myth is to science. Approaching its subject-matter
from a distance, with incongruous categories, it translates it into some
vague and misleading symbol rich in emotions which the object as it is
could never arouse and is sure presently to contradict. What lends these
hybrid ideas their temporary eloquence and charm is their congruity with
the mind that breeds them and with its early habits. Falsification, or
rather clouded vision, gives to poetry a more human accent and a readier
welcome than to truth. In other words, it is the medium that asserts
itself; the apperceptive powers indulge their private humours, and
neglect the office to which they were assigned once for all by their
cognitive essence.

[Sidenote: It is the best medium possible.]

That the medium should so assert itself, however, is no anomaly, the
cognitive function being an ulterior one to which ideas are by no means
obliged to conform. Apperception is itself an activity or art, and like
all others terminates in a product which is a good in itself, apart from
its utilities. If we abstract, then, from the representative function
which may perhaps accrue to speech, and regard it merely as an operation
absorbing energy and occasioning delight, we see that poetic language is
language at its best. Its essential success consists in fusing ideas in
charming sounds or in metaphors that shine by their own brilliance.
Poetry is an eloquence justified by its spontaneity, as eloquence is a
poetry justified by its application. The first draws the whole soul into
the situation, and the second puts the whole situation before the soul.

[Sidenote: Might it not convey what it is best to know?]

Is there not, we may ask, some ideal form of discourse in which
apperceptive life could be engaged with all its volume and transmuting
power, and in which at the same time no misrepresentation should be
involved? Transmutation is not erroneous when it is intentional;
misrepresentation does not please for being false, but only because
truth would be more congenial if it resembled such a fiction. Why
should not discourse, then, have nothing but truth in its import and
nothing but beauty in its form? With regard to euphony and grammatical
structure there is evidently nothing impossible in such an ideal; for
these radical beauties of language are independent of the
subject-matter. They form the body of poetry; but the ideal and
emotional atmosphere which is its soul depends on thin