212 i:.SSAyS IN PHILOSOPHY 



ment must be /// tJie gciuiine inedi/nn of tJioiight 

 and la)iguagc. Hence it must avoid all those mere- 

 tricious effects, exaggerations, and extravagances, 

 that come of attempting to force thought and speech 

 out of their natural province and make them ape the 

 functions of music or painting or sculpture. It must 

 avoid, in short, the fault of falsely mimicking external 

 Nature by that whose proper function is only to 

 suggest its ideal — the fault of over-melodiousness, 

 over-description, over-delineation, over-imitation. 



Now, the trait of true poetry mentioned last — that 

 it shall conform to the nature of thought and lan- 

 guage — is the specific quality that the poetic art 

 must add to the essential principle of art in general. 

 And yet it might easily seem to be one that will be 

 present of necessity, and consequently of no practi- 

 cal moment as a factor in ascertaining the existence 

 and rank of a poem ; we might suppose that we could 

 perfectly well disregard it. But to do so would ex- 

 pose the very substance of poetic art to mutilation, 

 and even to destruction. The tolerance which the 

 disregard would foster of the extravagant externalism 

 just mentioned is of a piece with another common 

 mistake — that of supposing that poetry must be set 

 in metre and rhythm, or that poetry is identical with 

 verse ; and that its contrast to prose is simply the 

 contrast between versified and unversified utterance. 



This brings us to the question of the real distinc- 



