With his brilliant pictorial fancy, he was able to conjure up before his mind's eye all those forms of the Pagan world which were, by his own confession, invisible to Wordsworth; but, on the other hand, to the actual strife of men, to the clash and conflict of opinion, to the moral meaning of the changes in social and political life, he was blind or indifferent. Physical science he regarded as the enemy of Poetry. 'Do not all charms,' he asks

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
Unweave a rainbow.

These lines appear to me to contain a world of suggestion. They speak with equal force, artistically, to enthusiasts who, like Wordsworth, contend that the sphere of poetry is co-extensive with the sphere of Nature, and morally (in their pessimism and melancholy) to

those other optimists who hold that the resources of Art are boundless, so long as it is pursued simply for its own sake. To detach the imagination from its proper sphere, from the range of associations in which it can move with natural freedom, and to plunge it into the midst of common actual life, is to confuse the limits that separate composition in verse from composition in prose; while, on the other hand, to struggle to get absolutely free from the world of sense and reality in pursuit of mere Beauty of Form, involves a relaxation of all the nerves and fibres of manly thought, the growth of affectation, and the consequent encouragement of all the emasculating influences that produce swift deterioration and final decay.

CONCLUSION:

THE PROSPECTS OF POETRY

VI.

CONCLUSION: THE PROSPECTS OF POETRY.

AN attempt has been made in the foregoing papers to ascertain by an historical inquiry the origin of the movement described in the above title. Now that I am on the point of arriving at a conclusion, I may be permitted to dwell for a moment on the meaning of that title-since its propriety has been more than once questioned to justify the critical method that I have pursued, and to recapitulate the general course of my argument.

And, in the first place, I think I need not waste many words in proving that during the present century there has been a movementwhatever we choose to call it-in literature, as distinct and definite as what are known in religion by the names of the Methodist and Tractarian movements, and in politics by the names