Whence danger is; therefore I seek him out
So with pure thought and care of things divine
To touch his soul that it partake the gods.
This does not imply that romantic love is the only avenue to ideal
beauty. Rupert Brooke's _The Great Lover_ might dissipate such an
idea, by its picture of childlike and omnivorous taste for
sensuousbeauty.
These I have loved,
Brooke begins,
White plates and cups, clean gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many tasting food;
Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood.
And so on he takes us, apparently at random, through the whole range of
his sense impressions. But the main difficulty with having no more than
such scattered and promiscuous impressionability is that it is likely to
result in poetry that is a mere confusion of color without design,
unless the poet is subject to the unifying influence of a great passion,
which, far from destroying perspective, as was hinted previously,
affords a fixed standard by which to gauge the relative values of other
impressions.
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