The senses were master. The mind

"Answer to Verses Addressed to the Poet."
"Thomson and Mallet, "The Masque of Alfred."

succumbed to the power of the lowest material his hand wrought in. But the man repented, and rose again, and again there were days and months of high endeavor and the production of poetry instinct with will, energy, morality, and freedom.

The aberrations of will in Burns do not invalidate but rather confirm the statement that strong will power is an essential element in high and serious poetry. It is this power, on the one hand, that saves the feelings from sentimentality, that gives dignity and manliness to human life, and that

Raises man aboon the brute

And mak's him ken himsel';"

and the power, on the other hand, by which the artist draws his whole rich passional and spiritual nature within the scope of a single short poem or even into the expression of a single sententious phrase or line and makes us feel a peculiar tension of compression and charged energy that we are wont to call style. And though a few men like Burns reveal the anomaly of an unusually powerful will and of a will that seems diseased dwelling in the same breast, the steadfastness and lofty purpose of Milton, the singlemindedness and high endeavors of Wordsworth, the victorious war cry and death-defying spirit of Browning, and like qualities in a host of other poets, ought to shame us into silence regarding a few of their weaker brethren and ought to convince us of the vast importance to life and poetry of the freedom of the will and the sense of freedom in the lives of our poets.

But a second and more serious objection may be made to the importance here attached to this principle

"The Tree of Liberty."

in poetry. It may be urged that poetry in particular demands spontaneity, naturalness and effortless flowing rather than conscious energy of will. And this objection leads us directly to the heart of our subject. An act of will is at one and the same time the most simple and the most inexplicable of all the characteristics of our mental life. To ask a man to choose between two alternatives offered him is to ask something that the simplest can understand. But to explain the act rationally when the choice is once made is as yet an impossibility and has thus far defied all science and philosophy. Yet, however inexplicable the act is, we all feel in our practical experience that we know precisely what it is to make choices, and we know that we are bound to go on making choices as long as we live. It is not enough that I will to be good or will to be true today. I must will the same today and tomorrow and always. It is not enough to will to write poetry today but it must be willed again and again. And the power of will when exerted, healthily and not narrowly, in one direction is the power to accumulate and increase will energy. The will gains strength by continued persistence in a thing; it gathers power and volume like a rolling snow ball. In poetry especially, the will, working in and through and by means of passion and imagination, does not grow sterile but remains healthy and flexible. And what is the spontaneity and the flowingness that critics speak of but the result of accumulated will energies suddenly unlocked under favorable circumstances? Does not the story of Burns, to which allusion has already been made-his willing to write poetry, his repeating favorite passages ten thousand times, his turning out poems while at the plow tail, his improvizations, his ponderings,-does not this story illustrate the true

nature of any product that may be called spontaneous and natural? Is not the poetry of Keats which is sensuous in a remarkable degree and which yet has, according to Matthew Arnold, flint and iron in it, an illustration of spontaneity and flowingness? "My heart is now made of iron" Keats writes to Fannie Brawne when he is in the midst of a poetic deliverance. The iron and flint is in him because he willed single-heartedly to see and to love "the principle of beauty in all things" and to set about in an iron-hearted fashion to realize his ideal. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is the iron in one's constitution that produces spontaneity in the thing to which one lays his hand; and conversely, the spontaneity required in poetry does not invalidate but rather confirms the statement that will power is one of the chiefest active faculties of the mind in the production of poetry.

To state the same truth somewhat differently, whenever the will acts forcibly in a single direction it puts into action subconscious and allied powers whose activities may finally surpass the will's own. This surplus. of energy thus produced, like the overtones in music, tends to enrich the product, give it spontaneity, and cover up, so to speak, the original moving power itself.. To give a simple illustration from personal experience, I have for a long time been planning to write this chapter. I have long and persistently held my mind to it against conflicting interests. For many days the hand refused to put down the words, but at last its work began. Since then at times the words have come in floods faster than the hand could put them down; and sometimes. when I wished to stop the activity of forces thus set in motion, they persisted in spite of my efforts. Although the original conception of the chapter has been adhered