The prose of life is honest living, a worthy endeavor to do the best
one can in the world as it is; the poetry of life is the feeling for,
and the striving after, the bringing of this life into harmony with a
nobler living. So we rightly give the name of poetry to such verse as
Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," Johnson's "London," Gray's "Elegy,"
Wordsworth's "Excursion," Milton's "Paradise Lost," Chaucer's
"Knight's Tale," Browning's "King and the Book," Tennyson's "In
Memoriam," which do not much stir our senses. They parallel the real
with the ideal, suggesting the eternal rhythms of infinite mind as the
poetry of the senses suggests the eternal rhythms of omnipotent
nature.
This poetry of the Intellect is the second great division of the
poetic realm. Beyond it lies still another; for there are spiritual
harmonies which the mind alone cannot compass, and which the senses
alone cannot interpret. The hand-books know little of spiritual
harmonies, and do not go beyond their academic classifications of
lyric and epic, and their catalogues of pentameters, hexameters, or
alexandrines. But the student can for himself push his observation
beyond, and come to the poetry of the higher imagination, where he can
be forgetful of the mere form and disdainful of the merely logical
relations, where his spirit can as it were see face to face the truth
beyond the seeming. This is the poetry of the spirit, and ought to
come as a revelation to the searcher.
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