Athanasian Creed)
Divisible or indivisible
At the option of the candidate--Gadzooks!

This method has even some advantage over the method of prose in that it
is more easily memorised; but it has, as you will admit, the one fatal
flaw that it imports emotion into a theme which does not properly admit
of emotion, and that so it offends against our first rule of
writing--that it should be appropriate.

Now if you accept the argument so far as we have led it--that verse is by
nature more emotional than prose--certain consequences would seem to
follow: of which the first is that while the capital difficulty of verse
consists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of prose
consists in saying extraordinary things; that while with verse, keyed for
high moments, the trouble is to manage the intervals, with prose the
trouble is to manage the high moments.

Let us dwell awhile on this difference, for it is important. You remember
my quoting to you in my last lecture these lines of Milton's:--

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

We agreed that these were good lines, with the accent of poetry: but we
allowed it to be a highly exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed a
hill for a better view but found none. Now obviously this exaltation does
not arise immediately out of the action described (which is as ordinary
as it well could be), but is _derivative_. It borrows its wings, its
impetus, from a previous high moment, from the emotion proper to that
moment, from the speech proper to that emotion: and these sustain us
across to the next height as with the glide of an aeroplane. Your own
sense will tell you at once that the passage would be merely bombastic if
the poet were starting to set forth how So-and-so climbed a hill for the
view--just that, and nothing else: as your own sense tells you that the
swoop is from one height to another. For if bathos lay ahead, if Milton
had but to relate how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand men,
'marched up a hill and then marched down again,' he certainly would not
use diction such as:--

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared.

Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in the
passage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten
lines lower down, to reviv