Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

64 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.
Must still believe, for still we hope
That in a world of larger scope,
What here is faithfully begun
Will be completed, not undone.'
Lastly, there is religious poetry, the poetry that gives
utterance to faith, to devotion, to aspiration. In these,
as poetry found its earliest, so, I believe, it will find its
latest springs of inspiration. Not only as the life of
individual men, but as the life of the race advances, the
deepest thoughts, the most earnest emotions, gather
round religion and the secrets of which it alone holds the
key. And the more we realise the inability of the logical
faculty to grasp the things of faith — how it cannot breathe
in the unseen world, and falls back paralysed when it
tries to enter it — the more we shall feel that some form
of song or musical language is the best possible adum-
bration of spiritual realities and the emotions they
awaken. An expansion of the field of religious poetry
this century has seen, since the time when Wordsworth
approached the world of nature with a sensitive love and
reverence till then unknown, feeling himself and making
others feel that the visible light that is in the heavens is
akin to the light that lighteth every man — both coming
from one centre. This unifying feeling, this more religious
attitude seen in men's regard towards the visible world,
may we not believe it to be the prelude of a wider unity
of feeling, which shall yet take in, not nature only, but
all truth and all existence ? And if some of our most