Yet Moody was indeed a rebel against the religious and social muddle in which he found himself. Something red and pagan poured into his veins the instinct of defiance to a jealous god and to pale customs. The best of the Greek was his; instinctively he turned at last to Greek drama for his form and to Greek mythology for his figures. There was in him that σπονδη which Aristotle believed essential for the poet—a quality so rare among us that the literal translation, “high seriousness,” conveys little hint of its warmth, its nobility and splendor. He believed in the body as in the soul; and his conception of the godly was rounded and not inhuman. Dionysus was every bit as real to him as the man of sorrows. Is not this the new spirit of America which we wish to nourish? And is there not a peculiar virtue in the poet who with the strong arm of the pilgrim and the consecration of the puritan fought for the kingdom of joy among us? In The Masque of Judgment he pictures a group of heroic unrepentant rebels against divine grace who have not yet fallen under the sword of the destroying angel. Of them one, a youth, sings:
Better with captives in the slaver’s pen
Hear women sob, and sit with cursing men,
Yea, better here among these writhen lips,
Than pluck out from the blood its old companionships.
If God had set me for one hour alone,
Apart from clash of sword
And trumpet pealéd word,
I think I should have fled unto his throne.
But always ere the dayspring shook the sky,