y fashion. More detail would have been
added, and more variety in interpretation. To deal with so great an
object, and retain his mastery over it, a poet would doubtless need a
robust genius. If he possessed it, and in transmuting all existence
falsified nothing, giving that picture of everything which human
experience in the end would have drawn, he would achieve an ideal
result. In prompting mankind to imagine, he would be helping them to
live. His poetry, without ceasing to be a fiction in its method and
ideality, would be an ultimate truth in its practical scope. It would
present in graphic images the total efficacy of real things. Such a
poetry would be more deeply rooted in human experience than is any
casual fancy, and therefore more appealing to the heart. Such a poetry
would represent more thoroughly than any formula the concrete burden of
experience; it would become the most trustworthy of companions. The
images it had worked out would confront human passion more intelligibly
than does the world as at present conceived, with its mechanism half
ignored and its ideality half invented; they would represent vividly the
uses of nature, and thereby make all natural situations seem so many
incentives to art.

[Sidenote: An illustration.]

Rational poetry is not wholly unknown. When Homer mentions an object,
how does he render it poetical? First, doubtless, by the euphony of its
name or the sensuous glow of some epithet coupled with it. Sometimes,
however, even this ornamental epithet is not merely sensuous; it is very
likely a patronymic, the name of some region or some mythical ancestor.
In other words, it is a signal for widening our view and for conceiving
the object, not only vividly and with pause, but in an adequate historic
setting. Macbeth tells us that his dagger was "unmannerly breeched in
gore." Achilles would not have amused himself with such a metaphor, even
if breeches had existed in his day, but would rather have told us whose
blood, on other occasions, had stained the same blade, and perhaps what
father or mother had grieved for the slaughtered hero, or what brave
children remained to continue his race. Shakespeare's phrase is
ingenious and fanciful; it dazzles for a moment, but in the end it seems
violent and crude. What Homer would have said, on the contrary, being
simple and true, might have grown, as we dwelt upon it, always more
noble, pathetic, and poetical. Shakespeare, too, beneath his occasi