Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

78 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE 01 POETRY. [ill.
especially in the great dramatists, ancient and modern,
from whose works were you to withdraw all the allusions
to Nature, though some of their charm would disappear,
yet the greater part of it would remain. When these
poets deal directly with human life and individual char-
acter, it holds in this region, not less but more than in
their dealing with Nature, that it is the continual
reference, tacit or expressed, to a higher unseen order
of things, which lends to all their thoughts about man
their profoundest interest and truest dignity.
* O Life ! O Death, O World, O Time !
O Grave where all things flow,
'Tis yours to make our lot sublime
With your great weight of woe.'
Two thoughts there are, which, if once admitted into
the mind, change our whole view of this life, — the belief
that this world is but the vestibule of an eternal state of
being ; and the thought of Him in Whom man lives here,
and shall live for ever. These, as they are the cardinal
assumptions of natural religion, so they are hardly less,
though more unconsciously, the groundtones which
underlie all the strains of the world's highest poetry.
It makes scarcely more difference in the colour of a
man's practical life, whether he really believes these
things to be true, than it does in the complexion of a
poet's work. Even those who can in no sense be called
exclusively religious poets, if they grasp Hfe with a
strong hand, are constrained to take in the sense of