We had a long-standing feud about poetry. To me the difference between poetry and prose was one of form only. I always held that the same things that are said in prose could be said in poetry, and _vice versâ_, and I often quoted Goethe’s saying that the best test of poetry was whether it would bear translation into prose or into a foreign language. To all that, even to Goethe’s words, Arnold demurred. Poetry to him was a thing by itself, “not an art like other arts,” but, as he grandly called it, “genius.” He once had a great triumph over me. An American gentleman, who brought out a “Collection of the Portraits of the Hundred Greatest Men,” divided them into eight classes, and the first class was assigned to poetry, the second to art, the third to religion, the fourth to philosophy, the fifth to history, the sixth to science, the seventh to politics, the eighth to industry. Arnold was asked to write the introduction to the first volume, H. Taine to the second, myself and Renan to the third, Noah Porter to the fourth, Dean Stanley to the fifth, Helmholtz to the sixth, Froude to the seventh, John Fiske to the eighth. I do not know whether Arnold had anything to do with suggesting this division of _Omne Scibile_ into eight classes; anyhow, he did not allow the opportunity to pass to assert the superiority of poetry over every other branch of man’s intellectual activity. “The men,” he began, “who are the flower and glory of our race are to pass here before us, the highest manifestations, whether on this line or that, of the force which stirs in every one of us—the chief poets, religious founders, philosophers, historians, scholars, orators, warriors, statesmen, voyagers, leaders in mechanical invention and industry, who have appeared among mankind. And the poets are to pass first. Why? Because, of the various modes of manifestation through which the human spirit pours its force, theirs is the most adequate and happy.” This is the well-known _ore rotundo_ and _spiritu profundo_ style of Arnold. But might we not ask, _Adequate_ to what? _Happy_ in what? Arnold himself answers a little farther on: “No man can fully draw out the reasons why the human spirit feels itself able to attain to a more adequate and satisfying expression in poetry than in any other of its modes of activity.” Yet he continues to call this a primordial and incontestable fact; and how could we poor mortals venture to contest a primordial and incontestable fact? And then, limiting the question “to us for to-day,” he says, “Surely it is its solidity that accounts to us for the superiority of poetry.” How he would have railed if any of his Philistines had ventured to recognise the true superiority of poetry in its solidity!