nd soul,
accepting the temporary loans of any such bodies at hand as actors may
offer, in order to be made palpable and visible to the audience, but
needing no such bodies to be palpable and visible to readers. The
highest kind of poetry is therefore that which has least to do with
external Nature. But every grade has its merit more or less genuinely
great, according as it instils into Nature that which is not there,--the
reason and the soul of man."

"I am not much disposed," said the minstrel, "to acknowledge any one
form of poetry to be practically higher than another; that is, so far as
to elevate the poet who cultivates what you call the highest with some
success above the rank of the poet who cultivates what you call a very
inferior school with a success much more triumphant. In theory, dramatic
poetry may be higher than lyric, and 'Venice Preserved' is a very
successful drama; but I think Burns a greater poet than Otway."

"Possibly he may be; but I know of no lyrical poet, at least among the
moderns, who treats less of Nature as the mere outward form of things,
or more passionately animates her framework with his own human heart,
than does Robert Burns. Do you suppose when a Greek, in some perplexity
of reason or conscience, addressed a question to the oracular oak-leaves
of Dodona that the oak-leaves answered him? Don't you rather believe
that the question suggested by his mind was answered by the mind of
his fellow-man, the priest, who made the oak-leaves the mere vehicle
of communication, as you and I might make such vehicle in a sheet of
writing-paper? Is not the history of superstition a chronicle of the
follies of man in attempting to get answers from external Nature?"

"But," said the minstrel, "have I not somewhere heard or read that the
experiments of Science are the answers made by Nature to the questions
put to her by man?"

"They are the answers which his own mind suggests to her,--nothing more.
His mind studies the laws of matter, and in that study makes experiments
on matter; out of those experiments his mind, according to its previous
knowledge or natural acuteness, arrives at its own deductions, and
hence arise the sciences of mechanics and chemistry, etc. But the matter
itself gives no answer: the answer varies according to the mind that
puts the question; and the progress of science consists in the perpetual
correction of the errors and falsehoods which preceding minds conceived
to be the c