"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare has said of man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, _in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed_, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time." It is Wordsworth who speaks--too rhetorically, perhaps. At any rate, the prose will not compare with Sidney's. But it is good prose, nevertheless; and the phrase I have ventured to italicise is superb. Their high claims for Poesy. As might be expected, the poets in this volume agree in pride of their calling. We have just listened to Wordsworth. Shelley quotes Tasso's proud sentence--"Non c'è in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta": and himself says, "The jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." Sidney exalts the poet above the historian and the philosopher; and Coleridge asserts that "no man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher." Ben Jonson puts it characteristically: "Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but _Solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur_." The longer one lives, the more cause one finds to rejoice that different men have different ways of saying the same thing. Inspiration not Improvisation. The agreement of all these poets on some other matters is more remarkable. Most of them claim _inspiration_ for the great practitioners of their art; but wonderful is the unanimity with which they dissociate this from _improvisation_. They are sticklers for the rules of the game. The Poet does not pour his full heart "In profuse strains of _unpremeditated_ art." On the contrary, his rapture is the sudden result of long premeditation. The first and most conspicuous lesson of this volume seems to be that Poetry is an _art_, and therefore has rules. Next after this, one is struck with the carefulness with which these practitioners, when it comes to theory, stick to their Aristotle. Poetry not mere Metrical Composition