These earlier treatises take away almost all oddity from the appearance in the first _Scienza_ of an entire Book,[276] the Third, occupied with New Principles of Poetry. Hotch-potch as this book may seem—ranging as it does from theogony to chronology, and from both to heraldry and the science of medals, from elaborate discussions of “fables” generally to a discovery of the Laws of War and Peace in poetry itself, from the greatness of Homer to the truth of the Christian Religion,—all these apparent oddities are waxed if not welded together by Vico’s general idea of the Poet as the earliest and truest historian, philosopher, and authority for the New Science of Humanity. Indeed he often reminds us of Shelley in the _Defence of Poetry_, and I daresay Shelley really knew him.[277] [Sidenote: _The Second._] It is not, however, till the second _Scienza_ that these sketches and studies take the form of an elaborate treatise, _Della Sapienza Poetica_, filling one whole book on the general subject, and another, _Della Discoverta del Vero Omero_, no less than three hundred pages.[278] Here Vico becomes more than ever “Thorough.” After preliminaries on science generally, on poetical science, and on the Deluge, we have a Metaphysic of Poetry, a Logic of Poetry, an Ethic, Economic, Politic, Physic (specified down as Cosmography, Astronomy, Chronology, and Geography)—all of Poetry! In these bold speculations many striking and really critical sayings occur. That it is the first principle of poetry to give life, and its own life, to everything[279] nobody need deny; nor that poetry is at once “impossible and credible,”[280] a near coasting of the Coleridgean Land of Promise, the explorer starting of course, as Coleridge did, from the Aristotelian doctrine of the “plausible impossible” and the absurdity rendered imperceptible by poetic speech. That “too much reflection hurts poetry”[281] is less unmixedly true, though most certainly not unmixedly false. [Sidenote: _Rationale of all this._]