It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to
fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or,
as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth
century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's,
he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments,
"fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled
conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See
_The Minstrel_.] and Bowles [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] both
warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry.
Even Landor reflected,
A marsh, where only flat leaves lie,
And showing but the broken sky
Too surely is the sweetest lay
That wins the ear and wastes the day
Where youthful Fancy pouts alone
And lets not wisdom touch her zone.
[Footnote: See _To Wordsworth_.]
But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such
distinctions.
If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal
values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of
things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his
test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready.
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