This Tao, you say, something far off,—­a principle in philosophy or a metaphysical idea,—­may be very nice to discuss in a lecture or write poetry about; but dear me! between whiles we have a great deal to do, and really—­But no! it is actually, as Mohammed said, “nearer to thee than thy jugular vein.”  It is a simple adjustment of oneself to the Universe,—­of which, after all, one cannot escape being a part; it is the attainment of a true relationship to the whole.  What obscures and hinders that, is simply our human brain-mind consciousness.  “Consider the lilies of the field,” that attain a perfection of beauty.  The thing that moves us, or ought to move us, in flowers, trees, seas and mountains, is this:  that lacking this fretting, gnawing sense of I-am-ness, their emanations are pure Tao, and may reach us along the channel we call beauty:  may flood our being through “the gateway of the eyes.”  Beauty is Tao made visible.  The rose and peony do not feel themselves ‘I,’ distinct from ‘you’ and the rest; they are in opposition to nothing; they do not fall in love, and have no aversions:  they simply worship Heaven and are unanxious, and so beautiful.  When we know this, we see what beauty means; and that it is not something we can afford to ignore and treat with stoic indifference or puritan dislike.  It is Tao visible; I call every flower an avatar of God.  Now you see how Taoism leads to poetry; is the philosophy of poetry; is indeed Poetics, rather than Metephysics. Think of all the little jewels you know in Keats, in Shelley, or Wordsworth:  the moments when the mists between those men and the divine “defecated to a thin transparency";—­those were precisely the moments when the poets lost sight of their I-am-ness and entered into true relations with the Universe.  A daffodil, every second of its life, holds within itself all the real things poets have ever said, or will ever say, about it; and can reach our souls directly with edicts from the Dragon Throne of the Eternal.—­I watched the linarias yesterday, and their purple delicacy assured me that all the filth, all the falsehood and tragedy of the world, should pass and be blown away; that the garden was full of dancing fairies, joy moving them to their dancing; that it was my own fault if I could not see Apollo leaning down out of the Sun; and my own fatuity, and that alone, if I could not hear the Stars of Morning singing together, and all the sons of God shouting for you.  And it was the truth they were telling; the plain, bald, naked truth;—­they have never learned to lie, and do not know what it means.  There is no sentimentalism in this; only science.  We live in a Universe absolutely soaked through with God,—­or with Poetry, which is perhaps a better name for It; a Universe peopled thick with Gods.  But it is all very far from our common thoughts and conceptions; that is why it sounds to most people like sentimental nonsense and ‘poetry.’  No wonder Plato hated that word;—­since it is made a hand-grenade, in the popular mind, to fling at every truth.  And yet Poetry ’gets in on us,’ too, occasionally, and accomplishes for