THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 49 



Ruskin, in a passage in which he deals with the essence and 

 condition of Beauty, holds that the sense of the beautiful must be 

 conjoined with high morality ; that no true artist can be without 

 lofty ideas. If this be so, and we cannot doubt it, it follows that no 

 master of poetic beauty can be without the loftiness of thought and 

 emotion which raises the true prophet to be a leader and guide of 

 men. 



The essence of the poetic temperament is the power of prophecy, 

 of spiritual insight, the power to see into the heart of the world and 

 human nature, and connect us with the divine. The grandest of all 

 poetry is the Hebrew, and this power of prophecy is there seen with 

 the least concealment. 



Perhaps the best way to make clear what this power is, is to in- 

 dicate in what poetry is different from prose, on the one hand, and 

 from science, on the other. 



The older writers were accustomed to contrast poetry and prose. 

 But in our time there has come to be recognized a new kind of com- 

 position, called "poetic prose." What is the real difference between 

 poetry and prose, and how may they be so harmonized as to be 

 united into poetic prose ? 



Theodore Watts has stated the answer to the first of these ques- 

 tions in very felicitous language : " For what is the deep distinction 

 between poet and prose man ? A writer may be many things besides 

 a poet ; he may be a warrior like Aeschylus, a man of business like 

 Shakespeare, a courtier like Chaucer, or cosmopolitan philosopher 

 like Goethe ; but the moment the poetic mood is upon him, all the 

 trappings of the world with which for years he may, perhaps, have 

 been clothing his soul — the world's knowingness, its cynicism, its 

 self-seeking, its ambition — fall away, and the man becomes an 

 inspired child again, with ears attuned to nothing but the whispers 

 of those spirits from the Golden Age, who, according to Hesiod, 

 haunt and bless the degenerate earth. What such a man produces 

 may greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not so greatly as 

 he astonishes himself. His passages of pathos draw no tears so deep 

 or so sweet as those that fall from his own eyes while he writes ; his 

 sublime passages overawe no soul so imperiously as his own ; his 

 humor draws no laughter so rich or so deep as that stirred within his 



