' For
it is not their method to wrestle with God, like Jacob, or to hold Him
up with a 'Stand and deliver.' It is enough for them to be receptacles
of His passing breath, as the harps abandoned and hung on willow-trees
by the waters of Babylon may have caught, at evening, and hummed the
wind whispering from Israel. And for this, while they hang and wait,
they will be despised by the commonalty for indolent fellows, as indeed
they are; as when the wind inspires and sets them hymning, they will be
accused of insobriety. Yet always they excel your philosophers, insomuch
as they accept the transcendental as really transcendental and do not
profess to instruct the Almighty in it; and chiefly, perhaps, they excel
your philosophers by opposing a creativeness, potential at any rate,
against a certain and foredoomed barrenness. For the philosophers would
get at the secret by reason, contemning emotion; whereas the poet knows
that creation implies fatherhood, and fatherhood implies emotion, even
passionate emotion. It is (take it as a cold fact) only on the impulse
of yearning, on the cry of Abba, that the creature can leap to any real
understanding of the Creator.
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