156 BIRDS AND POETS 
water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, 
emotion, — fluid humanity. Out of this arise his 
forms, as Venus arose out of the sea, and as man is 
daily built up out of the liquids of the body. We 
cannot taste, much less assimilate, a solid until it 
becomes a liquid; and your great idea, your sermon 
or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous 
mass unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emo- 
tional power. Herein I think Wordsworth’s “ Ex- 
cursion” fails as a poem. It has too much solid 
matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not 
ride the waves buoyantly and lifelike; far less so 
than Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam,” which is just as 
truly a philosophical poem as the “ Excursion.” 
(Wordsworth is the fresher poet; his poems seem 
really to have been written in the open air, and to 
have been brought directly under the oxygenating 
influence of outdoor nature; while in Tennyson this 
influence seems tempered or farther removed. ) 
The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but 
an act. Natural objects do not affect us like well- 
wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which 
have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating 
energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything 
passes and presses on; there is no pause, no com- 
pletion, no explanation. To produce and multiply 
endlessly, without ever reaching the last possibility 
of excellence, and without committing herself to any 
end, is the law of Nature. 
These considerations bring us very near the essen- 
tial difference between prose and poetry, or rather 
