he had no moral to expound, he merely sung from his heart with the beauties of nature and the ways of fairy-land as an open book before him. If we wish (and there is no rightful reason why we should not) to drain the very dregs of living for the richest drops of wine, let us enrich, make more virile our enjoyment by seeking nourishing draughts of experience from the poets who have expressed those sweetest joys on earth in poems that have cleansed the souls of men for generation upon generation.
There is the other phrase of Matthew Arnold, "Moral Profundity." It is when we seek wisdom from the poets that we find this attribute. When the greatest of them give us their innermost thought, not the record of experiences, but the essential deductions from all their experiences, we have their true wisdom. When Wordsworth in "The Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." wrote the words,
Therefore am I still
.....well pleased to recognize,
In Nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian, of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being;
or when, in his "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," he wrote,
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
and when Shelley wrote,
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
or when Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall," wrote,
This is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
those men formulated in exquisite language truths that have never been more intensively expressed.