The thesis itself is to the expert a sufficient announcement of the new departure, which of course is only an old one re-fashioned. Baumgarten takes us right back to the most abstract criticism of the Italian Renaissance—the “idea of a poem,” the skeleton of poetic thought, method, expression, strung together by a new science of the sense of beauty. A poem is _oratio sensitiva perfecta_. What is poetical is that which contributes to this perfection. [Sidenote: _and its definition of poetry_.] The most fatal, and I am sure the most unintentionally fatal, criticism of Baumgarten, and incidentally of the entire division of critical or quasi-critical literature to which his work belongs, is contained in a remark of Herr Braitmaier’s (ii. 9) that part of the thesis “is written with very little understanding of poetry.” The question is whether the whole is not—whether this and other things like it might not have been said by a man who could not distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson, between Hugo and Delille. Look at this _oratio sensitiva perfecta_—which sent the good Herder into ecstasies as a new poetic spell, germ, and what not. Like other abstract definitions, including that of Coleridge himself, to which we shall come later, it omits or misses the _differentia_ of Poetry altogether. It lets in the prose-poetry or the prose-better-than-poetry heretics by a wide and unclosable door:[261] it excludes the very quality which some of those who love poetry most love in it. What is “perfection” but the attainment, in the highest degree, of that which is elsewhere attained in degrees high, less high, low, or lowest? There are therefore _orationes sensitivæ_ which have the qualities of poetry but are not poetry. This is hard to admit. Poetry should be itself: not a “bestment” of something else. [Sidenote: _The_ Aletheophilus.]