the arts, poetry soars highest, flies widest, and is most at home in the region of the spirit.  What poetry lacks of sensuous fulness, it more than balances by intellectual intensity.  Its significance is unmistakable, because it employs the very material men use in their exchange of thoughts and correspondence of emotions.  To the bounds of its empire there is no end.  It embraces in its own more abstract being all the arts.  By words it does the work in turn of architecture, sculpture, painting, music.  It is the metaphysic of the fine arts.  Philosophy finds place in poetry; and life itself, refined to its last utterance, hangs trembling on this thread which joins our earth to heaven, this bridge between experience and the realms where unattainable and imperceptible will have no meaning.

If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the human spirit to man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more incontestably than any other art, fulfils this definition and enables us to gauge its accuracy.  For words are the spirit, manifested to itself in symbols with no sensual alloy.  Poetry is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all that life implies.  Perception, emotion, thought, action, find in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry their immediate apocalypse.  In poetry we are no longer puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not of necessity a spiritual content.  There cannot be any poetry whatsoever without a spiritual meaning of some sort:  good or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight or weighty—­such distinctions do not signify.  In poetry we are not met by questions whether the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made it.  Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would fain find melody quite meaningless, or a statue meaningless, or a Venetian picture meaningless) is a contradiction in terms.  In poetry, life, or a portion of life, lives again, resuscitated and presented to our mental faculty through art.  The best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life, or its intensest moments.  Therefore the extensive species of the drama and the epic, the intensive species of the lyric, have been ever held in highest esteem.  Only a half-crazy critic flaunts the paradox that poetry is excellent in so far as it assimilates the vagueness of music, or estimates a poet by his power of translating sense upon the borderland of nonsense into melodious words.  Where poetry falls short in the comparison with other arts, is in the quality of form-giving, in the quality of sensuous concreteness.  Poetry can only present forms to the mental eye and to the intellectual sense, stimulate the physical senses by indirect suggestion.  Therefore dramatic poetry, the most complicated kind of poetry, relies upon the actor; and lyrical poetry, the intensest kind of poetry, seeks the aid of music.  But these comparative deficiencies are overbalanced, for all the highest purposes of art, by the width