He must, in a word, go through the process by
which the poems were made, as well as feel, comprehend, and enjoy
their final perfection. In like manner the open-hearted and
open-minded reader of the Book of Job cannot rest content with that
noble poem in the form which it now possesses; the imaginative impulse
which even the casual reading of the poem liberates in him sends him
behind the finished product to the life of which it was the immortal
fruit; he enters into the groping thought of an age which has perished
out of all other remembrance; he deals with a problem which is as old
as man from the standpoint of men who have left no other record of
themselves. In proportion to the depth of his feeling and the vitality
of his imagination he must saturate himself with the rich life of
thought, conviction, and emotion, of struggle and aspiration, out of
which the greatest of the poems of nature took its rise. He must, in a
word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown
poet worked. In such a process the imagination is evoked in full and
free play; it insensibly reconstructs a life gone out of knowledge;
selects, harmonises, unifies, and in a measure creates.
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