The nightingale’s song is the voice of immortality. It releases the individual soul from the present hour, from the struggle of life and makes it one with the great experiences of the race. The imagination sweeps over all history on the wings of those first four lines, and then carries us into the world of religious story, in the lines recalling the Book of Ruth. And finally we are borne out of the human world into fairyland. All this in a single stanza! Every poem of high quality, every one of the treasured passages from long poems, makes such a magic flight into the realm of eternal ideas, so that it is commonly said that poetry is “uplifting.” Life and death and Heaven and the stars are the poet’s subjects. And the poem of common things, in praise of simple virtues and domestic happiness, such as have made Burns and Longfellow and Whittier so dear to the heart, have the same kind of power in less degree; if they do not transport us to Heaven they reveal the seed of immortality in daily circumstance. Keats bears the imagination over the world and beyond it in a single stanza. All poetry of the highest rank has this power to utter eternity in a few words. And though at first it seems a contradictory thing to say, it is true that the long poem has the same quality of compression; it makes long flights of idea in relatively short compass of words. The time of reading, the time that the physical eye needs to catch the winged sentences, is nothing. What, you say, “The Faerie Queene,” “Paradise Lost,” “Hamlet,” the “Iliad,” the “Idylls of the King” are compressed so that the time it takes to read them is annihilated? Just that. The complete works of a great poet do not fill more space than one or two long novels. Poetry is greater than prose if only because it expresses noble ideas in fewer words; it is language at its highest power. Its rhymes and rhythms are all a means of conveying this power. The person who regards poetry as rhymed sentences that might as well be put into prose, has his eye on the shell of form and has never felt the inner virtues of poetry. Poetry has its forms because only in its forms can it say the most.