guage composing it, but also in the mood and motives of the speaker or writer. When an author has emotion rather than knowledge to express, he will try to make his readers feel instead of know, he will aim to force upon them some share in his emotion rather than give them information. When we hear a cry of “ Murder, we know the object of the person in distress is not so much to declare a fact as to stir feelings of concern. When we have gone to the rescue, we shall most likely find that it is not a case of murder, but of wife-beating, or abuse of children. We are made to feel first, and get definite knowledge later. So far as he may, the poet does the same. He would make us feel, and is not much concerned, if he may succeed, about what happens after. He ignores time and space relations, and gives himself to generic spiritual aspects and meanings only. It is as necessary to know what prose is, typically, and what it is not, as to be definitively advised as to what is properly poetry, and what is not poetry at all. One of our earliest notions is that whatever is not expressed in verse is prose, and that any one composition cast in unmetric and unrhymed forms is as prosaic as any other lacking the same embellishments. This theory is pretty certain, in due time, to be much shaken. Consciously or unconsciously we become perusaded of an essential difference between the language of the almanac, or the marketplace, and such utterances as we find, for instance, in the Hundred and Fourth Psalm: "Thou art clothed with honor and majesty; who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain; who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters; who maketh the clouds his chariot; who walketh upon the wings of the wind." These sentences are mani festly nowhere in the least a record of facts. They are nothing, barring the solemn style, but plain prose in respect to form, but are unmistakably something vastly beyond plain prose in respect to meaning. A little reflection will discover to us that by no conceivable rhetorical industry could they be reduced to prose, because in this case the overpowering and all-possessing sentiment cannot be made to descend to items or instances of intellectual cognition. The thing to be felt has been made to do duty for what is to be known, and since it cannot be merged in more definite knowledge, remains till the end of the experience wholly unexpanded into knowing. The same must be largely true of all examples in which a seer or poet attempts to impart an experience of the Unconditioned. The sentences just quoted are interpretative, as all efforts to communicate experiences of the Sublime are interpretative, in the second or Truth way. The opening utterance of the Hebrew Scriptures is a yet more potent and significant example: "In the beginning God brought into existence the heavens and the earth." This was originally the product of most potent seership, and must have been indited by its Mesopotamic author, as well as discerned for generations by all truly spiritually minded hearers and readers, in a surpassing experience of mystic awe. But now that experience rounds out, with us, or the most of us, what with the revelations of the telescope and the spectroscope, and what with our nebular and monistic theories, into somewhat of intellectual comprehension. The language of interpreted Truth is always lofty, of interpreted Beauty always refined and graceful, but in neither case is it always versified. When supreme Beauty or Truth is to be set forth, there will be, as in the verses quoted, a noble simplicity and a noble rhythm. Sometimes the mind that declares such meanings is not content unless there is added the minor rhythm that we call meter; but that is native neither to the Hebrew nor the Anglo-Saxon race. The philosophy of the three Modes of Presentation thus becomes clearer. The first mode sets forth facts without developing any of the ulterior or "type" meanings involved respectively in the facts themselves. Men use this language of plain fact in business, and whenever for any reason there is no wish to assist or recognize any implied or involved effect upon the feelings. But even the most matter-of-fact and unsentimental of them all will carry over this language of plain fact into the second or the third mode, upon the instant, with very slight occasion. Your mother died this morning, as the form of a telegram, is declared in a business-like and brutal use of the prose way, which leaves the thing to be known to do duty, without a syllable of consideration or deference, for that which is to be realized or felt. "Your mother passed away this morning" is more nearly what the considerate and high-minded friend would telegraph, since by merely implying and partly obscuring the fact, it makes the mind realize the higher things in the realm of Truth that have caused that fact to be. In other words, by trying to make the thing to be felt do duty so far as may be for what is to be known, the sender of the dispatch spiritualizes what he has to communicate, and lifts it palpably thus above the earthy plane of fact. The philosophy of the third mode is much the same. "All the earnings of a quarter of a century were swept away in a moment, is the way a man once declared the fact, to a stranger, of his business failure. He was a very plain tradesman, wholly unaccustomed to literature and elegance of speech. Yet he could not avoid trying to help his hearer realize his misfortune, by implying the fact, and expatiating somewhat upon its extent, in the sympathetic or Beauty way. It is a mistake to assume that only men of books and liberal education are "poetic." Everybody uses the second and the third mode, in common speech, many times a day. Whatever treats of facts or of the actual in whatsoever way, without interpretation, is prose. Whatever treats of facts interpretatively, by appeal to our inner type-principles of Truth, is cast in the second way. Whatever treats of things interpretatively, through appeal to our inner type-appetencies of Beauty, the highest instincts and principles of fitness and nobleness and heroism, is cast in the third mode. There is, then, a poetry of Truth or of the Sublime, as well as a poetry of Beauty proper. We have always known indeed that the Sublime and the Beautiful exist in literature, but have perhaps not realized that where there is not prose, the one or the other of these, or its opposite, must be in evidence to some degree. Again, we may not have recognized, with much clearness, that the Sublime is a name merely that we give to the highest degree of inspiration proceeding from the True. We make practical distinctions here with great confidence and precision. When we say that this or some other person is a man ‘of character,' we mean that he is controlled by principles of Truth. When we say that he is a man' of worth,' we mean the same. When we say that he is as true as steel,' we wish to indicate interpretatively that his character exhibits the highest conceivable evincements of the True. On the other hand, when we say that the given person has a 'generous soul,' shows a 'beautiful spirit,' or exhibits' great nobility of character,' we are interpreting the man in the Beauty mode. All traits of excellence recognizable in æsthetics are of either the Truth or the Beauty kind. VI. The highest poetic diction is aesthetically composed of incidental glimpses of the Beautiful and the True, in which the generic is used for the particular. Thus is the whole of the reader's spiritual lore or culture levied on for the understanding of the smallest specific items. The ultimate purpose of a literary composition may be reached just as directly by the use of interpretative terms as by employing prosaic and unsuggestive diction. We will select a paragraph that shall illustrate the relation between the simplest units of meaning, and the incidentally interpretative purpose that they serve. The opening lines in Canto VII of The Princess are of average richness and strength, and practicable to quote: So was their sanctuary violated, |