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Book, page 201 / 276 best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought "thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the flower itself. He muses, Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;-- I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower--but if I could understand What you are, root and all and all in all, I should know what God and man is. By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one. A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by The foolishest fond folly of a heart Divided, neither here nor there at rest, That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth. [Footnote: _Later Life,_ Sonnet 24.] On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint. Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both
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