Or consider the joy of travel renewed in Kipling's--
Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,
And the shouting seas drive by,
And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and
swing,
And the Southern Cross rides high!
Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue.
Or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that crowd the
pages of men like Shakespeare, or Chaucer, who thanked God that he
had known his world as in his time. Even in these shopworn
quotations the power still remains.
Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because there most
concentrated and most penetrative, lies crystallized experience at
hand for all who need it. It is not difficult to find, although no
one can find it for you. It is not necessarily exalted, romantic,
passionate; it may be comfortable, homely, gentle or hearty,
vigorous and cheerful; it may be anything but commonplace, for no
true emotion is ever commonplace. I have known men of one poet;
and yet that poet gave them the satisfaction they required. I know
others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of
beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry
they would be less alive, their minds would be less young.
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