You may read the mere yearning of this, if you will, in Defoe, opening The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; or, if you will, in Kipling’s
For to admire an’ for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide—
It never done no good to me,
But I can’t drop it if I tried
—and these express the instinct. The sanction, for us, lies in the words
but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things.
And the desire for that—as I am sure you know—operates with no less force of prompting in the spiritual world than in the world of commerce and sea-travel. It carried Shakespeare at the last to that Ariel’s isle which no commentator has ever (thank heaven!) been able yet to locate; and it brought him home at the very last