Others, through the stained glass of their imperfect
humanity, showed it forth alive and alight in their own souls and bodies.
One there was who never dreamed he was a bright example of anything, in a
world which, you shall find him saying, God--or somebody--whoever is
responsible for civilization--had made only too good and complex and big
for him. We may hold that to make life a perfect, triumphant poem we must
keep in beautiful, untyrannous subordination every impulse of mere self-
provision, whether earthly or heavenly, while at the same time we give
life its equatorial circumference. I know that he so believed. Yet, under
no better conscious motive than an impulse of pure self-preservation,
finding his spiritual breadth and stature too small for half the practical
demands of such large theories, he humbly set to work to narrow down the
circumference of his life to limits within which he might hope to turn
_some_ of its daily issues into good poetry. This is the main reason why I
tell of him first, and why the parts of my story--or the stories--do not
fall into chronological order. I break that order with impunity, and adopt
that which I believe to be best in the interest of Poetry and themselves.
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