Sublime

his story expressed one of the unappeasable longings of the human imagination: the idea of a perfected society in which the world’s lost innocence will be restored and the Golden Age before the Fall will return.

he is a poet in this real sense, that he has realised the meaning of every function he has performed.

THE LEADEN EYED Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. It is the world’s sore crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden eyed. Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but they seldom reap. Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve Not that

unknown landscapes. Again and again a man full of years is merely the corroboration of the dreams of his youth. The sense of fancy growing out of the sense of fact—which makes all healthy personalities and gives a touch of romance and glory to all of life—first appears as the unrestrained imaginings of youth.

He was the voice in England of this humane intoxication and expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything. His best books are a carnival of liberty,

To be human is to inhabit some narrative enchantment of the world. Christian worship fuels our imaginations with a biblical picture of a world that, in the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

continue the slow, perpetual rebuilding of that inner structure which, in his view, it was the main purpose of life to rebuild.