760 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
fitly performed by poetry, and I can have no hesitation in 
saying that the poets who are likely to do this best are 
those genuinely English, manly and gentle writers, Words- 
worth and Tennyson. Wordsworth can, of course, only be 
read in selections; but the whole of Tennyson's work is 
most excellently calculated to influence the minds of youth 
in the best possible directions. 
Poetry also stimulates. It is part of its function, as ir 
have said above, to stir the feelings. It may stimulate to 
thought and to action. The heroic virtues, physical and 
spiritual, are best learned in poetry. All those activities, 
and that thorough control of them, which we call ‘“ man- 
liness’’ are here to be learned. J would instance “ The 
Idylls of the King” as poetry which should make for true 
manliness. I must not over-rate the importance of patriotic 
and bellicose verse as mental tonic. I would not say that 
poetry is likely to be a more efficient instrument than prose 
in this instance. Indeed I fear there is some danger of 
our going too far in this direction. Just as I think that 
most of Browning’s work is too subtly and abstrusely philo- 
sophical to be studied with full advantage by the young ; 
so I would utter a note of warning against a part, at least, 
of the vigorous “ patriotic”? doggerel of Mr. Kipling, and 
still more strongly against most of the verse which has been 
written under his influence. Mr. Kipling’s “ Imperial ”’ 
poetry has of course great excellence, as had that of Tenny- 
son before him; but admirable as its influence may be 
upon the minds of youth, and especially from the political 
point of view, upon Colonial youth, it falls outside the 
sphere with which I am endeavouring to deal in this paper. 
When I say that poetry’s function is to harmonise I use 
an expression which needs some explanation, as it hardly 
says what I mean, yet is the only term I can find to my 
hand. I mean that in a sense the best poetry has the ten- 
dency to make all people consciously or unconsciously 
philosophers. It makes men wise. It tends to produce 
and foster that true wisdom which was noted by Tennyson’s 
nearest friends as eminently characteristic of him. It is 
that wisdom which results from a due appreciation of the 
value of things in relation to one another and in relation 
to life. It is that wisdom which is a kind of har- 
mony in the mind, which is interfused throughout the 
mental structure, which acts subtly, profoundly, and 
as it were by a divine instinct. Part of Mill’s Second 
Lesson was this: “The maintenance of a due balance 
among the faculties now seemed to me of primary im- 
portance.” It is this balance of the faculties, and this 
