Leaving below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual
world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by
his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet
cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals
nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable
from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the
other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be
embodied. What else is the meaning of the statement in the _Phaedrus_,
"This is the privilege of beauty, that, being the loveliest (of the
ideas) she is also the most palpable to sight?" [Footnote: sec. 251.] Now,
whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art,
one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run,
personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures
of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization
of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered
to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, as the
habiliments of his thought.
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