156 BIEDS 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 huilt 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 aifect 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, uo 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 



