BEFORE BEAUTY 155 



This is perhaps what the G-erman 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 dissolves 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- 

 cal, 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 



