enial to their half-formed imagination.
Retreating deeper into the inner chaos, they bring to bear the whole
momentum of an irresponsible dialectic to frustrate the growth of
representative ideas: In this they are genuine, if somewhat belated,
poets, experimenting anew with solved problems, and fancying how
creation might have moved upon other lines. The great merit that prose
shares with science is that it is responsible. Its conscience is a new
and wiser imagination, by which creative thought is rendered cumulative
and progressive; for a man does not build less boldly or solidly if he
takes the precaution of building in baked brick. Prose is in itself
meagre and bodiless, merely indicating the riches of the world. Its
transparency helps us to look through it to the issue, and the signals
it gives fill the mind with an honest assurance and a prophetic art far
nobler than any ecstasy.

[Sidenote: Maturity brings love of practical truth.]

As men of action have a better intelligence than poets, if only their
action is on a broad enough stage, so the prosaic rendering of
experience has the greater value, if only the experience rendered covers
enough human interests. Youth and aspiration indulge in poetry; a mature
and masterful mind will often despise it, and prefer to express itself
laconically in prose. It is clearly proper that prosaic habits should
supervene in this way on the poetical; for youth, being as yet little
fed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; the
half-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone
beautiful and worthy of homage. Time modifies this sentiment in two
directions. It breeds lassitude and indifference towards impracticable
ideals, originally no less worthy than the practicable. Ideals which
cannot be realised, and are not fed at least by partial realisations,
soon grow dormant. Life-blood passes to other veins; the urgent and
palpitating interests of life appear in other quarters. While things
impossible thus lose their serious charm, things actual reveal their
natural order and variety; these not only can entertain the mind
abstractly, but they can offer a thousand material rewards in
observation and action. In their presence, a private dream begins to
look rather cheap and hysterical. Not that existence has any dignity or
prerogative in the presence of will, but that will itself, being
elastic, grows definite and firm when it is fed by success; and its