soul
seeks the realisation of its dreams of Beauty.' And, with more earnest
insistence on those limits which he knew to be so much more necessary to
guard in poetry than its so-called freedom ('the true artist will avail
himself of no "license" whatever'), he states, with categorical
precision: 'A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by
having, for its _immediate_ object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by
having, for its object, an _indefinite_ instead of a _definite_
pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance
presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with _in_definite
sensations, to which end music is an _essential_, since comprehension of
sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with
a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music;
the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.'

And he would set these careful limits, not only to the province of
poetic pleasure, but to the form and length of actual poetry. 'A long
poem,' he says, with more truth than most people are quite willing to
see, 'is a paradox.' 'I hold,' he says elsewhere, 'that a long poem does
not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat
contradiction in terms.' And, after defining his ideal, 'a rhymed poem,
not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour,' he says,
very justly, that 'within this limit alone can the highest order of true
poetry exist.' In another essay he narrows the duration to 'half an
hour, at the very utmost'; and wisely. In yet another essay he suggests
'a length of about one hundred lines' as the length most likely to
convey that unity of impression, with that intensity of true poetical
effect, in which he found the highest merit of poetry. Remember, that of
true poetry we have already had his definition; and concede, that a
loftier conception of poetry as poetry, poetry as lyric essence, cannot
easily be imagined. We are too ready to accept, under the general name
of poetry, whatever is written eloquently in metre; to call even
Wordsworth's _Excursion_ a poem, and to accept _Paradise Lost_ as
throughout a poem. But there are not thirty consecutive lines of
essential poetry in the whole of _The Excursion_, and, while _Paradise
Lost_ is crammed with essential poetry, that poetry is not consecutive;
but the splendid workmanship comes in to fill up the gaps, and to hold
our att