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This may seem a hard saying, even after what has been said.  So let us pause and digest it in Sir Philip Sidney’s comment:  “...  Thus farre Aristotle, which reason of his (as all his) is most full of reason.  For indeed, if the question were whether it were better to have a particular acte truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is to be chosen, no more than whether you had rather have Vespasian’s picture right as hee was or at the Painter’s pleasure nothing resembling.  But if the question be for your owne use and learning, whether it be better to have it set downe as it should be, or as it was, then certainly is more doctrinable the fayned Cyrus of Xenophon than the true Cyrus in Justine, and the fayned AEneas in Virgil than the true AEneas in Dares Phrygius.”

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But now, having drawn breath, let us follow our Poet from the lowest up to the highest of his claim.  And be it observed, to start with, that in clearing and cleansing the Idea for us (in the manner described) he does but employ a process of Selection which all men are employing, all day long and every day of their lives, upon more trivial matters; a process indeed which every man is constantly obliged to employ.  Life would be a night-mare for him, soon over, if he had to take account, for example, of every object flashed on the retina of his eye during a country walk.  How many millions of leaves, stones, blades of grass, must he not see without seeing?  Say it be the shortest of rambles on an afternoon in early November.  The light fades early:  but before he reaches home in the dark, how many of the myriad falling leaves has he counted?—­a dozen at most.  Of the myriad leaves changing colour does he preserve, unless by chance, the separate image of one?  Rather from the mass over which his eyes have travelled he has abstracted an “idea” of autumnal colouring—­yellow, red, brown—­and with that he carries home a sentimental, perhaps even a profound, sense of the falling leaf, the falling close of the year.  So—­and just so, save more deftly—­the Poet abstracts:—­

Where is the prime of Summer—­the green prime—­ The many, many leaves all twinkling?—­Three On the moss’d elm; three on the naked lime Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree!

(As a matter of fact, oak leaves are singularly tenacious, and the autumnal oak will show a thousand for the elm’s one.  Hood, being a Cockney, took his seven leaves at random.  But what does it matter?  He was a poet, and seven leaves sufficed him to convey the idea.)

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