out us nor wholly within us, is a product resulting from the meeting of certain qualities of the outward world with a sensitive and imaginative soul. The combination of both of these ele

ments is requisite to its existence. It is no merely mental or subjective thing, born of association, and depending on individual caprice, as the Scotch philosophers so long fancied. When the two elements necessary to the perception of it have met, it is a reality as inevitable and as veritable as the law of gravitation, or any law which science registers. And when, either through our own perception, or through the teaching of the poets, we learn to apprehend it-when it has found. entrance into us, through eye and ear, imagination and emotion, we have learnt something more about the world in which we dwell than Physics have taught us, a new truth of the material universe has reached us through the imagination, not through the scientific or logical faculty.

If, then, Beauty be a real quality interwoven into the essential texture of Creation, and if Poetry be the fittest human expression of the existence of this quality, it follows that Poetry has to do with truth as really as Science has, though with a different order of truth. This is perhaps not the common view of the matter. An old Scotch gentleman I once knew, one of the most sagacious and wise of his generation, who, whenever anything was propounded which was more than usually extravagant and absurd, used

to dismiss it with a wave of his hand, saying: 'Oh, that is Poetry.' Yet he was one who could see in the outlines of his native hills, and feel in all human relations, whatever was most beautiful. There are, I daresay, a good many sensible people who share my friend's view, to whom Poetry is only another name for what is fanciful, fantastic, unreal-only, as one called it, a convenient way of talking nonsense. To these I would say, If this be so, if Poetry be not true, if it have not a real foundation in the nature of things, if genuine Poetry be not as true a form of thinking as any other, indeed one of the highest forms of human thought, then I should not recommend any one to waste time on it, but to have done with it, and turn to more solid pursuits. It is because I have a quite opposite conviction, because I believe Poetry to have a true and noble place in this order of things, a place not made by the conceit of man, but intended by the Maker of this order, because I hold Poetry to be, what Wordsworth has called it, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge'-to be 'immortal as the heart of man,' it is because of these convictions that there is claimed for it the serious regard of reasonable men, and that it seems worth our while to dwell for a little on one, though only one, aspect of this many-sided study.

The real nature and intrinsic truth of Poetry will be made more apparent, if we may turn aside for a moment to reflect on the essence of that state of mind which we call the poetic, the genesis

of that creation which we call Poetry. Whenever any object of sense, or spectacle of the outer world, any truth of reason, or event of past history, any fact of human experience, any moral or spiritual reality; whenever, in short, any fact or object which the sense, or the intellect, or the soul, or the spirit of man can apprehend, comes home to one so as to touch him to the quick, to pierce him with a more than usual vividness and sense of reality, then is awakened that stirring of the imagination, that glow of emotion, in which Poetry is born. There is no truth cognisable by man which may not shape itself into poetry. It matters not whether it be a vision of Nature's ongoings, or a conception of the understanding, or some human incident, or some truth of the affections, or some moral sentiment, or some glimpse into the spiritual world, any one of these may be so realised as to become fit subjects for poetic utterance. Only in order that it should be so, it is necessary that the object, whatever it is, should cease to be a merely sensible object, or a mere notion of the understanding, and pass inward,— pass out of the coldness of the merely notional region into the warm atmosphere of the life-giving Imagination. Vitalised there, the truth shapes itself into living images which kindle the passion and affections, and stimulate the whole man. This is what has been called the real apprehension of truths, as opposed to the merely notional assent to them. There is no quality in which men more differ than in this intensity of mental

nature, this power of vividly realising whatever a man does lay hold of. It is an essential—indeed a primary—ingredient in the composition of the Poet; but it is not confined to him. It is shared by all men who are powerful in any line of thought or action. This mental energy, this

intensity of realising power, is the stuff out of which are made all who in any way really move their fellow-men. It creates, as has been well said, Heroes and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers and reformers, the pioneers of discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, and adventurers.' In these and such like, the men of abounding energy, who have revolutionised states and moved the world, the process had begun with the vivid realisation of some truth through the imagination; but it has not stopped there. It has gone on from the imagination to the affections. It has stirred the hopes, the fears, the loves, the hates of the soul, enkindling them and driving them with full force on the will, and propelling the man into action. In the Poet, on the other hand, the process not only begins, but continues in the imagination, kindling, no doubt, a real glow of emotion, but not leading him, as poet, to any outward action, save the one action of giving vent to what he feels, of finding poetic expression for the vision with which his imagination is filled.

In this we see the distinction between the Poet and those other men of intense soul, who share with him the power of vivid apprehension,

of making real through the imagination whatever truths they see at all. They carry that truth which they have imaginatively apprehended into the region of the passions and the will, and rest not till they have condensed it into outward action. He keeps the truth which he sees within the confines of imagination, and is impelled by his peculiar nature to seek a vehicle for it, not in action but in song, or in some other form of artistic expression. And hence the practical danger which besets the Poet, and indeed all æsthetic and literary men, of becoming unreal, if that truth which they see and cultivate for artistic purposes they never try to embody in any form of practical action, any common purpose with their fellow-men.

If then it be asked what are the proper objects of Poetry, what is the proper field for the exercise of the Poet's art, the answer, supposing what I have said to be true, is, the whole range of existence; wherever the sensations, thoughts, feelings of man can travel, there the Poet may be at his side, and find material for his faculties to work on. The one condition of his working is, that the object pass out of the region of mere dry fact, or abstract notion, into the warm and breathing realm of imagination. What the mental process is by which objects cease to be mere dead facts, informations, and become imaged into living realities, I stay not to inquire. The whole philosophy of Imagination is a subject on which the metaphysicians have as yet said little that is helpful.