model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective,
and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there
is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other
distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But
crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the
reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to
find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially
intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or
do not appear at all as solids,--as lime and iron,--any more than they
do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main
thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man
is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion,--fluid
humanity. Out of this arise his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea,
and as man is daily built up out of the liquids of the body. We cannot
taste, much less assimilate, a solid until it becomes a liquid; and your
great idea, your sermon or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous
mass unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emotional power. Herein
I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as a poem. It has too much
solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not ride the waves
buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which
is just as truly a philosophical poem as the "Excursion." (Wordsworth is
the fresher poet; his poems seem really to have been written in the open
air, and to have been brought directly under the oxygenating influence
of outdoor nature; while in Tennyson this influence seems tempered or
farther removed.)

The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects
do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft,
which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature
is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no
pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly,
without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without
committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.

These considerations bring us very near the essential difference
between prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the didactic
treatment of a subject. The essence of creative art is always the same;
namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didacti