Prose may be solid, it may be dense, massive, lumpish, concrete, and all the rest, but poetry is generally prized for its being subtle, light, ideal, air-drawn, fairy-like, or made of such stuff as dreams are made of. However, let that pass. Let poetry be solid, for who knows what sense Arnold may have assigned to solid? He next falls back on his great master Goethe, and quotes a passage which I have not been able to find, but the bearing of which must depend very much on the context in which it occurs. Goethe, we are told, said in one of his many moods: “I deny poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called neither art nor science, but genius.” Who would venture to differ from Goethe when he defines what poetry is? But does he define it? He simply says that it is not art or science. In this one may agree, if only art and science are defined first. No one I think has ever maintained that poetry was science, but no one would deny that poetry was a product of art, if only in the sense of the _Ars poetica_ of Horace, or the _Dichtkunst_ of Goethe. But if we ask what can be meant by saying that poetry is genius, Goethe would probably say that what he meant was that poetry was the product of genius, the German _Genie_. Goethe, therefore, meant no more than that poetry requires, in the poet, originality and spontaneity of thought; and this, though it would require some limitation, no one surely would feel inclined to deny, though even the authority of Goethe would hardly suffice to deprive the decipherer of an inscription, the painter of the “Last Supper,” or the discoverer of the bacilli of a claim to that divine light which we call genius. Arnold then goes on to say that poetry gives the idea, but it gives it touched with beauty, heightened by emotion. Would not Arnold have allowed that the language of Isaiah, and even some of the dialogues of Plato, were touched with beauty and heightened by emotion though they are in prose? I think he himself speaks somewhere of a poetic prose. Where, then, is the true difference between the creations of Isaiah and of Browning, between the eloquence of Plato and of Wordsworth? Arnold has one more trump card to play in order to win for poetry that superiority over all the other manifestations of the forces of the human spirit which he claims again and again. I have always been a sincere admirer of Arnold’s poetry, still I think there is more massive force in some of his prose than in many of his poems; nay, I believe he has left a much deeper and more lasting impression on what he likes to call the _Zeitgeist_ through his essays than through his tragedies. What then is his last card, his last proof of the superiority of poetry? Poetry, he argues, has more stability than anything else, and mankind finds in it a surer stay than in art, in philosophy, or religion. “Compare,” he says, “the stability of Shakespeare with that of the Thirty-nine Articles.”