Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/54

24 power of the bard is made preëminent. The subtlest modern poet of life and thought, Browning, Browning. has left us only one prose statement of his art, but that is the lion's progeny. The poet's effort he saw to be "a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to the Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal." Spiritual progress, rather than art, is the essential thing. A similarly extreme view led Carlyle (himself, like Carlyle. Plato, a poet throughout) to discountenance the making of poetry as an art. Carried too far, the Platonic idea often has vitiated the work '''Transcenden- tal strength and weakness.''' of those minor transcendentalists who reduce their poetics to didactics, and inject the drop of prose that precipitates their rarest elixir. Their creed, however,—with its inclusion of the bard as a revealer of the secret of things,—while not fully defining poetry, lays stress upon its highest attribute.

Thus we see that many have not cared to speak Per ambages ut mos oraculis. absolutely, and more have failed to discriminate between the thing done and the means of doing. Poetry is made a Brahma, at once the slayer and the slain. A vulgar delusion, that of poetasters, is to confound the art with its materials. The nobler error recognizes the poetic spirit, but not that spirit incarnate of its own will in particular and concrete form. The outcome is scarcely more exact and substantial than the pretty thesis caroled by "one of America's pet Marjories" in her tenth