they are
scientific ideas; some have to do with right and wrong conduct,
actions and qualities, and then they are religious or ethical ideas.
But there is a class of thoughts which belong precisely to none of
these things, but which are concerned with the perception of beauty,
in forms and colours, musical sounds, human faces and limbs, words
majestic or sweet; and this sense of beauty may go further, and may be
discerned in qualities, regarded not from the point of view of their
rightness and justice, but according as they are fine and noble,
evoking our admiration and our desire; and these are poetical ideas.

It is not of course possible exactly to classify ideas, because there
is a great overlapping of them and a wide interchange. The thought of
the slow progress of man from something rude and beastlike, the
statement of the astronomer about the swarms of worlds swimming in
space, may awaken the sense of poetry which is in its essence the
sense of wonder. I shall not attempt in these few pages to limit and
define the sense of poetry. I shall merely attempt to describe the
kind of effect it has or may have in life, what our relation is or may
be to it, what claim it may be said to have upon us, whether we can
practise it, and whether we ought to do so.

III

POETRY

I was reading the other day a volume of lectures delivered by Mr.
Mackail at Oxford, as Professor of Poetry there. Mr. Mackail began by
being a poet himself; he married the daughter of a great and poetical
artist, Sir Edward Burne-Jones; he has written the _Life of William
Morris_, which I think is one of the best biographies in the language,
in its fine proportion, its seriousness, its vividness; and indeed all
his writing has the true poetical quality. I hope he even contrives to
communicate it to his departmental work in the Board of Education!

He says in the preface to his lectures, "Poetry is the controller of
sullen care and frantic passion; it is the companion in youth of
desire and love; it is the power which in later years dispels the ills
of life--labour, penury, pain, disease, sorrow, death itself; it is
the inspiration, from youth to age, and in all times and lands, of the
noblest human motives and ardours, of glory, of generous shame, of
freedom and the unconquerable mind."

In these fine sentences it will be seen that Mr. Mackail makes a very
high and majestic claim indeed for poetry: no less than the claim of
art, chivalry,