with obvious truth, that the Bishop has more need of
motor-cars than any of his flock. But this Heaven making
needs no motor cars; it needs time and concentration. It
needs the imagination of a poet. Left to ourselves we can but
trifle with it—imagine Pepys in Heaven, adumbrate little
interviews with celebrated people on tufts of thyme, soon
fall into gossip about such of our friends as have stayed in
Hell, or, worse still, revert again to earth and choose, since
there is no harm in choosing, to live over and over, now as
man, now as woman, as sea-captain, court lady, Emperor,
farmer's wife, in splendid cities and on remote moors, in
Teheran and Tunbridge Wells, at the time of Pericles or
Arthur, Charlemagne, or George the Fourth—to live and
live till we have lived out those embryo lives which attend
about us in early youth and been consumed by that
tyrrantical ‘I’, who has conquered so far as this world is
concerned but shall not, if wishing can alter it, usurp
Heaven too, and condemn us, who have played our parts
here as William or Amelia, to remain William or Amelia
for ever. Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We
need the poets to imagine for us. The duty of Heaven-
making should be attached to the office of Poet Laureate.
Indeed, it is to the poets that we turn. Illness makes
us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts.
We cannot command all our faculties and keep our reason
and our judgment and our memory at attention while
chapter swings on top of chapter, and, as one settles into
place, we must be on the watch for the coming of the
next, until the whole structure—arches, towers, battle-
ments—stands firm on its foundations. The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire is not the book for influenza, nor
The Golden Bowl nor Madame Bovary. On the other hand,
with responsibility shelved and reason in abeyance—for
who is going to exact criticism from an invalid or sound
sense from the bed-ridden?—other tastes assert them-
selves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their
