In healthy function all the feelings are pure and moral, those whose action is most earthly and animal and selfish uniting themselves at their highest with the spiritual, for performance whose compass reaches beyond an individual, momentary good.  A burglar or a murderer may exhibit courage; but here, a manly quality backing baseness and brutality for selfish, short-sighted ends, there is an introverted and bounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry.  But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfish ends, becomes poetical, exhibiting the moral beautiful, as in the fable of Curtius and the fact (or fable) of Winkelried.  In the poetical there is always enlargement, exaltation, purification; animal feeling, self-seeking propensity, becoming so combined with the higher nature as to rise above themselves, above the self.

The lioness, pursuing the robber of her cub, if in her rage she scarcely heed that he (to stay her steps) has dropped the cub in her path, but, casting at it a glance of recognition, bounds with a wilder howl after the robber, the incident is purely bestial, an exhibition of sheer brute fury, and as such repulsive and most unpoetical.  But let her, instantly drawing her fiery eye from the robber, stop, and for the infuriated roar utter a growl of leonine tenderness over her recovered cub, and our sympathy leaps towards her.  Through the red glare of rage there shines suddenly a stream of white light, gushing from one of the purest fountains:  wrathful fury is suddenly subdued by love.  A moment before she was possessed with savage fierceness, her blood boiling with hate and revenge; now it glows with a mother’s joy.  Her nature rises to the highest whereof it is capable.  It is the poetry of animalism.

In the poetical, thought is amplified and ripened, while purified, in the calm warmth of emotion.  From being emotive, poetry draws in more of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose.  The poetical has, must have, rotundity.  No poet ever had a square head.  Prose, in its naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving, flesh-and-spirit-endowed body.  From the skeleton you can learn osteology, but neither aesthetics nor human nature.  Imaginative prose partakes of the spiritual character of poetry.  When a page is changed from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when from prose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened.  You get a something else and a something more.  Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage from the mouth of Viola in “Twelfth Night” would read somewhat thus:  “My father had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of her love, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief, patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untold attachment.”  Now hear the poet:—­

                        “She never told her love,
  But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,
  Feed on her damask cheek:  she pined in thought: 
  And with a green and yellow melancholy
  She sat like patience on a monument,
  Smiling at grief.”