Life Is Not Having And Getting, But

In Our English Popular Religion The Common Conception Of A Future State Of Bliss Is That Of ... A Kind Of Perfected Middle-class Home, With Labour Ended, The Table Spread, Goodness All Around, The Lost Ones Restored, Hymnody Incessant.

Most Men Eddy About Here And There-eat And Drink, Chatter And Love And Hate, Gather And Squander, Are Raised Aloft, Are Hurled In The Dust, Striving Blindly, Achieving Nothing; And Then They Die- Perish;-and No One Asks Who Or What They Have Been.

Alas! Is Even Love Too Weak To Unlock The Heart, And Let It Speak? Are Even Lovers Powerless To Reveal To One Another What Indeed They Feel? I Knew The Mass Of Men Conceal'd Their Thoughts, For Fear That If Reveal'd They Would By Other Men Be Met With Blank Indifference, Or With Blame Reproved; I Knew They Lived And Moved Trick'd In Disguises, Alien To The Rest Of Men, And Alien To Themselves - And Yet The Same Heart Beats In Every Human Breast!

Others Abide Our Question. Thou Art Free. We Ask And Ask. Thou Smilest And Art Still, Out-topping Knowledge.

The Interpretations Of Science Do Not Give Us This Intimate Sense Of Objects As The Interpretations Of Poetry Give It; They Appeal To A Limited Faculty, And Not To The Whole Man. It Is Not Linnaeus Or Cavendish Or Cuvier Who Gives Us The True Sense Of Animals, Or Water, Or Plants, Who Seizes Their Secret For Us, Who Makes Us Participate In Their Life; It Is Shakspeare [sic] … Wordsworth … Keats … Chateaubriand … Senancour.