BEFORE BEAUTY 155 
This is perhaps what the German critic, Lessing, 
really means by action, for true poems are more like 
deeds, expressive of something behind, more like 
acts of heroism or devotion, or like personal charac- 
ter, than like thoughts or intellections, ; 
All the master poets have in their work an inte- 
rior, chemical, assimilative property, a sort of gastric 
juice which dissoives thought and form, and holds 
in vital fusion religions, times, races, and the theory 
of their own construction, flaming up with electric 
and defiant power,— power without any admixture 
of resisting form, as in a living organism. 
There are in nature two types or forms, the cell 
and the crystal. One means the organic, the other 
inorganic; one means growth, development, life; 
the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The 
hint and model of all creative works is the cell; criti- 
eal, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer 
akin to the crystal; while there is much good litera- 
ture that is neither the one nor the other distinc- 
tively, but which in a measure touches and includes 
both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished 
gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than 
the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to 
find in the best poems, though they may be most 
prized by specially intellectual persons. In the im- 
mortal poems the solids are very few, or do not ap- 
pear at all as solids,— as lime and iron,— any more 
than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the 
peach or the apple. The main thing in every living 
organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is 
