The sound of the age-long battle dies away.
Here is a man who does not fight for any flag, but simply tells us the
mysterious story of his own soul and ours. It is a quiet and a fitting
close for our long tale of excursions and alarums. But into the quiet
ending there enters a very wonderful and exciting new element. We have
been watching successive men following after the ideal, which, like some
receding star, travelled before its pilgrims through the night. Here the
ideal is no longer passive, a thing to be pursued. It halts for its
pilgrims--"the star which chose to stoop and stay for us." Nay, more, it
turns upon them and pursues them. The ideal is alive and aware--a real
and living force among the great forces of the universe. It is out after
men, and in this great poem we are to watch it hunting a soul down. The
whole process of idealism is now suddenly reversed, and the would-be
captors of celestial beauty are become its captives.
As has been already stated, we must be in sympathetic understanding with
the pagan heart in order to be of any account as advocates of idealism.
No reader of Thompson's poetry can doubt for a moment his fitness here.
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