like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.  A man cannot say, I will compose poetry.  The greatest poet, even, cannot say it:  for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.”  But the Poet’s way of reporting these apprehensions to his fellows, since he deals with Universals or ideas, is by “universalising” or “idealising” his story:  and upon these two terms, which properly mean much the same thing, we must pause for a moment.

The word “idealise,” which is the more commonly used, has unfortunately two meanings, a true and a false; and, again unfortunately, the false prevails in vulgar use.  To “idealise” in the true sense is to disengage an “idea” of all that is trivial or impertinent or transient or disturbing, and present it to men in its clearest outline, so that its own proper form shines in on the intelligence, as you would wipe away from a discovered statue all stains or accretions of mud or moss or fungus, to release and reveal its true beauty.  False “idealising,” on the other hand, means that, instead of trusting to this naked manifestation, we add to it some graces of our invention, some touches by which we think to improve it; that we “paint the lily,” in short.  But the true “idealisation” and the first business of the poet is a denuding not an investing of the Goddess, whether her name be “Life,” “Truth,” “Beauty,” or what you will:  a revealing, not a coverture of embroidered words, however pretty and fantastic; as has been excellently said by Shelley:  “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its external truth.  There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the erection of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.”  Let us enforce this account of the true idealisation by a verse or two of our old friend Sir John Davies (quoted by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria).  “What an unworldly mass of impressions the mind would be,” says Sir John in effect, “did not the soul come to the rescue and reduce these crowding bodies by ‘sublimation strange.’”—­

From their gross Matter she abstracts the Forms, And draws a kind of Quintessence from things, Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings.  This doth She when from things particular She doth abstract the Universal kinds....

But it is time to descend from these heights (such as they are) of philosophising, and illustrate the difference between true and false “idealising” in Poetry by concrete example:  and no two better examples occur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster’s Duchess of Malfy and Shakespeare’s