Therefore he has no need
laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his
love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and
reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this
subject are Shelley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning,
_Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein,
_Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,
in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense
against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his
non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his
sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to
sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the
philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they
represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly
medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's
thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a
somber tapestry.
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