emotion after emotion has become disintegrated into thoughts.”  Yet I should still object to the word “disintegrated” as applied to thought, unless it be allowed that emotion undergoes the same process at the same time and both meet in one solution.  To speak more plainly, Music is inferior to Poetry because, of any two melodies in its counterpoint, both may be (and in practice are) emotional and vague:  while of any two melodies in the counterpoint of Poetry one must convey thought and therefore be intelligible.  And, to speak summarily, Poetry surpasses Music because it carries its explanation, whereas the meaning of a concerto has to be interpreted into dull words on a programme.

We have arrived at this, then; that Poetry’s chief function is to reconcile the inner harmony of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with the outer harmony of the Universe.  With this conception of “peerless Poesie” in our minds, we turn to Aristotle’s Poetics, and it gives us a sensible shock to read on the first page, that “Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes of imitation” ([Greek:  pasai tynchhanoysin ohysai mimheseis to hynolon]).  “What?” we say—­“Nothing better than that?”—­for “imitation” has a bad name among men and is apt to suggest the ape.  But, first bearing in mind that there are imitations and imitations (the Imitatio Christi among them), let us go on to see what it is that in Aristotle’s opinion Poetry imitates or copies.  It is “the Universal” ([Greek:  tho chathholoy]):  and as soon as we realise this we know ourselves to be on the same track as Aristotle, after all.  “Imitation,” as he uses it, is not an apish or a slavish imitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena as they pass (he even allows that the poet may “imitate” men as “better than they are"):  it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, order, harmony, and “law” the poet’s mind has apprehended in the outer Universe.  No fair-minded reader of the Poetics, as he lays down the treatise, will doubt that this, or something like this, was Aristotle’s meaning, nor is it probable that he will find any essential difference (or any difference that seriously disturbs agreement) between Aristotle’s “Universal” and the Platonic “Idea” or pattern of things “laid up somewhere in the heavens.”

* * * * *

Now the Poet’s way of apprehending the Universal is (as I have indicated) by keeping true to himself, attending to his soul’s inner harmony, and listening, waiting, brooding with a “wise passiveness” until the moment when his and the larger harmony fall into tune together.  The Psalmist describes the process accurately:  “While I was thus musing the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.”  “Poetry,” writes Shelley, “is not,